The news says that this year is the worst for the flu since the Swine Flu epidemic of 2009. Explains why the cold I caught a month ago has been about as ephemeral as a Cher farewell tour.
My Christmas present was a house to myself. My uncle, parents, and sister made their annual pilgrimage to the Holy Land, also known as a casino in Connecticut, and the visiting relatives spent the day with their daughter and her family.
In our culture, the icon of loneliness is the person facing Christmas Day in solitude. To that I say: it's all about context. Besides, with a house full of animals, I'm not exactly alone (ammiright, BabyJesusInAManger?)
I watched an on-demand movie ("Birdbox." Meh) and organized my bedroom, which included some tough love regarding clothing I'd bought while having a good day ("I can SO pull off a stretch zip-up magenta top with chartreuse spots!" "Black corduroy mini skirts are ME!") all the while thankful I thrift shop, so the experiments carried more chagrin than real financial regret.
I got my estate-planning documents in order and emailed copies to relevant people ("On the first day of Christmas, my true love gave to me..... a Durable Power of Attorneeeeeeeeey!")
I visited my 92-YO great-aunt ("Auntie, have you been naughty or nice?" "Naughty!" "THAT's my girl!"), and took a hike in a state park where, true to form, I spent a half-hour walking some really weird paths that seemed to just run behind houses, then through a cemetery, until I returned to the parking lot to realize the trail heads were ACROSS the street, so I walked there until the sun started to go down, which only made me more manic with desire to buy a house in Maine with some honest-to-God Nature right out my back door.
And I coughed. Constantly. Maybe because of my asthma, which in turn may be because of allergies or may be just another side-effect of the stupid B-list autoimmune disease I have that nobody ever heard of because nobody ever dies from it, they just get really, really annoying symptoms, or maybe because of the lingering Cher-cold, or all three.
Last night I coughed a nonstop cough so classically dry I was sure an olive would fly out of my mouth, which meant I could not keep my CPAP mask on, so it was a free-for-all to see whether the coughing, congestion, apnea, or the cats who thought it therapeutic to encircle me in a claustrophobic cartouche would deprive me of the most oxygen/sleep.
Before I go on to the next part, some background.
In my 30s I was sitting in the South End apartment of a friend, and, while she finished up some things, I passed the time by opening a copy of Whitley Streiber's Communion. This was a big juicy book about his supposed experience with alien abduction. I figured it would be fluffy enough to pick up and put down with no regrets when it was time to leave. How deliciously, mindlessly sensational.
Twenty minutes into it I was in a pounding sweat. Whitley was describing in detail an event that had also happened to me when I was five. Now, I have no memories of abduction, but I do have his memories of gray men in my room, of being touched on the forehead by a wand and being paralyzed, being terrified almost to the point of hysteria while these beings moved in and out of my line of vision, of feeling their touch (never intimate) without being able to move from it. Experiencing the kind of terror that, if you were dreaming, would cause you to wake up. Only I never did.
I have no recollection of being taken out of my room, but I do remember having this experience with minor variations several times in my childhood. I'd chalked it up to being a nightmare-prone kid, and forgot it as an adult. Until Whitley brought it all back down from the dusty mental attic, cold terror and all.
I'm not saying it was aliens, but how did he experience the exact same things? Is there some Jungian effect at work here? Some strange default the mind takes when our sleep paralysis doesn't quit?
I mention this episode because last night I managed to doze off, finally, but was woken abruptly by a low, very loud thrumming. The head of my bed is in a corner of the room, with a window directly to my left, and one at my feet to the right. We live by a wooded area.
I felt my whole body vibrate with the thrumming, and saw a blindingly bright light (like LED headlights) through both windows. And -- this is important -- the cats jerked to attention.
I could not move. I could move my eyes, but not my head or my limbs or open my mouth.
The first thought I had was, "They're back." This time I wasn't so much terrified as nervously curious, and hoped that if they were going to do anything particularly unpleasant to me they'd have the good manners to knock me out first. So, not unlike a visit to the endodontist.
And then the lights dimmed and suddenly it was morning and I was looking out not at a blinding light but at daylight with a very confused sense that something had just been erased like a badly edited film. If you've had surgery you know the feeling: "100, 99 98...hey, how'd I end up here and yes, I will have that ginger ale!"
What bothered me most? I still had the cough. If they could manage interstellar travel, inflict paralysis at will, and erase memory, couldn't they have at least given me some advanced goddamn Space Robitussin? Or would that have been the metaphorical butterfly wing-flap that tore the fabric of space and time?
Stupid aliens.
No comments:
Post a Comment