springtime sun was setting with a soft hiss, and the light was full of richness. The blue mug glowed; the tins quietly twinkled. I felt a satisfaction come over me then, and I would sit on the buckled brown floor of the shed, and hug my knees, and watch.
• • •
I got my period. This was a disappointment. In school we had a book on teenage emotions, in which there was a whole chapter devoted to the emotions around getting your period. The book said you would feel full of things, water and grief and little sparkles of joy.
When my period came, you could barely even tell. I had imagined blood spooling generously from inside. Instead, there was just a brownish little flow, like rusty trickles from an old tap. I kept waiting for an emotion or two, but all I could feel was worried that I didn’t have an emotion, or two.
What happened was this. Soon after menstruation, the seizures worsened, which is sometimes the case with females, hormones egging on the brain, estrogen tweaking the system. My nipples pegged out and my seizures came fast now, came furious, one a day no, two a day no, three, four, five a day, each one with a full-blown aura. I want to talk about the auras. I lost my social life, I lost my body, I lost my mother, I lost this, I lost that, everyone could see me but me when I went down, and so I don’t want to talk about the seizures. I want to talk about the auras, which many epileptics have and agree are truly special states. My auras. They were with me almost constantly after my period, states of light and sizzle, states of joy and trees, states of dread laced through with terrific sweet smells, the tongue so very alive.
Seizures are not just spasms. That’s called a grand mal, or tonoclonic, and it was my most common type, but I had other types too. Some seizures are very subtle, just a twitch of the eye, and others are funny, a person, maybe, repeating a phrase over and over, or walking backward for no goodreason. In school I started to say, “Wait. Wait just a minute!” I didn’t always fall on the floor. Once, so they tell me, I got up in the middle of math class and tried to climb out the window. I don’t remember that. I just remember smelling orange marmalade.
This I do remember. Since the epilepsy had begun three years ago, functioning was always difficult, but now it was almost impossible. I just gave up. People, always wary of me, now made wide, careful arcs around me in the hall, and once, in the lunchroom, when I asked Amy Goldblatt for a sip of her Coke, she paused and then said, “Oh, sure, have the whole can,” and I knew it was because she didn’t want to put her mouth where mine had been. I didn’t go to Sarah Kushner’s parties, and I didn’t dance with boys, and I knew not even the cancer story would change these facts.
I saw that success, if I were to have it, would be not outside, but within, my sickness. Sometimes I went down for hours, and when I woke up a whole day had passed, me dreaming through time on the spikes and jags of seizures. If it happened in school, I might wake up in the sickroom, a place, like the toolshed, that I came to crave. There was a nurse named Nell Fiore with baby-doll blue eyes. “Fiore,” she would say, “pronounced like
fjord
,” a word I knew, and I pictured it, a place of clean green water, the air delicious.
“You’ve had a bad one,” Nell might say. “Shall we send you home?”
“No.”
I lay on the narrow metal cot. She put her hands on my forehead, and if I’d bitten my mouth she cleaned it withsomething that fizzed and tasted of lime. Sometimes I watched TV in the school’s sickroom, a movie, I remember, about World War II, and it all seemed oddly beautiful, bombs drifting down through the evening air like sinister silver angels, the perpetual fall of German snow. There was a world out there, but I didn’t have to be part of it, and slowly I saw the privilege of this. It must have been in the sickroom where illness
• • •
I got my period. This was a disappointment. In school we had a book on teenage emotions, in which there was a whole chapter devoted to the emotions around getting your period. The book said you would feel full of things, water and grief and little sparkles of joy.
When my period came, you could barely even tell. I had imagined blood spooling generously from inside. Instead, there was just a brownish little flow, like rusty trickles from an old tap. I kept waiting for an emotion or two, but all I could feel was worried that I didn’t have an emotion, or two.
What happened was this. Soon after menstruation, the seizures worsened, which is sometimes the case with females, hormones egging on the brain, estrogen tweaking the system. My nipples pegged out and my seizures came fast now, came furious, one a day no, two a day no, three, four, five a day, each one with a full-blown aura. I want to talk about the auras. I lost my social life, I lost my body, I lost my mother, I lost this, I lost that, everyone could see me but me when I went down, and so I don’t want to talk about the seizures. I want to talk about the auras, which many epileptics have and agree are truly special states. My auras. They were with me almost constantly after my period, states of light and sizzle, states of joy and trees, states of dread laced through with terrific sweet smells, the tongue so very alive.
Seizures are not just spasms. That’s called a grand mal, or tonoclonic, and it was my most common type, but I had other types too. Some seizures are very subtle, just a twitch of the eye, and others are funny, a person, maybe, repeating a phrase over and over, or walking backward for no goodreason. In school I started to say, “Wait. Wait just a minute!” I didn’t always fall on the floor. Once, so they tell me, I got up in the middle of math class and tried to climb out the window. I don’t remember that. I just remember smelling orange marmalade.
This I do remember. Since the epilepsy had begun three years ago, functioning was always difficult, but now it was almost impossible. I just gave up. People, always wary of me, now made wide, careful arcs around me in the hall, and once, in the lunchroom, when I asked Amy Goldblatt for a sip of her Coke, she paused and then said, “Oh, sure, have the whole can,” and I knew it was because she didn’t want to put her mouth where mine had been. I didn’t go to Sarah Kushner’s parties, and I didn’t dance with boys, and I knew not even the cancer story would change these facts.
I saw that success, if I were to have it, would be not outside, but within, my sickness. Sometimes I went down for hours, and when I woke up a whole day had passed, me dreaming through time on the spikes and jags of seizures. If it happened in school, I might wake up in the sickroom, a place, like the toolshed, that I came to crave. There was a nurse named Nell Fiore with baby-doll blue eyes. “Fiore,” she would say, “pronounced like
fjord
,” a word I knew, and I pictured it, a place of clean green water, the air delicious.
“You’ve had a bad one,” Nell might say. “Shall we send you home?”
“No.”
I lay on the narrow metal cot. She put her hands on my forehead, and if I’d bitten my mouth she cleaned it withsomething that fizzed and tasted of lime. Sometimes I watched TV in the school’s sickroom, a movie, I remember, about World War II, and it all seemed oddly beautiful, bombs drifting down through the evening air like sinister silver angels, the perpetual fall of German snow. There was a world out there, but I didn’t have to be part of it, and slowly I saw the privilege of this. It must have been in the sickroom where illness
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