It’s been a while since I’ve had a hallucination (I hate that word, but it simplifies things). Since I’ve had to explain “No, I’m not on drugs. Never have been.” Since I’ve had some people believe me and some people refuse to. Since I’ve sat and wondered: should I even be telling you this.

Should I even be telling you this?

It’s the way my brain works. When I’m hooked up to nodes and electrodes they can even see it happening. Apparently. They are the doctors who study such things. Who make you feel like you’re in a science fiction film even when you’re not. Even when, of course you’re not. I played guinea pig once. Twice. Didn’t do it again. Still, part of me is curious. Would like to go back. To find out. Because they just want to help. Really. And even if they don’t, I’m nosey.

Those are actually real coffins behind me. The photo’s been desaturated. Tis all.

I have a vague recollection of episodes at three and five. They called them night terrors even though there was nothing night about them. During first grade I spent a lot of time in my closet – pushing against the walls to keep them from pushing back. I was seven when I realised sometimes…something happens that I don’t understand; that I can’t explain because I don’t have the words.

I remember sliding on my stomach. Pulling myself along the carpet. Jacquard and paisley. Keeping my eyes on the floor so I couldn’t see the things above my head. Through the kitchen. Through the living room. Trying to breathe. Until I could get to my mother’s bed…

I was fifteen before I was able to verbalise any of this to a doctor. Before I could say: Sometimes the walls come alive. The room becomes animated and personified. In ways it shouldn’t. In ways I know it couldn’t. But it does just the same. It’s just as terrifying. Just as heart stopping. As it would be for you. If in your waking moments you saw – and knew it really was. Not just a dream. But a truth. Even though it wasn’t.

It’s all good and well to know something isn’t real. But when you see it – you believe it. If only for a moment.

I’ve spent the weekend hiding away in dark corners of dark rooms. With a brain full of tripans and warm bottles of fizzy water. I dreamt alot. Of dead things and secrets. Pulled part from a novel and the fever that’s not. It’s cold and I’m awake because I need to sleep tonight. Otherwise I wouldn’t be. Migraines suck.

———-

I watch an episode of House. Where a girl hallucinates her dead mother. A few dead other things. And then gets told she’s on a trip.

I look across the room – at him. He looks at me and said “Enough already. I know you’re weird. I love you anyway.” I smile and wave a kiss through the air.

Mertsie-Beth looks after her husband’s invalid mother. When she’s not working at the Med Supply or getting her hair done up like Jackie O or doing the hundred other things she thinks up to do to keep from tending to an octogenarian’s bed sores.

Eddie says she drugs the old lady with benadryl and pays a 12 year old neighbor 2 bucks an hour to sit by the bedside and watch soap operas and call her if she dies. He says Mertsie-Beth’s husband knows about it too, but he pretends like he doesn’t because he’s what they call a good son.

Eddie sells hospital beds and hydraulic lifts two aisles over and thinks he’s Italian because his last name says he should be. He says he likes me but I can’t bring myself to be moved by him. His head is too big and he has no hair.

He fell. Down the mountain. The one he climbed. For roots.

His wife is in the hospital. And when she isn’t, she’s not getting better.

His brother … cancer. They’re not thinking about it. Not gonna let it bother them. But it does. It must.

His daughter is being biopsied. For the thing that took his sister.

His grand baby, the great one, is asleep. Under anesthesia. A ‘procedure’.

Bear my burden. You do it so well.

He’s been doing it for years.

But how do you bear his?

I’ve thought about this. A lot. Even before I had to.

I’m trying to know. But I don’t.

The day before I left home Blue took me out to lunch – his favorite mom-and-pop on a wind-about road in the hills of McDowell County. He told me to stay warm. To always remember him. And to go see the White Cliffs of Dover – the most beautiful place in the world, even when you weren’t coming home from four years of war…

My mother bought me lingerie and candles for my birthday.

“Because I want a grandbaby. Buffy!”

“You know, you have six already. Just because grandma has 27…doesn’t mean you have to.”

She keeps saying my biological clock is ticking. Even posted it on a message board once because I got snarky and said she didn’t think my sister was pretty. (The two of us tease our mother: “You like our brothers best”.)

The other day she says one of my BFFs is ‘trying’.

“It’s what I heard. And I heard she’s struggling. That she doesn’t have much time. You may want to think about that yourself. Some people wait too long.”

“Whatever. You make it sound like she’s dying and – FYI – if she can’t get pregnant, I don’t think waiting is her problem.” She’s 23.

Here’s the thing. I don’t think I have a biological clock. Not the ticking kind anyway. And even if I did….NOT in a real big hurry to get shown up by Super Mom (AKA: The Sister Who Is Very Pretty no Matter What Our Mother Says.)

I do like the candles though.

WHO: Andrew Motion, Paul Abbott, Roddy Doyle, Carol Ann Duffy, Linton Kwesi Johnson, Jackie Kay, Galway Kinnell, Rose Tremain, Gerard Woodward. Comma, Route, Templar, Suitcase, Transmission and Matter…

WHAT: The Second Annual Manchester Literature Festival

WHEN: 4 October – 17 October

WHERE: John Rylands, Cornerhouse, The Whitworth Art Gallery, Central Library, Library Theatre, Manchester Museum, The Lowry, URBIS, Manchester Art Gallery,The Museum of Science & Industry, Martin Harris Centre for Music and Drama, Cervantes Institute,The Green Room, Sweet Mandarin, St Ann’s Church, Friends Meeting House, Godlee Observatory, Heals, Contact Theatre, Indus 5, Matt & Phreds Jazz, The Frog & Bucket Comedy Club

WHY: To challenge “…the boundaries of what is traditionally understood to be…” literature and to “…promote internationalism, diversity and independence”.

Manchester Literature Festival

One day I grew into it. Loving God more than my grandfather. But when I was four I didn’t know how. Only that I should.

In Sunday school we sang “He’s Got the Whole World In His Hands”. I pretended to understand the underlying spiritual metaphor, quoted all the necessary scripture and drew and coloured the requisite big ball of land held by God-Up-To-The-Elbows.

But in the back of my mind I knew, in all the ways a four year old can know, that there was only one pair of hands capable of holding up the empyreal body that was my heaven and earth. They were big, they were strong, they were callused. They were paid in script and little-money to do a job no one else would or could do.

I use to picture my grandfather, deep in the mines in an Atlas like pose. With a celestial sphere that was more-than-world on his back. He strained and stood beneath the very ground I stood upon and as far as I was concerned he and the other miners laboured inside the earth not to feed the fire but to keep the world from falling into it…