I’ll have to let others say it for me just now; from a friend. Click on it.

My honest answer is: I don’t see why things matter, but thank you.

If it matters: after all that happened in the last 10 days,
I contracted another flu-like infection at the end of last week, followed by stomach infection which means bad stomach cramps and I can’t hold in food for any more than 3 hours – for 3 days and counting. This after taking more vitamin C (3.5g) to scare off infection on doctor’s advice, but I can’t believe that would do this to me for this long. This is just like the stomach infection I’ve had repeatedly for the last nine months, the first appearance of which coincided with my hearing loss. Doctors shrug; I sit terrified it will reoccur, amplify or migrate to the other ear. If I learned anything from computers, it’s that if you don’t find out why it crashed, it’ll happen again, and do more damage next time. If someone tells you your PC crashing is “idiopathic”, refuse to pay. I feel completely helpless: driftwood at sea waiting for the next splintering wave.

I’ve always had three things keeping me going: friends, music, and my imagination. Friends are only present via a keyboard and few and fewer and increasingly quieter as I get worse to be with; hearing is eating up my music; and my imagination’s suddenly and shockingly dried up, like a rusty tap you dare to turn off, which suddenly won’t turn on again.

I seem to dash from pitch blackness to illness and back again, til I don’t know what day it is: the sequence rushing by ever quicker, scenery streaming past faster and faster, like the dramatic chase at the end of a film. Some monstrous joke where my mind and body alternate lines rolls towards its punchline. The coming of a weekend always surprises me: Saturday feels like Wednesday. How can things go so fast?

Please bear in mind then that everything’s caving in just now. I can pretend cheery for so long then I will crash out, freak out, not answer emails, be suddenly tearful, angry or rude; or, if you’re a close friend be very scared to you, bore you, offend you or make you miserable which will make you want to go and talk to someone else. Which you should go and do. If you are a good friend, you should tell me that is what you’re doing.

I suddenly don’t care about being very candid in this weblog: what is it for anyway? Who’s reading and why? Is this a bad way to think? The next time I am terrible to you, please remember that I know less about what is going on inside me than you do, have some pity, and tell me what to do next. This could just have easily happened to you. I know I’m showing little of Saint Emily’s courage, and maybe you would do better than me. But if you think you would, show some while you’re well too, and either help me or be honest and tell me you’re off.

Love After Love

The time will come
when, with elation
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your own mirror
and each will smile at the other’s welcome,

and say, sit here. Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was your self.
Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you

all your life, whom you ignored
for another, who knows you by heart.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,

the photographs, the desperate notes,
peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit. Feast on your life.

Derek Walcott

My biggest fear is that when everyone has gone and the show’s over, there will be nothing of my life to feast on, and no stranger to love, just bones and sinew: a life in the lonely waiting room of gender, in the hushed and guilty bed of M.E. Who can fill up a lifetime’s larder of memories from a bedroom, and a mind that won’t issue me a permit for shoreleave? I even have to borrow others’ pictures and words.