Michelle Roger

Inverted

Listen to the audio version of this piece

A little piece here.
A little piece there.
My day broken into unconnected activities.
Partial activities.
Things started and discarded.
Only to be picked up an hour or two later and tossed aside once more.

I try
To piece together my day.
To find continuity, creativity.
To account for all the time that has passed.
Only to come up short.
Because
Tired fractured thoughts
Equal tired fractured activities.
Punctuated only by pills and potions.
Tinctures and tisanes.
Gathered from bedside tables.
In inverted universes of soft cotton and flannelette.

The weariness of activities undertaken on the days prior.
The necessary accounting of the weariness of days to come.
The weariness of pain.
The weariness of the drugs used to take the edge off the pain.
The weariness of existing
In this body.
When the wanting and the doing of the creating are warring.

Not the creation I imagined.
Not the one before.
That one still seeps in to berate me on the dark days when the self I’ve built seems more tenuous, more fleeting.

Instead
This one
Inverted, reassembled, reimagined.
Like all aspects of me and mine.

So I start to type and stop.
I plan and forget before the idea drips from neuron to neuron, to arm to finger to …

My default position,
Supine on my bed.
Propped just right.
Down to the exact millimetre and exact angle.
To manage the pain.
And the blood pressure.
And the nausea.
And…..

And where the heart is wild it must be filled
and controlled in equal measure.
Look right to the light and the whimsy.
The practicality and necessity.
Pop the pill and wash it down with a jellybean chaser.
Place the mouse on my chest and watch it beat.
Sending its secrets to faraway places.
Rub sweet creams on old scars and tender flesh.

Pick up the notebook.
And find my pen.
The pen that is right.
The only one that lets the words flow.

Scattered amongst telehealth, and exercise and admin, and relief and renewal through connection and mindlessly scrolling.
To sit next to the bottomless lolly jars
And heart monitors
Ceramic chickens
Memories of better days
And outside places
Cut crystal holds water
Collections of battered pill boxes hold functioning.
And empty silver squares
Whose contents
Measure the day, the health, the productivity.
A kaleidoscope of small silver butterflies unfurling to give me time.
Breath.
Being.

I flick through the channels on the television.
I’m not watching.
Or listening.
No details emerge.
Yet I know.
The idea scattered amongst the other scattered pieces internal and external.
Forms.

Pop the dosette box once more.
Afternoons are peach and orange.

Reopen my lap top
Tap on keys.
And write down the snippets.
Of which this is one.

And piece together my day.
The minutes.
The hours.

And me.