II) Happiness

A good friend of mine, JB, is neighbors with Indira, a favorite professor of mine from my stint as a writing and literature major. Indira and JB befriended each other months before JB made the connection and asked if I knew her. Since I often park at JB's, then walk or bus onwards with her, I get the occasional bonus of seeing Indira.

A few weeks ago, we dragged Indira down to the Farmer's market with us to grab lunch. Eating our Vietnamese noodles in the park, JB spied a little boy hiding under a juniper bush, chewing on a plastic spoon. She wanted to get a Polaroid, I wanted to know what world he had created under that bush. We stepped over and I squatted down, and asked him how his spoon tasted. He looked up and told me something in little kid speak that I think related to ice cream, and held out the spoon. JB told me to stop scaring the children. I told him I was full, but thanks, and waved.

Wandering back, Indira told me that she still had some of my work from last year, since I took medical leave in early October and never went back. She complimented my work from 'that period' and told me she'd dig up this one (and maybe a couple others) and give them back to me so I could see her comments. She talked about how my tactile references were something or other... I'm impressed that she even held onto them! I intend to make cupcakes and trade them for my stories.

Point of that long ramble is: the boy, the spoon, the professor... I've been thinking a lot about this essay, so I dug it up. Part one is on Anger, and I haven't been thinking about it.

II) Happiness

There is nothing as wonderful as the way time passes in dreams. An hour of dreaming can take place in the five minutes between the first alarm and the snooze repeat. Discovering this, my first semester away at college I began taking short naps between classes to refresh my brain. As I realized how many memories I had lost, dreams became my closest reality. In dreams, time has not definition; in reality, I could not remember the definitions of my time. I was always very late, extremely early, or not there at all because I had forgotten. I could not even place events in chronological order in my life, past or present.
Recently, I have been sleeping so well at night, that I can skip the little naps and still find my time. In fact, I can stretch my time because I finally have an idea of how long things take me. I can arrive within a few minutes of needing to be places, and I know when things have happened, in their correct order, over past week.
An appointment with my psychiatrist on Wednesday shed light on my newly relaxed mind. In his words, I have removed the “wet blanked” from my cognitive abilities by stopping some of the medications I went on after my head injury. This past week has been my first remembered reality without the harshest of these drugs, ironically named ‘Abilify.’ This drug, he explained again, is designed to stop one from feeling sensations, and thus prevents the vivid hallucinations often associated with both blows to the temporal lobe and mental illness. But, for head injury patients, it is a temporary fix, to be used only for a few years while the brain is healing.
So, four years later, I am feeling things again, and it is fucking brilliant. I feel wet when it rains, and cold when I get in my car in the mornings before the heat starts, around 64th. Then, I blast the heater and bask in the glory of my flesh warming to a comfortable temperature. I have actually burnt myself four times this week pulling things from the oven, which makes me wonder how many times I have burnt myself and not felt it enough to care. My shoulder, where I tore some ligaments, hurts more than I realized, and it feels great when Mike rubs it for me. His beard tickles my neck and cheek when he holds me, and his breath on my shoulder, as we fall asleep, gives me goose bumps. I actually made him feel the goose bumps Tuesday night, because I did not realize that I was capable of such sensitivity. He knows me well enough not to laugh, as I know him well enough to not spend five straight hours feeling his chest hairs, one by one, while he’s grading labs. That does not mean that I do not want to, it just means I don’t want him to draw on my face with his special red grading pen.
The highlight of my week, that one thing that made me happier than every other happy moment combined, was feeling happy in the first place. I realized that my idea of happiness is completely muted compared to the potential for glee I possess. I spent my week blissful with emotions, positive and negative alike, simply because I was feeling them. I cannot seem to explain the wonder I feel, but those who know me too well have all commented about the shine in my eyes this week. I want to ask them to imagine getting to feel everything after four years of not noticing that feeling was missing, but, instead, I have a tendency to pick up lemons out of fruit bowls, smell them, stare at them, and show whoever’s with me how cool the texture of the yellow rind feels against a fingertip.
(9/24/2007)