Againness

Again
1. to return
2. another time: once more 
3. on the other hand
4. in addition

I’m rereading a memoir about a man who threw himself in front of a train. I’m rereading it because it makes me feel something visceral that I want to capture or possess, Another time: once more. I don’t have any friends who have thrown themselves in front of trains. But I do have friends who have committed suicide. And I frequently dream about trains. And I frequently dream about my friends who committed suicide. Trains pass the same spot, again and again: a mechanical loop. Their loops, like the loops of dreams, are certain. I’m trying to make sense of this train of thought. I’m trying to decipher what this all means to me, the same way I try to parse meaning out of my dreams.

Last night I had twelve hours of fever dreams. (Fever of 100.2 according to my cheap CVS thermometer.) I keep having dreams about my ex, Kate, and I’m trying to figure out why. In the last one, or, the last one that I can remember, she told everyone I know—my family included—that she was coming into town but did not, under any circumstance, want to see me. She wants me to know she’s in town. She wants everyone I know to know she’s in town. She wants to talk to them. She does not want to talk to me. I am separate, other. In my dreams, I am in a bubble. I wake up.

In the next dream, everyone I know goes to a new hospital built on a huge plot of land, to work and volunteer. But when we arrive, the doors shut. The hospital staff doesn’t want us to leave. They want us to stay.

I wonder if my subconscious is trying to intimate something. I met a girl named Madison at a psych ward eight or nine years ago who took a handful of sleeping pills and went to sleep on the train tracks near her house. Her wife found her and brought her to the hospital, where the doors shut. The doors shut and the two of us were bound together, by something other than choice. My first night in the psych ward, I dreamt I was in a boardroom, giving a presentation that I was completely unprepared for. My tie was strangling me. I jumped out the window and landed back in the boardroom and the window closed. At that moment, I was in the hospital dreaming about leaving. Now, I’m on the other side of those doors, dreaming about a hospital.

In my hospital dream, the director wants us to know that they have all the control and, perhaps more importantly, that we have none. I realize this and start trying to rally loved ones to leave the hospital, but few want to. Few understand. Few of everyone I know understand. I am held captive in a hospital-sized bubble, by something other than choice. Kate is not among the everyone I know. I realize this is because I do not know her. I manage to make it past the entrance (a place that you don’t leave has only an entrance). I get to a phone and call someone for help, but they laugh. They know. Now the hospital director is outside. She wants me to know that they are with me. They are with me always. In my dreams, I have no control. I surrender. I wake up.

But I want to go back into my dream. It’s a painful dream, but I’m not done there, and I’m not exactly sure why. Perhaps I want to save my friends. Or I know that, for the infection to run its course, I must sweat it out in my dreams. Or maybe I am obsessed with the hypnotic repetition of pain, its comfortable predictability. Something calls me back there again, To return, so I close my eyes, but when I reenter that hospital, I’m aware that I am dreaming. This semi-lucid dreaming has happened since I got sober, four years ago. This ruins my experience. This removes urgency from the dream, which removes reality, which removes purpose. The dreaming is now purposeless and, thus, so is this writing. What does it mean if this writing has no purpose?

+++

Now, I’m sitting in a waiting room at an urgent care center and trying to write poems about the word ‘again’ with little success. My renditions are either about its meaning or its purposelessness, but I struggle to meld the two thematically. This writing, for instance, is steeped in againness, as if I’ve written and rewritten this very line on a loop, but, On the other hand, it does have a point. I need it to have a point. I write the poem again. 

I don’t know how many poems I have sitting in spined notebooks on my desk, stuffed in my drawers, scribbled on post-it notes tacked to my walls. Some are finished, most are not. Some leave a strange taste in my mouth when I read them. Often, this is intentional. They remind me of experiences I no longer want to have. I write the poem again. 

+++

As I’m writing, a text message from my boss breaks my focus. He tells me he’s disappointed. It’s important he tell me how he’s feeling, so long as the feeling is bad. I remind myself that he is just sick. I try not to feel his symptoms, but he is, regrettably, infectious.

It’s a shame I can’t control my immune system, I think. I think this while I wait to be called up to the reception area, where I’ll tell the nurse I don’t have health insurance and say Yes when they ask if I smoke and they’ll look at me judgmentally and I’ll feel weighed down by inferiority. The inferiority returns me to writing before the harsh buzz of my phone interrupts me again.

My friends are planning a trip to New Orleans in a group chat that I’m not sure why I’m a part of, because they know I cannot afford to go, but keep me in the group chat anyway. This inferiority is not fresh. It is flat, and it follows me. They’re excited about the trip. They’re not thinking about me. A part of me is happy just to be included, to feel a part of. Maybe next time I’ll be able to afford it. I tell myself this repeatedly, In addition, hoping time will one day have a different shape. 

+++

My favorite Vonnegut quote: “Well, here we are, Mr. Pilgrim, trapped in the amber of this moment. There is no why.”

I’m not sure if this moment has a color, but if it does, it certainly isn’t amber. I’m unsure of the ‘Why’ behind any of this: this moment, this writing, this infection. Maybe there is no Why.

I have heard people recite the platitude, ‘Why’ is a management-level question. They mean we have no business asking it. My friends and I knock the stale proverb as we drive through Cleveland, where I first started to feel sick. I need to be able to ask “Why,” my sponsor says. But what if there is no answer, if the person asking knows there is no answer, if they know because they have asked it before? Do I have any business asking Why if I know there is no true, objective answer?

The platitude makes sense in a context such as this. As I write, I give up searching for the Why. Perhaps it will come later. When I look up from my notebook, I notice the color of the urgent care’s wallpaper: grey and eggshell white.

+++

As we drive back home from Cleveland, my friends and I bash the judgment we heard from those in Cleveland. We judge the judgment we heard from those in Cleveland. We talk about the harm that can be caused by being right. When I’m right, I don’t learn. When I don’t learn, I don’t grow. When I don’t grow, I repeat my mistakes. As we all talk, we feel right. 

The following morning, my friend sends a group text—the text that later became about New Orleans—to the people in the car the previous day. He’s apologizing for his judgment about what we heard in Cleveland. Now he’s judging his judgment. He has judged his judgment as “bad.” I respond, Love ya. I don’t tell him I loved his judgment. I have judged his judgment as “good.”

I think back to the judge and the stale musk of the stuffy courtroom where I paid restitution in 2017 for stealing money out of a food court worker’s wallet. I paid him back the hundred bucks instead of going to trial. A part of me wanted to go to trial. I knew I was guilty but thought that I’d feel less guilty if a trial found me innocent. I surrendered. At the time, I thought I’d be happy to be delusional if the delusion made me happy. 

I consider the meaning of the judge and the courtroom. In this instance, the principle is cause and effect. The Why is uninteresting: I needed money, I took it, I was wrong, I surrendered. The Why is simple, or rather, unimportant. The notion that delusion could make me happy is like a fever dream—a dream without a profound purpose, but to sweat the infection out. Perhaps delusion, too, must run its course.

It’s the same way I delude myself into believing that my boss is wrong and entirely to blame when he tells me I’m ungrateful. I tell him it’s not the truth, but I don’t know if I’m lying as I say it. I’m still not sure, but I have more evidence to support the lying than the truth. I often do. I talk to my sponsor about it, telling him the truth, while also bending the narrative in my favor. You sound ungrateful, my sponsor tells me.  

I have spent years trying to find the food court worker to make amends.

I have emailed police officers.
If I found him, I would sit across from him and look him in the eyes.
I have scoured the internet.
I would confess to him the nature of what I have done, I would ask how it impacted
him, I would ask what I can do to make it right.
I have contacted lawyers and researched court records.
Maybe we would both even cry a little bit together.

Perhaps I think that making amends will take out some type of philosophical insurance that I will not be that person again. Offer up some type of proof. Proof that allows me to fold a dust jacket across the creased pages of my moments, ensuring those sentences will not be reread. Maybe this is a type of Why. Instead, I know who I am, or rather, who I was, who I could be again. I have spent years searching, but have yet to find him.

+++

Sometimes we have to have experiences to learn we don’t want those experiences anymore, my sponsor tells me. I have just slept with someone I’m not attracted to and feel poorly about it. I met him on Bumble and learned only his first name. There were no lies, no dishonesty, nothing inherently objectionable involved; we were both clear about what we were doing. I still felt badly afterwards, though the feeling was not guilt. I don’t like the taste of something foreign remaining on my lips. I don’t like the imprints on my back. We don’t talk again after I drive him home.

I run into him on a college campus six months later. We say nothing to one another. I get a Snapchat DM thirty minutes later asking me to hang out. I make it clear that I’m not interested, but I do so politely. He un-adds me on Snapchat and un-matches with me on Bumble. To my phone, it’s as if nothing has ever happened. If my phone doesn’t remember, do I? There’s no evidence to show that the experience occurred. I think I’ve had an experience that I don’t want to have anymore. I internalize this lesson until I need to have it again.

+++

An editor tells me I need to incorporate a more concrete sense of time into this piece, that my tenses are inconsistent and confusing, that you can’t tell when certain things are occurring. They let me know this before they say they’re not going to publish it. What if this is intentional—if it fits within a theme? It’s not intentional, but I like thinking it is.

Another editor tells me she disagrees. That time, in this piece, is inconsequential. That this piece seems to be more about my thoughts and feelings surrounding these events than the events themselves. She also tells me that she expected me to discuss more about my dreams and why I’m having them. What if I don’t have a Why? As I write, I search for the Why.

+++

I always dreaded being the kind of person that talked about Nietzsche in a creative essay, but here I am, referencing Nietzsche, who said something to the effect of, Time is a flat circle. We will always be reliving the same experiences, over and over and over. If that’s true, then I’m writing this piece, sitting in a doctor’s office, over and over and over. And if that’s true, all the againness serves no purpose. But then Nietzsche also serves no purpose. And neither does this writing. But this writing must have a purpose. Otherwise, I wouldn’t be writing it.

+++

Finally, I’m called into the doctor’s office, where I’m told I have an infection and given antibiotics. Two days later, I feel better. Simple cause and effect. No Why necessary.

+++

Sometimes when I write, I tend to hold my breath. I do this unconsciously, and I’m not sure why. Maybe holding my breath is an act of rebellion. If holding my breath is rebellion, then breathing is surrender and, naturally, I always surrender. I have little choice in this. It’s been said that surrender is a good thing, that without surrender there is no freedom. And without freedom, I am back at the feverish hospital, with the hospital director reminding me, We’re with you always, and I’m back to feeling guilty for lifting money out of a food worker’s wallet and sleeping with people I don’t want to see again and writing long, windy sentences that go nowhere, that mean nothing, that rumble over train tracks that hopefully Madison isn’t sleeping on.

These are things that must not happen again. And so, when all doors close, I surrender—as if I ever had a choice.