The Monkey Business Illusion
I get too vulnerable about wondering if my life is up to par with the normal human experience, meanwhile the days thump onward
I tried reading E.E.Cummings selected poetry on Friday night while high off of a 5 mg edible gummy. I thought it would be a nice way to put myself to sleep. Put my racing mind to sleep, more like. My healthier instincts, taking the form of a metaphysical stern but loving mother reading me a bedtime story, tried to hush the 5 mgs of cannabinoid-induced mania. I don’t know why my body reacts that way to weed, I really wish it didn’t. It’s one of the reoccurring pop-ups in my life that I come across and instinctively associate with my being “broken.”
All too soon it was 3:30 am, and I had gotten into bed at 1 am and my heart was still noisily beating in my ears. Everyone else in my apartment was asleep. That statistic includes my three roommates, E, M, and D, E’s friend and D’s friend. Should it strike me as odd that it was my first weekend moving in to my new apartment and none of the people in the impromptu get together were there specifically for me? Is that but another shred of evidence towards my “brokenness?”
I got the low-dose edible — though everybody knows that dosage is highly subjective — from a girl I met at a bar who works at a dispensary. That is one job I will, for 100% certain, never have, like being a doctor or a makeup artist. I’m starting to realize my current job consists 85% of sending emails. “I’m starting to realize how much I don’t like my job because of how much I don’t like to talk about it,” I told E’s friend. “You don’t have to talk about it!” he assured me. That was nice. I could have pretty easily twisted the role into sounding impressive, but I’ve swung the opposite direction from previous patterns of using my favorite kind of lying (truth-omission) to rope in the interest of strangers through a facade of coolness. There’s also the possibility that I’m just thinking more negatively about the job than I need to be because I don’t really know what other people do in their day jobs, and maybe it’s actually fairly similar to mine, and it’s actually just the modern work expectations themselves that have been really letting me down. Anyway…
I took the edible because of the understanding that it would be no new people but who I was already with and video games for the rest of the night. Suddenly the edible was peaking and bam, new faces, bam, board game time. I was trying to hang because damnit if I can’t have some normal fun in this life, but understanding the instructions while my inner experience switched abruptly to rampant nervous thought mode was like the Monkey Business Illusion.
E says “First Player 1 picks a red card …” and my mind starts yelling about the first time I saw someone get a red card in middle school travel soccer and what turf inside the Latham Afrim’s Dome smelled like and why soccer started to get so bad when I started to play with older, out-of-town, more-skilled girls and — now E has finished what he was saying and assumes I was listening like everyone else but I missed the whole entire thing and I could be Player 1 but I actually have no fucking clue. I had to excuse myself and go to bed.
Back to where I started, it was 3:30 am and I took a hydroxyzine to trigger drowsiness while I “read.” The poetry was meant to bring me to a nicer, freer place. Pop a poem like a low-dose edible. Low commitment. I’ve always loved poetry. The first page:
Thy fingers make early flowers of
all things.
thy hair mostly the house love:
a smoothness which
sings, saying
(though love be a day)
do not fear, we will go amaying.
I can connect with these words now, rereading with sobriety, which is a relief. Because Friday night I did not. I felt supremely stupid. I felt like I lost grip on the English language and all the meaning that other people’s words contain. The only language I spoke was the language of my mind palace. bitch. you wanna sleep? hah. count how many times the players wearing white pass the ball!!!!!!!
When I finally really woke up on Saturday at 3 pm, I thought, goddamn you hydroxyzine. Now I remember why I don’t take you. Then I thought about When I Drink by the Avett Brothers, a song that’s always stuck since I was 13 or so. During the climax of the song, the background instrumentals quiet down and the tempo slows, leaving just the one voice and a couple guitar chords, as the Avett brother sings: “but when I drink, I spend the next morning in a haze. and we only get so many days. now I have one less. just do your best.” I was just 20 seconds awake, with ringing in my ears: We only get so many days. We only get so many days.
In summary, on Friday night I was out taking on the world, strutting down the buzzing city streets to a new bar in a new city, feeling cute in my pigtail braids and turtle-neck tank top, cautiously excited about the prospects of my new adult life. By Saturday afternoon I was an illiterate can’t-hang smooth-brained can’t-understand-simple-instructions email-job-working hypersomniac. It slipped out of my hands so quickly.
But I have found recently that the more I try to squint and force a positive read on things, the blurrier what I’m looking at gets. This is unfamiliar. Sitting back and letting my eyes refocus to the grander what-it-is has been really difficult.
Narrativizing life works well when I’m in a groove of seeing my life as an Epic Wins Compilation girl-meets-world mysterious bliss fest. It doesn’t work well when the story I’m trying to put together is like a collection of puzzle pieces that look like they come from different boxes. I have so many questions about how to live in this timeline I’m in. I keep asking Google stupid questions. I don’t know who I should be inviting to my first weekend in this apartment. I don’t know what people do during their day jobs. I don’t know why my thoughts are the way they are. I don’t know why I stopped being great at soccer once I started having louder thoughts. Maybe the ball got harder to see.
Well, I can’t wait to get that verdict back on whether I’m broken or not. If there’s someone out there reading this who can chill while learning the instructions to a board game with new people while high, was still good at a sport at 16 that they were good at at 6, enjoys talking about the day-to-day tasks of their job, and would know exactly who to invite to their first weekend living in nyc, please confirm that you never feel broken. Then I’ll know, at least, that I’ve figured out the key to life. If, however, this applies to you and you have opposing evidence to my theory, let's grab a coffee and discuss your pop-ups. That seems like a good way to spend an afternoon.