I Miss You When I Blink: Essays(12)

I think about people who can’t ask for what they need, and also people who just think they can’t. I think about how sometimes we hesitate to speak up out of fear of being seen as selfish or greedy. Imagine the lives we’d live if we were all able to say what we wanted out loud, or put it on paper if necessary.

And as I reflect on my imaginary mermaid friend who lacked the skills to save herself, I also think about what that story taught me—and I don’t mean the contrived moral tacked onto the end of the fairy tale; I mean the lesson I took away from it and carried with me forever.

Baby, you better learn to write.



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This is the story I tell when the students ask, “Did you always know you’d be a writer?” It’s my way of saying, “On some level, yes.” Did I always love books? Sure. Did I always ruminate on the strange details of what I read? Definitely. Has it always seemed vitally important that I find a way to express what I’m thinking, as if to fail to let my thoughts out of my head would kill me just like it killed that mermaid? Yeah, kind of.

But I give a warning, too. When people tell stories about their childhood as a way of prophesying what they’d become as adults, be suspicious. Nobody’s path is as linear as it looks in retrospect. Did the famous TV chef really know she had a future in pastry making after eating a cupcake when she was four? Or is she now a baker who happens to remember eating a cupcake? She probably did a lot of other things as a kid, too. Maybe she was on a kickball team in second grade, but she’s not a professional kickballer now, is she? I went through a phase for about three years where I spent every afternoon coasting around my neighborhood on my bike, but I’m not a biker today. I don’t even have a bike. Contrary to the old aphorism, I’m pretty sure I’ve forgotten how to ride one.

The picture you get at the end of a connect-the-dots activity really depends on which dots you decide to use. So try things and go through phases. Put down a lot of dots. Later, you can look back and pick any of those dots to create a picture of how you became who you are. And if you don’t like the picture you end up with, you can always choose different dots, which just goes to show destiny isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.





Disappearing Act


It starts the same way every time. An invisible, icy finger plucks my spine like a harp string, and a vibration begins at the back of my skull. The cold spreads up into my head and down into my limbs. My breaths become shallow, and what I suddenly want most is one big gulp of fresh air. People who witness it say it happens in a flash, that I stumble and crumple before they can reach me, but to me it feels like slow motion, a cartoonish antigravity spacewalk. A few seconds balloon into a suspended moment, then the shutoff valve is tripped. My eyes close, and I’m out, as if asleep. Splat.

No matter how many variables you introduce into my life—location, age, situation—one thing that remains is my habit of dropping out of consciousness without notice. Same face-plant, different floor.

I once fainted in my bathroom, the hair dryer still dangling from its cord, twirling and blowing hot air as I lay on the tile. Another time, as a kid, I fainted in church while wearing a heavy linen robe, just after handing off my big candle to another acolyte. I fainted in high school with some regularity. On one occasion, the buzz crept into my head during our pig dissection in biology; I set down my tools, stepped away from the lab desk, and put my hands out to protect my face before the world went dark. I once slid down the wall of a hallway in an academic building in college; my humanities professor saw it happen, and when I woke up, he half dragged me to a quieter hallway, where I sat until I felt ready to walk again. A few years after that, I passed out face-first onto a newspaper and stood up a few minutes later with backward headlines on my cheek. I’ve fainted at various workplaces through the years, although it probably always looked like I was napping, my head resting on crossed arms upon my desk.



* * *



Every time I faint—either as I’m going down or when I’m waking up—I have a split-second flashback to the first time, in kindergarten. It was morning sing-along. I had started feeling spacey during the Pledge of Allegiance, and by the time we wrapped up liberty and justice for all, my face, hands, and feet had turned cold, and my classmates’ voices had faded into the ringing inside my head. The distance between me and everyone around me stretched out, distorted by the suddenly too-thin air. Having never experienced this before, I fought it. I tried to stay standing.

(We were about to sing “The Farmer in the Dell,” you see, and it was Mike C.’s turn to be the farmer, which meant that when we got to the “farmer takes a wife” verse, he’d have to pick a girl, and the hell if I was going to let him pick that Missy girl again, because she eats erasers, and—)

Thud.

I can’t stop it once it starts.

This type of fainting—“syncope” if you like fancy medical words, “swooning” if you live in 1870 and wear a corset—is not uncommon. It occurs because my blood isn’t rushing through my veins so much as it’s just drifting along like the lazy-river raft ride. Sometimes the oxygenated blood doesn’t make it all the way up to my head, so down I go. If I could control it, it would make a great party trick (Watch this! Boom), but alas, I cannot. I’ve grown accustomed to it, though. The only thing it has really cost me is any hope of a career as a surgeon. Or a pilot. Or a stripper, I guess. Anything where reliable motor control and maintaining consciousness is important.