Chapter Three #2
I spent much of the morning trying to get what was in my head onto the screen, but it felt like everything dissolved somewhere between my brain and my fingers. It was frustrating, but I spent the day doing other things, figuring I could just have a fresh start the next day.
Monday came, then Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday. I taught my classes. I walked Ollie. I slept and ate, but I did not write. I couldn’t write. Was this writer’s block? I’d never experienced it before, but people talked about it all the time. That had to be it.
I tried everything over the next two weeks.
I tried dictating what was in my head, but the words wouldn’t come out.
I tried writing longhand in notebooks like I had when I was a kid.
I tried to start other projects. Nothing helped.
I got about five pages finished and it was like pulling teeth.
Five pages in three weeks. This could not be writer’s block.
I was desperate the next time I saw Catherine. “I can’t write.”
She had barely closed the door. “What do you mean?”
“Nothing. Nothing comes out.”
“A lot of people have writer’s block. Great writers have struggled mightily with it.”
“I don’t think it’s that. I have ideas, okay, but they’re stuck in my head. I can’t get them out.”
“Has this ever happened before?”
I shook my head. “I’ve tried stepping away from it, I’ve tried dictating, I’ve tried everything.”
“Have you tried telling a story to someone else?”
My jaw tightened. “I’m telling you, there’s something wrong. Really wrong.”
Catherine was quiet for a moment. “How are you feeling besides that?”
I hadn’t really thought about it. “Good, I think. I mean, I’ve been panicking a little bit about this so I can’t really tell but—”
“How have you been dealing with it?”
I threw my hands up in the air. “I mean, panicking.”
“Like old Sam panicking or new Sam panicking?”
“New Sam panicking,” I said, starting to feel a little lightheaded. “I mean I guess I’ve dealt with it pretty well, all things considered.”
“No angry outbursts? No self-harm?”
I shook my head. “It’s working, isn’t it. This is it working.”
“I think so. It works on that rogue temporal lobe and—”
It hit me like a ton of bricks. “It turns it off.”
“Right. You should still be able to feel things, but it turns off the—”
“It turns off the writing.”
Catherine had looked a little irritated about how I was interrupting her, but once she understood, her demeanor changed. “Oh. No, I don’t think…”
“If my rogue temporal lobe makes it happen,” I said, borrowing her term even though I didn’t much care for it, “and this works on the problems with my temporal lobe, wouldn’t it conveniently fix the whole fucking…Epileptic…Package? I mean, can a pill really pick and choose?”
Catherine looked completely confounded. “You can write on them. You can do it. This will go away, and if it doesn’t, just remember that you wrote before your accident.”
My accident. Could she please stop calling it that, like I’d been in a fender bender or fallen off a slide?
I did throw the pillow that time, although at the floor instead of the window.
She didn’t understand how hard the past few weeks had been.
Nobody could understand what it felt like when the flow of creativity that came so fucking easily to me dried up like a parched, cracked riverbed.
“We can try a different mood stabilizer, but you do need one that doubles as an anticonvulsant. I mean, you can go back to the neurologist.”
“I don’t want to go back to the neurologist.” My words sounded like those of a petulant toddler, but I meant them. I didn’t want to go back to the neurologist, ever. I didn’t want any reason to. I’d never cried in a therapy session, and I was damn close, but I wasn’t about to start now.
“I’m sorry, Sam. I know this is hard on you.”
I’d never thought of my compulsive writing as a curse, but rather something that made me special.
I supposed that sometimes it got in the way of sleep, food, my relationships, even sometimes my teaching when my mind wandered, but I’d never missed a class.
I sort of hoped that if it really did turn off my writing, this cocktail wouldn’t work, but frankly, over the next few months, I felt better than I ever had in my life.
It was indeed the elusive even keel, and I could do things like getting through difficult moments without crying or yelling, and even date without being a nuisance.
I had a new girlfriend, and things were great.
The only thing that wasn’t great was that the writing that had gushed out of me so easily continued to be little more than a trickle.
I learned to work with it and managed to squeeze out a couple of books over the next few years, but sometimes I got frustrated enough to go off my meds and enjoy a week or so of unbridled writing.
Catherine got mad at me every time, but she was patient, and we continued to work through the other things we’d been discussing before that particular crisis happened.
A week after the incident at Kroger, I sat in the lobby at Catherine’s practice, lips tight. I’d almost cancelled my biweekly appointment because I really didn’t want to talk about it. I didn’t like looking stupid, and I really didn’t like talking about how I didn’t like looking stupid.
After an exhausted-looking young woman left, I counted the ten minutes until Catherine appeared in the doorway and ushered me into her office.
In complete silence, I took my spot on the right side of the sofa, grabbed the throw pillow, tucked it where it belonged beside me. I was like clockwork, and I could feel myself ticking.
Catherine closed the door and sat gingerly in her chair, watching me the whole time. She fingered my chart lazily, crossed her legs at the knee, took a sip of coffee. “How have you been?”
I stared out the window at the air conditioner unit. “Fine.”
“Really.”
“Uh-huh.”
Silence. Catherine sighed. “You’re paying for this.”
“Veronica is still in town.”
“Pardon?”
“My ex pretended to move out of town in order to get rid of me.”
She blinked. “Are you sure she actually—”
“The woman packed everything she owned into boxes. The last night I saw her, we were sitting on the floor in her apartment completely surrounded with boxes. I spent days helping her put everything into boxes.”
“Remind me where she was moving?”
“St. Louis. She spent weeks in St. Louis, allegedly interviewing for a job and finding an apartment. She quit her job here. She quit her job.”
“And you’re certain that she’s still in town?”
I raised my eyebrows at the window. “I ran into her at Kroger.”
“And she told you she was still in town?”
“I didn’t actually talk to her.”
“Then how do you know she wasn’t just visiting?”
I didn’t bother to think about how I would feel if she was actually visiting and hadn’t told me. “She was cuddling up to one of our mutual friends.”
“In Kroger?”
I shut my eyes. Get with the program. “Not like huge PDA, just an arm around her. So then I called the place she had worked and they said she was with another…What?”
“You called her at work?”
I threw my hands in the air. “What am I supposed to do? Shouldn’t I know what’s really going on? It’s not like I’m stalking her or something…I mean, not really, right?”
Catherine just stared back at me.
“Come on. That’s so not like me. It isn’t like I was stalking her when I thought she was in St. Louis.”
“Fair enough. So her work said what?”
“That she was with another firm in town.”
Catherine nodded. “Okay. Any idea why she might do such a thing?”
“Because she’s a—” I stopped myself and stared out the window again.
“Say it.”
“No. I don’t mean it.”
“Say it anyway.”
I ignored that. “I am not so fucked up that she couldn’t just tell me she was over me. Tell me that I am not so fucked up that she needed to pretend that she was moving out of state.”
Catherine wrinkled her nose. “You’re not that fucked up.”
I didn’t like where she put the emphasis, but hearing that in so many words did make me feel a little bit more justified in my tirade. “But that she would think that…I mean, okay, I can take it. Really, I can take it. I’ve taken it from plenty of people. I’m not dead yet.”
“Did you do anything that might have led her to believe you’d hurt yourself or—”
“Or hunt down her new girlfriend or stalk her?”
“You keep bringing up stalking.”
I clenched my jaw for as many seconds as it took to convince myself not to tell my therapist to shut up.
“I did nothing. I’m positive. I was really good during this one.
Anyway, it wasn’t like we lived together.
We could go home. We could get away from one another.
We didn’t have to deal with the mundane, unattractive shit. ”
“So could there be a possibility that she simply couldn’t bring herself to leave you in a…more conventional manner?”
“She packed up her life, quit her job, and pretended to leave town,” I said. “I suppose she didn’t assume a new identity… It could be worse.”
Catherine smiled. “There we go.”
I shook my head. “No. I’m not funny. I am desperately unfunny right now.”
The smile grew. “Are you writing?”
“I’m on my meds,” I told her darkly.
“I know it. Are you writing?”
“As much as I ever am on them.”
“Don’t go off them. Not now.”
“I know.”