Heesun's Table #13: Is Rotting
Surprise, surprise. I am Ill.
The first week of freedom fell into illness.
Not the COVID kind, or the flu kind, or the bird flu kind - thank God. Illness, however, that gave me a good bout of the shivers and kept me bed ridden for most of the week, a fairly normal bodily reaction after the end of a stressful period. (The show closed, by the way.)
I Became Ill.
Fatigue punched me in the throat, then instructed me to lay down and rot. For once, I listened. Work came in and I said “yes” only to then swiftly email my agents the “I’m sorry, I can’t” as I felt the oncoming collapse. Sure enough, two days post closure, my body became Ill. Soup and pudding were all I ate when my body chose to do something other than sleep or mindlessly numb itself in hour long reruns of A Cook’s Tour or Mr. Bean. I slept one day for almost twenty hours. Messages piled up, friends asking how I was doing now that The Thing was done, and my parents worrying if I was dead (they can track me - they knew I was just rotting.)
In rotting, I finished a book given to me by my friend, the first of the new year. The Coin by Yasmin Zaher. “Bonkers” is a word used by one critic to describe it, but bonkers usually equates itself to silliness, and I’m not sure it was a silly book. Still, it was a book that made me think, given to me by a friend, that led me back towards reading another book - once my brain was up for it during the rotting.
Most of this round of rotting felt like a sort of karmic reparation. I’ve noticed it’s gotten harder and harder to keep myself from revealing too much of how I honestly feel in certain situations. It is becoming harder to play the game. When something repulses me, as it so often does, the reaction comes out of my mouth without trouble or hesitation. It isn’t so much that I am a picky, sanitized, insane person - although, at times, I am. It is the fact that there is so much to be repulsed by, just in the last thirteen days of living in this country, in this world. Being Ill and the rotting that followed has my pre-Christian roots vibrating, as if to say, this is what you get when all you spew is negativity. Little do they, the roots, know - the air has been polluted for some time with negativity. We have simply forgotten how it looks and tastes when it’s clean.
I tried smoking a cigarette on one of the days I was feeling Less Ill. Stupid mistake. I paid for it with another two days in bed, writhing in sheets drenched in sad sweat, sheets that had been changed only a few days ago. I promised myself I’d be sleeping regular hours come the new year, but now I was waking up at eleven and going to bed at six, then nine, then four.
Stacks of books are lined against my walls right now. The bookshelf I bought on Amazon broke. It broke because I built it drunk. I have a horrible habit of wanting to get things done when I’m drunk, and this bookshelf was bought within the first month of me moving into the new apartment. I built the bookshelf drunk, and the next morning, realized how horribly I built it. The cat stepped on the bookshelf and it fell into shambles. I did what I had to do. I got drunk again and tried rebuilding it, securing it with new holes that I’d drilled into the foundation. Stupid mistake. I threw out the bookshelf.
It ended up for the better because I had way too many books for that bookshelf to hold. I needed a new book after The Coin. I rolled over on my mattress and stared at the options in front of me, the store sitting against my right-side wall instead of going to some place like Kinokuniya. Initially, I reached for White Teeth by Zadie Smith, then had the thought of, do I really want to do this to myself? I then picked up all about love: new visions by bell hooks. I tried reading the book before and absolutely hated it.
That was a year ago, though, and a lot has changed. In my Illness and half-rotted mind, I tried re-reading those opening pages. As I read into it more deeply, I struggled to find what pages I had problems with, what saying or quote spurred me so much to put the book down altogether. What did I find wrong in this? I thought. I was so sure of my distaste towards the book, almost to the point of it being a personality trait. I became one of those annoying people who thought different towards a beloved (ha) title that I had, unashamedly at the time, only read thirty or so pages of. Only to backpedal and realize, I had no idea why I detested this book and author for so long. The fact that she was just trying to find love in a repulsive world?? Is that so wrong??
I’m still sort of Ill. The fog is lifting. My room is still cluttered, but less so. I am still reading all about love. Today, I had mushrooms in my soup. I used to hate mushrooms, but now they’re one of the foods that bring me back to life, especially after rotting for so long. Your tastebuds change as you grow older, I suppose. I mean, last year I thought bell hooks’ cry against lovelessness was pointless, now I’m crying alongside her. Did my tastes change, do I really like bell hooks and mushrooms now? Or did life’s recent experiences leave me in such a bitter way that it made the things I once despised now taste good?
Writing this now, my cigarettes sit in their Grethers case in the left pocket of my winter coat, waiting to be exhumed. They’re American Spirits. I hate American Spirits.
