in flux

I have Thrush.

I wish this meant that when I open my mouth I warble and trill because my insides are full of birds, but it does not. I wish this meant that when I open my mouth thrushes wing their way upwards toward the heavens, but it does not.

It means bad luck. It means shame on you amoxicillin and stress, stress, stress. It means that I only THOUGHT I knew what cottonmouth was.

I feel like one of those monsters walking through a little hamlet on his way to the big city. To Camelot. Or Gotham. To wreak havoc. To instill fear and trembling into the people. And as he walks roaches and centipedes and millipedes and flies and baby flies and those little gnats always circling your fruit bowl and those no-see-‘ems everyone says aren’t there but that bite you anyway and fleas and lice and ticks and dung beetles and sucker worms come crawling and flying furiously toward him to hitch a ride. They crawl up his legs and arms and face, noodling and boring their way inside his clothes, inside his mouth and nose and ears, inside his rotten and evil and festering body.

I feel like the fly paper, completely innocent when hung up in the morning, but suddenly choking with angry flies in the hot afternoon when she realizes, with a start, that she was an angry fly all along joining that insane buzzing writhing mass of anger and sorrow and loss loss loss, losing herself in a clot of flies droning endlessly because the owners of the house have packed up and gone, closed up the house for winter, and the flies just hang there, suspended in time, trapped, unrepentant.

I have THRUSH.

Things keep snagging on the branches in the creek. Things keep giving up. Our ice maker has given up. Our perfectly-ordinary plans for birthdays have given up. Our microwave has given up and its shiny new replacement has also given up having been rejected by the installers. We cannot put this where you want it, they said. We cannot do what you want. We are so sorry they said. I said, I am that soldier. You know the one? That guy dropping to his knees and collapsing during the retreat from the city that has fallen to the enemy? His platoon is relocating, getting the hell out of dodge, but he is giving up the ghost. Get up, soldier. Get up, soldier. But he cannot get up and his sergeant blows out his brains in a way that perfectly punctuates the futility of war, of anger, of the great disorganizing principle of the universe. And the music swells. And you either cry or toughen up your heart one notch further so you will not give into your tears. And the lights begin to come up.

You know that guy? I asked. Do you know how awful my broken microwave feels? Do you know how badly my new still-in-its-enormous-door-blocking box feels? Do you know how failure feels to a broken ice maker when its sad little tray is LITERALLY DANGLING BY A THREAD? Do you know what its like to have THRUSH??

Of course, I am not that soldier because I am incapable of falling to my knees either from exhaustion or before an angel of the Lord. And I am not a member of that sick and dying clot of flies because I no longer believe in being in teeming crowds of people. And I am not that monster walking through the village because GOSH DARN IT people LIKE ME.

So I can only suppose that this is a particularly bad oil slick of awful luck. This is surely the can I kicked down the road, kicked it so long ago I cannot remember when. But that sound, that tinny sound of the can as it lifts into the air and travels and clatters back to Earth. I know that sound and I know its echo. That sound shrouds my local CVS which has all but sunk to hellfire. They have been unable to do the job for a long time. Now, when things are at their worst, the management has cut their hours—yesterday afternoon and last night their were TWO people working the pharmacy. Only two. The pharmacist and another person. That’s it. I asked them today, or I would have asked them if I really were a monster, if they know what it’s like to WAIT AN EXTRA TWELVE HOURS to get medication for your THRUSH?????

When James had thrush as a baby (from breastfeeding), we painted his mouth with gentian violet and he looked like a three-month old who’d been sneaking out at night and raiding the berry patch. If it would work better than this VILE stuff they’ve given me I would get it but then I would look…sort of like the monster.

Just please let whatever stewing brewing vicious toothy soup in me that is boiling and hate hate hating everything that goes wrong, whether a spoon flying out of my hands or driving James to the hospital to get labs and learning that the nurse at the heart institute did not call in those lab orders and the (mouthpiece) office administrator calling and bald-faced lying to me (again) and saying that the people at the lab didn’t know that we were heart institute patients (they did of course because I told them and they repeated what I said) and had not realized they had the order all along (liar liar just look at your pants), please, no matter how big or small, let the water go still and clear blue and let us push off the lake bank with our toes and go off floating on our backs so far across the way that no one can find us, no one will call us to say blah, or blah, or blah blah blah, or uh oh.

For you see, I am beginning to be….a not pleasant person. And I don’t want this to be my new normal. It reminds me of what it was like to have James in the public school system—a constant fight. Armor on. Dukes up. Heart ready to burst. Teeth gnashing before the fact.

However, the good thing about being a writer is that this act, this creative movement through images and sounds and imagining one’s toes in squishy soil, is a tonic. After a fashion. And I am not without my personal Pollyanna sunshine outlook by turns, for how else would I have survived thus far?

So bring on the birthdays-on-hold-for-now, and the less-than-it-should-be weekend. And bring on a new fridge and a new stove to go with the new microwave and by George bring on the Vitamix and perhaps a trip to Ulta and at the end of the day, isn’t it lucky, lucky, lucky to be inside your own comfy house with your own personal air conditioner secure in the knowing that if the world ends right now, if the anvil falls upon us all, you will go right to sleep, so soundly, so endlessly, that you will not wake, not even when you transform back into star dust.