Feverish

Maybe once a year I have a one night fever.

I never know where it comes from, it never lasts longer than a night, and I never feel so much as a cold coming on the day before or after it happens.

But the weirdest part is that I kind of…like it.

It’s as if my body were recharging, purging itself the same way we might self-medicate after a day of dabauchery with a kale smoothie and a warm washcloth plastered over our eyes in bed.

It’s like hitting restart, letting the bad and the old wash away in a night of frozen sweat and vibrating limbs.

And once it’s over, it ain’t half bad.

Greetings, Discomfort

I regret not going with them the other night.

When I decided to head home, it wasn’t even out of a conscious need to find a quiet place and recharge; it was like an instinctual evacuation. I don’t know what’s worse, deliberating and then deciding to be a buzz killer, or automatically declining an invitation because the reaction is so wired within me.

I really was having a good time at the holiday dinner. And it’s not like I’m so introverted or anti-social that I never drink.

I think my nerves kicked in at the thought – at the overblown concern – of what would result if I were to let loose for the first time in front of people, coworkers, who would have never seen me so relaxed. I kept wondering how I would appear, in their eyes, with the stockings off and the blazer unbuttoned (so to speak).

There was that time I very much unintentionally got buzzed at a small work meeting, over an innocent glass of afternoon rosé. But that was in a different environment completely, on a quiet porch at a fancy 5-star hotel, and neither of the people with me seemed to feel anything less than sober (at least, they didn’t seem to struggle getting out of their chairs). So they wouldn’t have expected anything different from me.

But getting back to the other night:

I should have gone. I regret not going.

And from now on let it be a lesson to not lie comfortably with old habits, but instead, to kick them aside and start welcoming the uncomfortable, even – especially – when it makes me most afraid.

On nostalgia

There are often moments in my conversations when something seems to collapse, and our talk becomes a physical thing, a plane upon which we stand, you and I, speaking.

Then comes this instance when, for no reason I can find, the ground seems to open up all around me, so that I am standing on this island surrounded by your speaking.

The only extant, definable emotion I can liken it to is nostalgia:

All obsessed

I’m a bit of a pack rat when it comes to memorabilia. I have a giant manila folder, along with drawers that I dread opening, that are stuffed with movie stubs, theater programs, birthday cards, event flyers, and crinkly classroom notes that my friends and I shuttled back and forth in high school.

When I look on all these things and try to fit them into the greater puzzle of my memory, they’re really, honestly no more than cracked paper and faded ink. They’re microscopic pieces of an overall picture which, if you were to examine it from far away, would look no different with them gone.

Yet I can’t throw them away.

A room for grief

“No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear. I am not afraid, but the sensation is like being afraid. The same fluttering in the stomach, the same restlessness, the yawning. I keep on swallowing.” – C.S. Lewis, A Grief Observed

About a year ago, my grandfather on my dad’s side passed away. I never met him. The things I knew about him were largely impersonal: he was, at various points in his life, a detective, a pilot, and a farmer in Lebanon. He never saw a single game in my father’s professional soccer career. He owned hundreds of acres of beautiful land, and a beautiful house in Beirut where most of my father’s siblings (eight in total) still live. For most of their adult lives, many of those siblings took advantage of him.

That’s all I know. I’ve seen pictures, although none recent. I’ve seen my dad’s stern expression in an old, crackly photo of a familiar face, the same unwillingness – or maybe just inability – to smile before a lens. Until last year, in those rare moments when the subject would come up, I’d heard my dad say every time, “Your grandpa is a very good man.”

I don’t know how my father reacted to his father’s death, because he’s never actually talked about it. I came home from a few months in England last year, right around Christmas, and heard the news from my mom. My grandpa had died about a month before that. No one had wanted to upset me.

My thoughts on this kind of intimate secrecy aside, I worried about my dad. He hadn’t seen his father in over a decade, and now he would never see him again. But more than that, I had a small (but big enough) understanding of his grief.

My grandpa wasn’t the first parent my dad had lost. His mother passed away four or five years ago, when I was still living at home and in high school. The news reached me in much the same way: indirectly, through my mom. But I did get a chance to hear about my grandma from my dad’s lips, too.