With school in full swing, creative writing has taken a back seat outside class. However, readings about illness narratives have translated into some interesting exercises. In honoring this blog, I want to share with you what’s going on because it’s the right thing to do after all this time. Also, I want you to know that I have some colossal news to share in November when the madness of October has passed. And after I’ve recovered…let’s call it mid-November.
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My banded blur sits on the left palm beneath my forefinger. In palm reading, the pointer finger is the seat of power, so I wonder how this trauma influenced my influence. Was I undermined the moment I hauled myself out of the Gulf and sliced myself open on the pier? Or was it a shift that started after the flesh began to knit? Does the control disappear as the scar fades away, or does it rearrange my core?
We didn’t talk about the implications of power much, my father and I, especially not on the beach while he held my hand above my head with his left and flipped burgers with his right. I looked up into my palm, blinking to keep the blood out of my eyes.
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Assassins aren’t supposed to live long. The average length of service after the academy is 5 years. A lot of hard living gets done in those years to make up for the lack. Abigail, though? She was the best. The first assassin in two generations to make it past fifty. Her age never seemed to bother her, as spry as any spring chicken. Well, except for one thing: her eyes started to go, which made dressing for a job a bit of a gamble. Abigail loved a good gamble; and though she usually came out on top, she was starting to lose her touch.
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High-functioning depression is an odd term, especially when it feels like I’m barely functioning at all. Dysthymia, from the Latin? The Latin doesn’t matter. Some days, nothing matters, nothing feels real. Today is a cotton candy day. When my brain feels full, stuffed with gossamer sugar strands. When I force my hand, try to force myself, everything gets squishy.
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Illness narratives don’t have neat endings. For a narrative structure, a reader needs some sense of a beginning, middle, and ending to understand and connect to a story (there’s a place for abstract and experimental work, but I’ll leave that for now). But illness isn’t neat, and Moore seems to know that. She is deliberate in making her chaos known, her anger, her grief, and those emotions are contextualized in the illness of her child. If a child is sick and no one is there to care, did it even matter?
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