Tag: So I retreat and submerge. Staying under is easier, more comfortable than trying to navigate a wide, dry land with a fragmented mind and frail, tired body.

A film has settled over my life. It blurs and conceals. It divides and separates. It sends down off-shoots that hang like curtains between my thoughts so they cannot reach each other, and I am left with disconnects all around; broken wires, their ends shooting out sparks of ideas that fizzle and fry and land nowhere.
Most days I live near the surface, helpless to break through the languid, lazy scum; other days I drift so low – – so far down that the sparks above, appear as harmless lights, like fairy dust or fireflies. Without heat or energy they float aimlessly above my head. And the film is not just a thin coating but seems to me to be the end of everything – – the place where my own personal atmosphere stops.
New treatments have, for a time, fallen like life preservers around me, shooting me through the stagnant ceiling. Under their influence, I have emerged gulping for air, walking out of this moribund pool to stand waist deep, even ankle deep, looking down on my enemies for a time, in awe that what had been a school of sharks was now just a bevy of insignificant minnows. I have stepped over them and entered, once again, my garden, my wooded trails and bike paths, and conversations with friends. But while distracted, busy, and happy and certain I had beaten my illness, the enemy rose again, inching its way up, reasserting its hold until little by little the foggy brain; the painful joints, muscles, bones, and skin; the numbness, stinging, and burning; the weakness, vertigo, and crushing fatigue rolled over my whole self, pulling me under. Clarity is, once more gone, and I wrinkle my brow, confused, struggling to understand what is happening to me.
There are days when I so want to see dry land, to walk where I used to and be who I was that I willingly pay the price. I kick and claw my way out and just let the mess cling to me, hauling it as best I can, but I don’t fit in anymore. I am flabbergasted by simple words, lethargic and weak. The lights, the sounds, the information rushing at me is too much; like a great, angry crowd poking and shoving. So I retreat and submerge. Staying under is easier, more comfortable than trying to navigate a wide, dry land with a fragmented mind and frail, tired body.
I don’t swim here, but I still dream of it. I am tossed, shifting in the direction dictated by my symptoms, different everyday but always present in some form. I roll and drift with the flux like so much wreckage, aimless and helpless to overpower this weighty affliction. I know God sees me. I know He hears, but from where I lie, it is hard to know what He is saying; to understand what He is doing. I squint and cup an ear, but I just can’t make it out.
I catch dull glimpses of people’s faces as they view me through the murk and mire, and I fear I make them uncomfortable when I can’t form words or when I stumble, when I don’t look like me anymore. When I don’t look healthy.
I don’t want to live here, in this watery cavern where my brain is dull, but it is becoming better than trying to live up there. Maybe I am evolving; adapting to this stale airless place. Maybe I feel safer where I can just be sick and avoid trying to act like I’m not.
Lyme feels like this.