I breathe in. I breathe out. The sky’s full of clouds. A rope is looping down from above, out of the sky and down to earth. There is a woman’s face looking at me, and all around us, hundreds upon hundreds of birds. The flock flows like water, surging up and into the air, black and gold and red, and everything is safe and cold, bright with stars and moon.
I’m tiny in comparison, and I’m not on the ground.
I know everyone has dreams of flying, but this isn’t a dream of flying. It’s a dream of floating, and the ocean is not water but wind.
I call it a dream, but it feels realer than my life.
My history is hospitals.
This is what I tell people when I’m in a mood to be combination funny and stressful, which is a lot of the time.
It’s easier to have a line ready than to be forced into a conversation with someone whose face is showing “fake nice,” “fake worry,” or “fake interest.” My preferred method is as follows: make a joke, make a half-apologetic/half-freaky face, and be out of the discussion in five seconds flat.
Aza: “Nothing really majorly wrong with me. Don’t worry. I just have a history of hospitals.”
Person in Question: “Er. Um. Oh. I’m so sorry to hear that. Or, wait, glad. You just said that nothing’s really wrong with you! Glad!”
Aza (freaky face intensifying): “It’s incredibly nice of you to ask.”
Subtext: It isn’t. Leave it.
People don’t usually ask anything after that. Most are polite. My parents, my family, not so much, but the randoms? The substitute teacher who wonders why I’m coughing and having to leave the room—then having to go to the nurse’s office—then having to have a nice 911 call to summon an ambulance to spirit me back to my white linoleum homeland?
That sort of person doesn’t typically want to remind me of things I no doubt already know. Which I very much do. Don’t be stupid. Also, don’t think I’m stupid.
This is not, like, Little Women. Beth and her nice, invalid Beth-ness have always made me puke. The way people imagined she wasn’t dying. The way she blatantly was. In that kind of story, the moment someone decides to wrap you in blankets and you accidentally smile weakly, you’re dead.
Hence, I try not to smile weakly, even if I feel weak, which I sometimes secretly or unsecretly do. I don’t want to make myself into a catastrophic blanket-y invalid.
Bang, bang, you’re dead. Close your eyes and go to bed.
Side note: invalid. Whoever invented that word, and made it the same word as not-valid? That person sucked.
So, right, the question of death comes up in my presence on a regular basis. Adults don’t want to talk about it. Seriously, it’s not as though I want to talk about it either. But other people my age do.
DEATH DEATH DEATH, everyone’s thinking, like we’re in our cars, driving slowly past accidents on the highway all day long. They’re grossly fascinated.
Some of us, the ones actually dying, are maybe less fascinated than others. Some of us, maybe, would rather not get stuck in rooms where people are regularly talking about celebrity death-y things, whichever kind you want, the OD, the car crash, the mystery fall-apart . . .
People my age enjoy crying and speculating dramatically over how people our age could die. Take it from one who knows. Take it from one whose role has been, for years, The Girl I Knew Really Well Who Tragically Died One Day.
Not that I’ve died yet. I am still totally here. Which is why all the artistic, goth morbidity is a bummer.
Adults want to talk about death way less than people my age do. Death is the Santa Claus of the adult world. Except Santa Claus in reverse. The guy who takes all the presents away. Big bag over the shoulder, climbing up the chimney carrying everything in a person’s life, and taking off, eight-reindeered, from the roof. Sleigh loaded down with memories and wineglasses and pots and pans and sweaters and grilled cheese sandwiches and Kleenexes and text messages and ugly houseplants and calico cat fur and half-used lipstick and laundry that never got done and letters you went to the trouble of handwriting but never sent and birth certificates and broken necklaces and disposable socks with scuffs on the bottom from hospital visits.
And notes you kept on the fridge.
And pictures of boys you had crushes on.
And a dress that got worn to a dance at which you danced by yourself, before you got too skinny and too breathless to dance.
Along with, probably, though this isn’t worthy of huge thinking, a soul or something.
Anyway, adults don’t believe in Santa Claus. They try hard not to believe in Santa Claus in Reverse either.
At school, the whole rare-disease-impending-doom situation makes me freakishly intriguing. In the real world, it makes me a problem. Worried look, bang, nervous face, bang: “Maybe you should talk to someone about your feelings, Aza,” along with a nasty side dish of what-about-God-what-about-therapy-what-about-antidepressants?
Sometimes also what-about-faith-healers-what-about-herbs-what-about-crystals-what-about-yoga? Have you tried yoga, Aza, I mean have you, because it helped this friend of a friend who was supposedly dying but didn’t, due to downward dog?
No. I haven’t tried yoga to cure my thing, because yoga isn’t going to cure my thing. My thing is a Mystery and not just a Mystery, but Bermuda—no sun, only Triangle.
Unknowable. Unsolvable.
I take handfuls of drugs every morning, even though no one is entirely sure what the thing that’s wrong with me actually is. I’m rare like that. (Rare, like what?)