the habit of being

In the lab, I was told that a notebook that loses pages is not a notebook. I wrote this truism down immediately, in my notebook, which is falling apart.

How much of my everyday life would qualify as panic? By professional standards? For instance: my heart is often pounding. My dreams are often bad.

When my benefits come through I could see someone. I suppose.

It took me two months to remember that the second anniversary of my death had gone by. I overlooked it because I was too busy moving. I moved to New York two years, to the day, after my abortion. How else could I have missed it? I know the day very well. Coincidences of this magnitude convince me, more than anything else, that there is God.

I told him that the blood clots were the size of plums. They were plumlike in many ways. He said he had no idea. He held me and I cried. As could be expected.

In the park, a man in a yellow robe handed me a daisy. He smiled and the daisy was white and a little bit droopy.

I vomited on the train. I made it to the second-to-last stop, my eyes closing heavily and opening slowly and everything rocking and rocking. I got most of it into my bag but some on my coat and when I told him, he didn’t understand why I hadn’t just puked on the floor of the train. But then what would I have done?

I wiped my mouth on my sleeve and tried to pretend it had not happened, that no one had seen. I got off at my stop and walked home in the late-night drizzle, with my kitten-ear hoody hanging off my shoulder and my bag full of vomit. Someone honked at me. Someone always does. Later, I wiped a mushroom off my cell phone.

I want to get married and have a baby.

I shouldn’t be at home now. I shouldn’t be feeling the lavender-scented bubbles slip down the backs of my thighs. I shouldn’t have been in the bath, reading about crazy women and their lost children and how those lost children made them crazy. But I don’t feel well. I feel dizzy and I don’t know which came first anymore.

Now, when my mother tells me how she cooked something, she does it in a serious way she never had before. Like she’s just realized I am an adult and there is a place in my life for recipes.

The man in the yellow robe was only an actor. His smile was fake. Someone filmed him handing me the daisy. I got up and left it on the park bench.

I did work on Sunday. If I did work on Sunday, why should I have to do work today?

There’s a tin can of grape leaves beside my bed. I have these sheets with a high thread count and two ink stains. I have those screaming kids under my window, the job I didn’t go to, the nausea behind my stinging eyes.

Also, why’d I stop going to my yoga classes? And did someone really call me ethereal? In my presence? Could I OD on echinacea?