Unseverable

Days 22 and 23

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As I sit to write updates I find that I’m having actual difficulty separating yesterday (Day 22) from today (23). I can remember a few things so I’ll list these in general order, but just combine the days here because I don’t have the wherewithal to tease them apart.

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I think I mentioned weeks ago that I haven’t been taking any medicine because it feels like cheating my emotions. That’s not quite the right way to explain it, but I'm unsure of a better way. Anyway, yesterday (Day 21), I look a Xanax before my early-morning work to mitigate the anxiety-boost from the caffeine I took to wake up, and to calm my discomfort more generally.

This made me tired enough to cause the longer-than-expected nap I took after work. That night, I took another one, but I’m not sure why. Maybe it was just to get something like sleep after the nap; I’m not sure. Regardless, it made waking up incredibly difficult. I only worked in the evening, so it wasn’t critical. But for the first time since he died, I had a hard time waking up.

I couldn’t wake up, but I also slept like shit. I finally forced myself out of bed at sometime around 2:30, showered, and struggled to get ready for work. Whatever resistance to Xanax I’d built up in the last couple years seems to have been entirely reset in the last, give-or-take, 24 days of taking nothing at all (plus, the extremely small amount of sleep I’ve had in over 3 weeks). It hammered me.

I felt off all Day 22 and had to drink an inordinate amount of caffeine just to feel like I could function. This caused a repeat of the problem because, this morning (Day 23), the Astros and Yankees played at 5 fucking am. In an attempt to sleep early enough last night to wake up for the game this morning, I took yet another Xanax. I fell asleep at about 2:30am, far earlier than I have been falling asleep recently. I set my alarm for around 5:30, late enough to miss all the pre-game shit and ensure that the game would be going when I tuned in.

I woke up and checked my phone to find not a single notification from the notification-happy MLB app. In my extremely-tired, half-asleep state, I figured that I must’ve confused the days and fell back asleep. About 40 minutes later, perhaps an hour, I woke up and checked my phone again. There were a couple notifications about the then-upcoming 4th game of the Cards-Nats NLCS, but nothing about the Game 3 of the Astros-Yankees ALC.

I woke up later when a friend sent me a message saying the Nats were about to sweep the Cards. I checked my notifications and there was still no other notifications. So I opened the app – something I should’ve done hours earlier – and found that the Nats were up 7-1, just a couple innings away from moving on to the World Series. And, of course, I saw the final score of the ALCS’s Game 3: Astros over the Yankees 4-1.

I’m happy the Astros won, but god dammit….

Because I’d taken the Xanax the night before, I fell back to sleep after discovering this disappointment, and didn’t actually roll out of bed until around 3:30. I’ve swung, with the unwise aid of medicines, from sleeping almost not at all, to sleeping way too long while getting sleep that feels just as shitty.

Tonight I’ll return to not taking anything and try to see if I can sleep normally or if, as I suspect, my sleep is just broken for a while.

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Last night (22) at work, I had four lessons and I made it through well enough. Tonight (23), I had the same number of lessons, but all the people were fun so I was able to almost enjoy myself. This was actually surprising, because I don’t feel in any way happy. And yet the lessons weren’t so bad. My first student easily laughs at my jokes when we (rarely) have lessons and tonight I was once again having fun making her laugh.

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These two experiences are new, but they don’t feel like things have changed. Perhaps, looking back, this will mark a turning point. Or perhaps this experience just continues it’s nothing-is-ever-the-same style. I’m unsure.

I’m unsure of anything at all.

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After listening to a song I randomly remembered, I tweeted: “When I’m all emotional, I find music really hard to listen to and always have. Can’t say precisely why, but the emotion just kinda amplify when music is introduced. [….] Just listened to a song I haven’t heard in years. Spend the entire time on the verge of waterworks. And it’s not even really a nostalgic song for me.”

I experience music emotionally, but my brain also does something that may or may not be unique: it embeds the emotions I was feeling when a song played (over and over on the radio or by me), rendering many, many songs almost unplayable later because they carry the weight of whatever I was feeling at the time, where I was, the person I was, what was going on around me, etc. (My favorite example is Night Ranger’s song Sister Christian. It was released and popular around the time my parents separated and divorced. Because of this, I couldn’t listen to it for about the following 13 or 14 years, so strongly was it linked to that fragile time of my childhood – until, that is, it popped up in a Boogie Nights scene that was so great and intense that it kind of overrode the fading memories of my childhood.)

For fear of staining whatever music I might be listening to during this awful time, I’ve pretty much avoided any. I did listen to Big Thief’s new album a couple times, but stopped because I do want to listen to it in the future. And I worry that beginning to now will make it painful to hear, even years from now. And so I continue to listen to podcasts. And when they finish, I wait for more to come and walk in silence.

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I’ve managed, in halves, to make it through two more episodes of Succession. It’s a fantastic show and I really want to get through the season, but focusing on something, anything, takes effort I don’t have, and sometimes causes pain I’d like to avoid. I assume this will be the case for a while. So the list of movies and TV shows I want to see will continue to pile up unwatched.

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It’s been two more days. And I still feel like I’ve lived a lot longer than 23 days.

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