Untitled: Poetry

 

We tread a very delicate line, amid foolishness and adoration. 

But my sweetheart, love is love, is it not? 

We are told that we are sinful, unclean, and shameful. 

But, what of those people who hurl us aside? 

They who turn their backs on us,

Treat us with emotionless murmurs. 

They have nothing to give to us but their impersonal scorching stares;

Like we are a blade directly into their hearts and their faith.

We are the citizens in the hammering rainwater

Who dare to prance, laugh and smile

Although the world seems completely against us

We are different, unique, and the beautiful

We are the strong who stand against the name-calling, against the pain

Love is love and yes there is hope

Because we dared to love in the first place

Terry McMillian "Why I Lie For a Living"

Author Terry McMillan performs an intimate reading and analysis of her bestselling novels in this funny and profound talk, blurring the lines between fiction and reality and revealing the spiritual power of writing.

When a writer reveals her process, it is always a fascinating thing. McMillan has become known as much for her dynamic personality as she has her magnetic writing and this presentation puts both on full display at the Chicago Ideas Festival.




And if you havent done so, check out Terry's work!

Some of our favorites!
Mama
A Day Late and a Dollar Short
Waiting to Exhale
and
Who Asked You?

Anne Rice Gives Writing Advice 09.18.12

"Go where the pain is when you write.  Go where the pain is.  Write about what hurts.  Go back to the memory that causes conflict and pain and almost makes you, you know, not able to breathe."  Anne Rice

Jayne Anne Phillips: "Lark and Termite" a brief summary

     A Brief Summary and synopsis:

 Jayne Anne Phillips’s "Lark and Termite" concerns a set of interrelated characters in West Virginia and Korea in the 1950s. Phillips shifts between two locations: a tunnel beneath a railway bridge at the start of the Korean War in 1950, where twenty-one-year-old Corporal Robert Leavitt is trapped with a mob of refugees being fired upon by confused American troops, and Winfield, West Virginia, 1959, where an unconventional family that includes Leavitt’s autistic son rides out a torrential flood. Lark and Termite features an epigraph from William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury.

     The novel recalls Faulkner’s both in its reliance on a mentally impaired character and in its use of multiple points of view. Phillips moves between the perspectives of Leavitt; Leavitt’s autistic son, Termite; Termite’s half-sister, Lark; and Lark and Termite’s aunt, Nonie. Robert Leavitt has arrived in Korea by way of Japan, where he played trumpet in an army band before being chosen to join a group of American servicemen in an intensive Korean language program. A month after the surprise invasion of South Korea by North Korea, Leavitt is guiding a large mass of refugees from an evacuated village when they are fired upon by American airplanes, who are under the assumption that refugees have been infiltrated by North Korean soldiers.

     In the chaos of the firefight, Leavitt helps a Korean girl who is traveling with a blind boy, probably her brother, and an older woman. Leavitt flees with the refugees into a tunnel—but not before he is mortally wounded by gunfire in his legs and back. As Leavitt marches with the refugees and after he becomes trapped in the tunnel, his mind reaches back to his life in America—specifically his youth in Philadelphia and his time on base in Fort Knox, Kentucky. While at Fort Knox, Leavitt visits nearby Louisville, where he plays trumpet in a jazz band at a club and brothel run by Bill Onslow. Leavitt falls in love with the jazz band’s lead singer, a thirty-year-old woman from West Virginia named Lola.

   
Three weeks before Leavitt ships out to Asia, Lola tells him she is pregnant with his child, and they marry. As Leavitt fades in and out of consciousness, he hears Lola speaking to him. Leavitt knows their baby is due any day now, and he believes he will somehow know when Lola gives birth.

     I had the distinct fortune to attend a talk about "Lark And Termite" held by the incomparable  Ken Madden.  "Lark and Termite" is considered transcendental fiction in which we are taken to the extreme edge of literature and the very sound of the word on the page.  This novel asks the big questions-- can the "blind and dumb" such as Termite really communicate?  Can Termite know emotion and know of his surroundings?  When is the assistance that given to this family to much?  When is it not enough and should the "government" be involved in what happens to Termite.

     This book deals with the issues of what are the rules of reality, should they be followed, when are they followed and when if ever are they broken.  We get beautiful prose that in many ways reads as poetry that gives us insight into exactly what the world is and in many instances how Termite and others really see it.

     The best example of this is on page 70:

          "He's alone.  It was his cry, his voice.  His revolver in his hand.  He clutches it tightly but knows he has blacked out.  Time has passed.  Hours.  He sees the inverted face of the girl over him, and the face of the boy on her back.  She's waited until dusk and now she;s touching him, moving him, pulling him deeper in tot he tunnel.  The boy clasps her neck from behind with his locked arms, nearly flattened against her as she crouches over Leavitt."

     Phillips pulls the rug out from under you and you, the reader, are in for a rare treat of words and phrases that entertain, entwine and enrapture you.

My rating 4 out of 5 stars.

Other books that fall into the transcendental genre would be:

"A Burnt Out Case" by Graham Greene
"Siddhartha" by Herman Heese
"The Razor's Edge" by Somerset Silko

Writers and Rum by Adam Gopnik

by Adam Gopnik




     “Writers in this office used to drink,” a grizzled veteran of these corridors once said sternly to a couple of pup reporters, whom he had discovered taking turns trying on a good-looking cashmere jacket in another cubicle. The moral, abashing if not shaming, was that in the halls where once real men had roamed, or drank in peaceable closets, now mere jacket-fanciers wandered. Certainly, it’s impossible to turn the past pages of this magazine, or the pages of American literary history, for that matter, without being reminded of how inextricable the drinking life and the writing life—or, to put it more bluntly, alcoholism and art—once were. From St. Clair McKelway to Dorothy Parker and James Thurber, and from Ernest Hemingway to F. Scott Fitzgerald to Sinclair Lewis and beyond, it was not long ago that if you wrote you drank, and if you weren’t drinking it was because you were drying out.

     The critic Olivia Laing has just published a good, sad book on this subject called “The Trip To Echo Spring: On Writers And Drinking,” which tells at length the mostly familiar but still melancholy stories of the drinking lives of Fitzgerald and Hemingway and Tennessee Williams and John Berryman and John Cheever and Raymond Carver, complete, it sometimes feels, with tipped-in napkin stains from each of their favorite bars. Oddly fixated, for a Brit, who surely has plenty of scribbling drinkers in her own country, on this one—a reviewer in the Times claims that she “romanticizes the vast American landscape as a place made for rumination,” though rum-ination seems more like it—she entangles the story of these gifted men with tales of her own alcoholic family. We attend an A.A. meeting in her presence, and then are off to Key West, where Hemingway downed many and Tennessee Williams even more. Tender and sympathetic though she is to her subjects’ compulsions, and difficult though it is to be completely immune to the appeal of dissolute lives in our timid time, it mostly makes for depressing reading, which was, perhaps, her point.
I’m just old enough to be able to have seen the tail end of that literary culture of really big drinkers—and a real culture it was, as Laing understands. It may be hard to believe that it was so, when nowadays we mostly ingest our drugs from prescription bottles, early in the morning or late at night—but it existed, and was as alluring as it was utterly toxic.

     As I wrote in my book about eating and drinking, “The Table Comes First,” one of my early editorial occupations was taking two remarkable writers, Mordecai Richler and Wilfrid Sheed, once a month out to a largely liquid lunch. Both died before their day. Sheed, at least, did what a writer should, and got a very fine book, “In Love with Daylight”, out of it later on—all about drying out, with pills and cancer thrown into the Job-like bundle—marred only by the rummy’s blind certainty that what he suffered from was merely social drinking, plus a little more. (They can be pulling the tiny bottles out of your hand in the hotel room after the third blackout, and you can still stubbornly believe that it’s just social drinking, maybe a little more.) “I took more from alcohol than alcohol has taken from me,” Sheed liked to quote Churchill as saying—and what that old drinking culture took from alcohol was sociability, of a rather Londonish kind, where the bumps and bruises of literary conflict seemed at least to heal a little sooner and the literary types mingled more freely. (Sheed, for one, was equally at home with the National Review crowd and the New York Review of Books crowd and the New York Daily News crowd, and he wasn’t unique.)

     At the other, soberer end, John Updike once said to an admirer that the reason for the astonishing longevity he shared with Philip Roth—not just achieving the second acts that Fitzgerald said were impossible in American lives but third acts and fourth acts and then both men appearing, so to speak, out in the lobby to shake hands and do card tricks after the show—was, simply, that neither drank. He brought it up because he knew it was unusual. Growing up, he had absorbed the notion that a good writer wasn’t just possibly a drunk; a good writer had to be a drunk to be any good at all. (Jazz musicians, I think, believed something similar about the harder stuff, though the price they paid was more obvious in jail time and the advantages they took more obvious, I’m told, in blissed out periods. Bill Evans’s piano playing circa 1961 makes a strong case for heroin.)

     Of course, ballplayers and ballerinas and aluminum-siding salesmen, for that matter, all drink, too, or used to. But most aluminum-siding salesmen or ballerinas presumably saw drinking too much as a problem, whereas writers, for a surprisingly long time, as Laing reminds us, saw drinking as an essential feature of the act, a complement to the act of authorship. When Norton and Kramden overindulge at the Raccoon Lodge, they say, “Oh, what a head!” Only writers say, “Oh, what a chapter!”

* * *       If a theory is called for—and when is it not, in these woods?—to explain this phenomenon, it is that writing is work in which the balance necessary to a sane life of physical and symbolic work has been wrested right out of plumb, or proportion, and alcohol is (wrongly) believed to rebalance it. Anyone not a writer is probably sick of hearing how hard writing is, and obviously writing is not nearly as soul-destroying as coal mining or burger flipping or whatever you like. But writing is, if not uniquely hard work, then uniquely draining work. Some basic human need for a balance between thinking and acting is still kept intact even by the most tedious of other tasks. All rewarding effort involves a balance between wit and work—between the bits you do alone in your head and the bits you do in company with your hands (or voice or body or whatever). Laboring in your head, exclusively, does feel unnatural; whatever else we might have been doing, back out there on the primeval savannah, we weren’t sitting and moving the ends of our fingers minutely on a stone surface for six hours at a stretch.


     The dramatic and plastic arts have elements of both wit and work intertwined—actors move around and shout, a director moves them (and shouts at them); painters have the sheer physicality of paint, and the givens of the canvas offer you four lines and a white surface to start with. A writer, on the other hand, stares out mournfully over the abyss of language—there are, truly, an infinite number of ways of forming the sentence you are about to attempt, all save one of them ugly and inadequate. And there’s nowhere to look for help but your own fingers.


      The only cure, or hope, is to make the act of writing physical—to move it from your head to your gut—and, in doing so, to make it automatic, aerobic. That’s hard, and can be done in only two ways, both calling for outside assistance. One is to take the drug, or drink, and hope that it helps to ‘physicalize’ the work, move the pedals, and start the breathing—the theory used by those writers, like the elder Hemingway, who do the drinking and the writing simultaneously. Or else, to make the transition from mind to hand sober, knowing that the exhaustion it engenders will call for an antidote. Drained, one wants to replenish, and the whiskey or wine bottle is at hand. This is false reasoning of course, but it is the speciousness of writers.


     Or was. No generalization about literature ever survives contact with the enemy, reality—doubtless there’s a young novelist in New York now writing her twelve-hundred-page opus on love and Brooklyn with a bottle of Jack Daniels in hand, and certainly Gary Shteyngart is doing his bit for the virtues of vodka. Still, there’s a general sense that the drugs of choice for writers now are more often little blue pills than big brown bottles. The onset of feminism, which compelled male writers at last to take some responsibility for their kids (one of the things that Laing’s writers certainly were not were present-tense dads), the diffusion of literary life from narrow bands of energy in London and New York and Paris into the academic monasteries of creative-writing programs—all of this has made the evening’s common cocktail a lost communion cup. (You can take the pill, and then send the kids to school.) Writers cope with the drain of writing now with yoga and meditation and marital discord (and, of course, with weed and Oregon Pinot, too) but the heyday of the writer with the whiskey bottle always on his desk seems past.


     The price we pay for the end of the drinking life for writers is, perhaps, not so much isolation, though that is so: people can’t believe how few writers actually know other writers; the bars solved that for the old guys, at least. We also pay it, perhaps, in undue cheerfulness and extended youthfulness. The single most astonishing thing about the old-time writers Laing studies is how old they were when still young. Alcohol ages. Fitzgerald died just past forty, but everyone was already treating him like Rip Van Winkle. This was partly because he had out-lived his time but mostly because youth died then with the young. Now hair dye and twenty-four-hour gyms and wild salmon and celery juice or whatever have extended youth or the illusion of youth right to the edge of extreme old age.

     The unduly extended boyishness of this generation’s fully mature writers is still much spoken of, with annoyance, often by critics of what must seem to the boyish writers unduly extended girlishness. (The boyishness takes the form of being too arch for too long, the girlishness of being too catty too often.) But life is always worth extending on any terms available. “American writers are so strange,” an aging (and alcoholic) British wit once said. “ They’re such … chirpy chappies.” The price of a lot less drink may be far fewer barroom sing-alongs among the bards, but also far fewer early deaths, if ever more chirpy chaps. It seems a decent trade.

AIDS activist Sean Strub recounts his story of rage and survival in the memoir 'Body Counts'

 By Earl Pike, Special to The Plain Dealer
on January 07, 2014 at 9:17 PM, updated January 07, 2014 at 9:24 PM

     The HIV/AIDS epidemic is far from over: There are still 34 million people living with HIV/AIDS around the world, and here in the United States, there are 50,000 new cases of HIV infection annually. Much hard work remains.

     But we have also witnessed remarkable progress. Effective treatment, expanded access and new prevention technologies have given hope that a turning point is in sight. And within this moment of cautious optimism, it is time to begin a fuller history – a time for more of those who survived to share their accounts of what was endured, and what was learned.

     With “Body Counts: A Memoir of Politics, Sex, AIDS and Survival” (Scribner, 432 pp., $30), Sean Strub, founder of POZ magazine and one of the AIDS movement’s most respected leaders, has written such an account, thereby adding a critical historical voice.

     Growing up a Catholic Everyboy in Iowa in the late 1950s and 1960s, Strub knew he was different but didn’t have a language or context for comprehending that difference.

     Like so many others, he developed, as a young adult, “a political consciousness shaped by Watergate, the Vietnam War, feminism, and social-justice movements,” and was drawn into the captivating, transformative politics of the times, eventually making his way to Washington, D.C., to work in and around government.


     While it may have been a heady time, it was also precarious for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) people. “In the 1970s, many, if not most, gay men woke up every morning with the belief that they would rather kill themselves than be identified publicly as a homosexual,” Strub reminds us. Being “out” had potentially fatal consequences, and “gay life” was governed by codes, signs and secrets, the semiotics of attraction and risk.

     Slowly, Strub began acknowledging, and then accepting, his attraction to other men, coming out to friends and then to family. But the assassination in November 1978 of San Francisco City Supervisor Harvey Milk, then one of the few openly gay men elected to political office, was a turning point for Strub. The personal became political, and unsparingly consequential.

     By the mid-1970s, Strub had migrated to New York and was managing a thriving direct-mail fundraising business, often for LGBT causes. The promise of LGBT liberation had taken root in major U.S. metropolitan areas; for a brief moment, a vision of political and sexual freedom seemed attainable.

     Then, on June 5, 1981, “the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) first took note in their Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report of a strange new disease killing gay men.” Misinformation, terror and the virus itself spread rapidly. Strub already had symptoms in 1981, and within a few years, he was diagnosed with the new disease himself.

     By then a seasoned activist, he turned his focus to fighting not merely the disease but its attendant discrimination, becoming a core member of ACT UP, where every meeting “began with a reading of the names of members and friends who had died in the previous seven days.”

     Within a few years, AIDS had already decimated many of America’s LGBT communities, but it also “unified the LGBT community in new ways.” It was a time of luminous anger, muscular sorrow and widespread, often brilliantly conceived, political action for change.

     By the early 1990s, Strub began envisioning a national publication – a kind of People magazine for the HIV/AIDS community. It was a bold idea, and he published the first issue of POZ magazine in April 1994. Much of the remaining quarter of the book is devoted to the successes and setbacks of POZ. As such, it may be historically significant, but it’s less emotionally compelling than the previous sections.

     Body Counts is an absorbing, quick read, accessible not only to those intimate with the devastation wrought by HIV/AIDS but to those who viewed it from a distance or in retrospect as well.
Its most powerful lesson is that AIDS changed, fundamentally, many who lived through it: “I have to acknowledge that AIDS, as horrific as it has been, has also shaped my character, centered my values, and taught me important lessons.”

     The most salient of those are embodied in Strub’s life and story: that sometimes mere survival is an act of bravery, and can impose an obligation to save every other life possible.

Christopher Isherwood: A Single Man

                       Christopher Isherwood’s “A Single Man” is set in Southern California during 1962 and exquisitely invites us in to one day of the life of George Falconer who is attempting to live life the best way he knows how after his “husband” Jim has been killed in an automobile accident even before our story begins.  From the opening lines we learn that George struggles with just being:

“Waking up begins with saying am and now.  That which has woken then lies for a while staring up at the ceiling and down into itself until it has recognized I, and therefrom deduced I am, I am now.

            I think many people who have suffered the loss of a husband, wife or partner know all to well
this feeling of not being anyone, and that within that loss we have lost who we are as well.  So many “couples” have become the inseparable “we”.  Yes, they have their own separate lives and activities but by so many are viewed as the “we” instead of the individual I.  I know my previous partner and I were like that.  When he died in 2002 I didn’t know who I was without the undeniable “we” that we had become.  It was like being a bicycle with only one wheel.  Yes you can ride the blasted thing but you have to learn all over again how to ride the bloody thing.

George can be best described when Isherwood says:

            “What are they afraid of?

They are afraid of what they know is somewhere in the darkness around them, of what may at any moment emerge into the undeniable light of their flashlamps, never more to be ignored, explained away… among many other kinds of monster, George says, they are afraid of little me” (p.27).

            I have to admit I saw the movie of the same name “A Single Man” directed by Tom Ford first and was riveted from the opening scene until the climatic ending where I was left weeping.  So I knew going into the book that George at the end of the narrative was going to die.  The narrative took on even more pain and turmoil for me knowing this fact about George and the story.  George however, I believe is afraid of what he is without Jim and he suffers from survival’s guilt as is evident in the following passage:

“In all those old crises of the twenties, the thirties, the war- each one of them has left traces upon George, like an illness… now we have with us a far more terrible fear, the fear of survival.  Survival into a Rubble Age, in which it will… become more dangerous and this is no time for sentiment” (pg. 87-88).

Granted this narrative is set in the “safe” 1960’s, way before the advent of AIDS but for me this story could have very easily bet set in the late 1980’s or even early 1990’s when AIDS was a killing demon who was slaughtering countless people.  AIDS left many of us suffering from survival’s guilt and many of us all of this time later still suffer from it as our survival becomes longer and longer with each passing day.  Many of us, on many different levels who are very similar to George, or at the very least I know I could very easily be George especially when Isherwood says:

“Your book is wrong, Mrs. Strunk, says George, when it tells you that Jim is the substitute I found for a real son, a real husband, a real wife.  Jim wasn’t a substitute for anything.  And there is no substitute for Jim, if you’ll forgive my saying so, anywhere” (pg. 29).

George is still madly, desperately in love with Jim and not even death can stop that love, and maybe in some ways death has intensified his love for Jim because he no longer physically has Jim

present, all George has left is his memories.  As the old spiritual says “Precious memories, how the linger”.   These memories of George linger somehow in every word Isherwood puts on the page.  Possibly those memories because in the text time is moving forward, slowly forward as the text only covers twenty-four hours.  But, time is moving forward and in each case George’s memories are the only thing that physically moves him forward, even if he doesn’t want to.  Maybe this is where the real pain of Isherwood’s text lies that despite everything that happens to us, good or bad it lingers with us as we move forward.  Some of it lingers longer than others, while other circumstances are just a short breeze that happens to blow through us.  And in many ways Isherwood speaks to this idea as well when saying: “Your exorcism has failed, dear Mrs. Strunk… the unspeakable is still here—right in your very midst” (pg. 29).  I am sure many could say George is speaking of himself as a gay man in Mrs. Strunk’s presence in the pre-Stonewall timeframe, but is George also speaking of his love for Jim?  That despite everything his love for Jim is still present, still visible and still lingers in the floorboards.  Or, is George speaking of his visible and tangible pain that Jim is dead and gone forever.  That now matter how many days pass, or months, or years pass George’s pain of losing Jim will never fully go away.  That, that pain will also linger in the floorboards of not only George’s home but also in the depths of heart. This pain I felt was as equally obvious in the film as the book, however it is in the ending of the film that the pain comes full circle. 

In the book the ending has a more brutish ending for George when Isherwood says:

“George has indeed been absent at this moment of terminal shock, away out there on the deep waters… for it can associate no longer with what lies here… this (George) is now cousin to the garbage in the container on the back porch.  Both will have to be carted away” (pg. 186).

            The ending in the literary text of “A Single Man” casts George aside as little more than garbage as referred to in the text.  For me this ending was so harsh, in that it played to the idea that George

wasn’t anything to anyone and would simply be forgotten as if he was never there in the first place.  While in the movie as George says:

“A few times in my life, I’ve had moments of absolute clarity.  When for a few, brief seconds…the silence drowns out the noise… and I can feel…rather than think. And things seem so sharp.  And the world seems so fresh. It’s as though it had all just come into existence” (2010 movie).

            It is within this clarity, this noiselessness, this sharpness and this freshness that George finally opens himself up to possibility.  I know this is a vague idea but I believe that it is within this realm that George can be open to what I consider the sacredness of the divine.

“I can never make these moments last. I cling to them, but like everything, they fade.  I’ve lived my life on those moments.  They pull me back to the present.  And I realize that everything… is exactly the way it’s meant to be” (2010 movie).

It is at this moment this moment (in the movie) that George suffers from his massive heart attack.  He falls to the floor in agony, gasping for air. All we hear is the ticking of a clock, the sounds of the rolling surf.  The clock stops and we see a foot from the corner of the right of the screen, then two and a hand.  It’s Jim; he leans down kisses George and recedes back into the darkness.

                        “And just like that… it came.”

            I believe to my core in “visitations” from the dead.  I’ve been fortunate enough to experience them, and each time my husband comes to me in my dreams or visions I “wake’ in a cold sweat shaking, crying and feeling lost over all and in the depths of my grief all over again.  My soul ripped from me, my heart having stopped beating and in those moments   … just like that… I am… the… single… man.

            

Angel of Hope Against the Demon of Despair

From within the deepest darkness
The forest of the night has me
Engulfed in its grip of despair

Cold, starving, naked and alone
The demon of the night
Eyes Fierce with flame
Breath like brimstone
Me in his grip of doom

Horrific insanity
Frightening silence
Than the impossible happens

From the distance a small ray
Of brilliant light, heaven sent
The aroma of roses
Fill my nostrils and my senses

The sound of enormous wings
Fill the silence of the night
You can feel its presence

That presence filling the darkness
With a chasm of brilliant light
He makes His presence known
The angel of Hope

HIs indescribable beauty stuns me
Overwhelms my every pore
His stature tall and great
This incredible peace fills my hunger

With the raising of his hand
He orders my release from
The clutches of despair

My nakedness clothed in light
My hunger fed by love
My loneliness erased by is presence
The cold gone by the immense warmth of eternal peace

My freedom guaranteed
My life my own
My obligation to be
Just me

Can we talk about Panic Attacks

September 18, 2014

My Darling Beloved Ron:

“Guilt once harbored in the conscious breast, intimidates the brave, degrades the great.”

Samuel Johnson

            I finally saw the doctor about my Panic Attacks. I’m sure you are well aware of them, since you now see and know all. Very G-d like if you ask me. Seeing all, knowing all, and letting me have free will. Saint Ron. I like the sound and idea of that. My own private Saint that I can come to in times of grief, loss, hurting, despair; while at other times sharing joy, hope and peace. I’m sure I don’t have to tell you that the first four panic attacks were at Fairfield University, where I’m earning my MFA in Creative Writing. Sitting in the small dining room in Enders House, Mystic Seaport area that July day, waves of panic overwhelmed me and I came crashing to an emotional, crying heap.  But, again you know all of this. I think I just need to write it down. Make it feel like I am actually talking to you and getting the unconscious thoughts out of my head, I need to simply say them out loud, and say them to you. My panic attacks involve sudden feelings of terror that strike without warning. These episodes can occur at anytime. When I experience a panic attack I’m convinced that a heart attack or even death is imminent. This feeling of impending seems to have come from nowhere. My doctor said that the fear and terror that I experience during a panic attack are not in proportion to reality and is unrelated to what is happening around me. Most people with panic attacks experience several of the following symptoms:

1.     There is a possibility to have a racing heart.

2.     Feeling weak, faint, or dizzy can be very common.

3.     There could be tingling or numbness in the hands and fingers. So don’t panic if this happens to you.

4.     You could suffer from a sense of terror, or impending doom or death.

5.     Chest pains and breathing difficulties could occur.

6.     And finally there very easily could be this feeling that you have lost of control

            My panic attacks, my beloved, are generally brief, lasting usually no more than ten minutes.  Although my longest panic attack was thirty minutes with symptoms persisting much longer after, even after the shortest ones. Dr. Diane Kreptowski, said today that, “People who have had one panic attack are at a greater risk for having subsequent ones than those who have never experienced one before. When the attacks occur repeatedly, a person is considered to have a condition known as Panic Disorder.” The blue colored walls around me began to slowly spin, and I could hear the sounds of waves in my mind. How it pains me to tell you, that I am suffering from this very curse.  She added that people with panic disorders can be extremely anxious and fearful, since they are unable to predict when the next attack. Panic disorders are fairly common. It affects about 2.4 million people in the U.S., and should not feel ashamed that this is happening to me.”

            Fuck, this is happening to … me! How can this be happening? I thought I had my shit together, facing my life bravely. It is hard to let that sink into my very being. I … suffer… from … Panic … Disorders. Oh my beloved, my heart aches that I have let you down.  I couldn’t be brave, or strong, or fierce any longer than I have been.  Somehow, darling, I’ve lost it.  I have lost the ability to cope. I’ve lost the strength to survive the darkest hours. I have simply lost, lost my way.

            Christ, how did that happen, my heart begins to race in her office. I can hear the waves of the tsunami off in the distance coming toward me. My darling, they are rolling in faster, the waves of water are reaching heavenward and the white caps foaming in violently. I can feel the pressure of the waves, swallowing me. I can sense them. The thunderous roar of the tide, the howling of the wind. It’s all I hear. Spoken words are lost in the lamenting murky waters that looked like wild animals. I can’t look up. The people in the room vanish, even the presence of shadows abandons my senses. I can’t hear or understand what they are saying. My hands begin to shake and my thoughts begin to jumble into a knot. My g-d, I’m having a panic attack sitting right here in her office. I begin to melt, in tears.

            Guilt.

Guilt (gilt) noun

1.     The fact or state of having done wrong or committed an offence.

2.     Responsibility for a criminal or moral offence punishment or penalty.

3.     Remorse, or self-reproach caused by feeling that one is responsible for a wrong or an offence.

4.     Arch. Sin or crime.

Guilt: One can admit it when they had an affair. It can be discovered when we are found cheating on a test. Saying you’re sorry when your hand is in the cookie jar. Sitting in a weekly confessional, “Father forgive me for I have sinned grievously.” We feel it when we have binged all night on Ben & Jerry’s Chunky Monkey ice cream. The ultimate embracing of it spoken by Jesus Christ himself; “My G-d, My G-d why hast Thou forsaken me?”  In the end did you feel guilty for your pending death? For leaving my loving side. That you could not control something none of us can control.   Of course you did. I sensed it.  So, no guilt please, darling. We may be able to prolong life with surgeries, life support, organ transplants and the like; but in the end we all do it.

We all die. Yours was simply and brutally premature and the pain you felt as you were leaving me in death.  It took me thirteen years to know and understand your pain.The remorse you said you felt before losing consciousness, of not having enough time together, ten years was simply not enough. Your final days were filled with worry of what and how I was to be after you died. I don’t fear dying in the near future, I suffer from something more ominous than death.

            I live in guilt now. This guilt has become woven like thread into the fabric of my being. Pull that one thread and everything unravels, and I’ll be undone. The guilt is so innate that it has left me immobile for years. I wish now I could put words to it, and now just maybe my darling I can. Guilt has become an increasing part of my identity, the only dominating force of my own written narrative. I am tormented with an unending supply of guilt, unasked for and unwanted; it conyving and slimy swarming into every recess of my psyche. Maybe it is a sickness, a familial legacy from the women in my family, a breakdown or craziness intertwined into my emotional illiteracy which forces it to be heard, ravenous in its unending need and beyond my domination. This guilt has destroyed my happiness. No, annihilated is the right word. I know I can’t have what I truly want if I continue to live in guilt. I’m just not sure how to overcome it. I’m not so sure I’m the man everyone sees in me. I fear that this guilt will stand in my way of achieving everything I was meant to achieve. How can greatness be achieved in the depths of guilt, fear and despair? The tide is now drowning me, and everywhere it’s dark.

            Then I suddenly feel a hand on my shoulder. It’s resting gently, fingers caressing my sore muscles. The grasp is firm, sure and the hand begins to gently massage my shoulder. My G-d it feels so good. Words seem to be spoken from deep from within the  depths of inky blue-black water. The water seems to recede some. I begin to hear a voice from within. “Charlie. Charlie. Can you look up? Maybe even look at me? Sweetie, what is going on?”

            I can barely make out the words, sounds just swimming blurred, much like schools’ of fish. I can’t even make out the syllables. It’s all just blue-white noise. The hand begins to massage, the back in firm, yet gentle circular motions. From the top of my neck to my waist, the pressure is just right. I think it’s Dr. Kreptowski talking to me, though she never called me sweetie before. My crying intensifies. I don’t have the words to describe to her what I’m going through. Her right hand caresses my chin and her hand begins to raise my face so she can look into my eyes.

            “Charlie. It’s going to be ok.” I can see the sincerity in her eyes. I can feel the warmth and the compassion that radiates from her. “Charlie. Just breathe deeply now.” She is still rubbing my back as the tears roll down my face. “Have you ever been diagnosed with PTSD?”

            “No.” Even that simple two-letter word stumbles out of my mouth and I stumble over the brief letters. I begin to cry again, and my right hand is shaking.

            “Charlie. Medical and antiretroviral advances have had substantial gains over the years.  We both know this. This means that being diagnosed with HIV/AIDS had a different impact years ago. It’s a whole new field of medicine and survival.”

            “I know. I’m one of five from my first support group to still be alive. There were, originally twenty-five of us.”

            “Yes, the disease has changed from a death sentence to living long-term with a chronic disease. Over time, Charlie, you have dealt with treatment side effects, adjusting to depression, medication adherence and changes of those medications, changes in viral load and t-cell counts, witnessing AIDS related deaths, disclosure of your status, discrimination and finally, community ostracization, at the very least if not more.”

“I’ve never thought of it that way. I just feel like I have accomplished nothing.”

“My G-d, how can you say that? You graduated with full honors and earned your BA in English. You’re pursuing your MFA in Creative Writing. You’ve published a book. You’ve won awards. You have had your story in the newspaper, and more than once I’ve heard. Charlie, if all of that is nothing, the one thing you should be the proudest of is, is you simply lived, when everyone else didn’t.”

“I know that in my head, but I have to get all of that into my heart.”

“I’ll write you a prescription and I’ll give you a referral to a counselor who should be able to help. Just keep in mind that between 13 to 64% of all HIV/AIDS diagnosed persons at some point are diagnosed with PTSD.  That diagnosis however, Charlie, will be up to the counselor.”

I’m not fully sure why this guilt developed and this manic-ism began, except I feel guilty that I –––––––– simply lived, when so many did not.  My darling beloved, regret leads to guilt, shame breeds it, and reproach feeds it.  It grinds me down, eats away at me and crushes my very spirit until I am sure insanity is not far behind. I cannot understand those who do not suffer from guilt. They unnerve me and yet they amaze me, s they will never fully understand me before they just roll their eyes and walk away. They will never know the crushing, and all consuming tsunami that drowns me from the minute I wake to the moment when I sleep. The only person who hears those words are my beloved, for I dare not say them to anyone else.

It’s 7 o’clock in the evening and I can hear the ambulance in the near distance. It’s coming for me. My heart is pounding through my chest. It feels like a jackhammer is pummeling my body into bits. I am stuttering so badly that the words have no meaning, expect for me. Flashing red lights in front of my living room window. The lights threating to bury me even deeper into abyssing despair. Four tall, strong, vibrant beautiful male paramedics help me stand on my feet, swing me around and get me to a stretcher. I lay my head on the pillow, crumbling into the fabric beneath me. My eyes feel heavy as they bring the heavy material straps over my arms and legs. I hear a click and the stretcher is raised off the floor. My front door opens, then the porch door and I can feel the wheels hit the uneven sidewalk. One bump over the berm, and we are on the red brick road, which weaves past the front of the 110-year-old Salt Box home that I live in. I can vaguely hear the whoosh of the ambulance doors open before the wheels of the stretcher thump me into the back.

“Mr. Dale we’re going to hook you up to an IV. We’re on the way to Affinity Hospital in Massillon.” I nod my head.

“Can you open your mouth Mr. Dale? I need to take your temperature.” I do as I am told.

There were few on staff on that night. The streets outside were dirty, and was there blood on these floors? The nurses and doctors are told to be on the ready. There goes a fast moving gurney; another patient rushed into Trauma One while others sit bitter from waiting so long. There’s a policeman taking a statement from the victim of a rape, who was ushered through the electronic doors. Her blood stained clothes were put into a bag. The moment has arrived, “Nurse could you prepare the rape kit?” It’s continuous emotions and commotion that are slamming shut, the sound echoing down the hall. The nurses’ morphine-laced fingers finally bring relief and my pain will subside once they make their round while sleep shies away from florescent lighting. They’re taking care to do their best. I hear a voice beyond the bedrail, “Good evening Mr. Dale. What seems to be the problem?”

An EKG, CAT scan, MRI, a heart monitor, blood tests, x-rays, ultrasound on my neck, a two-day hospital stay and all the tests find nothing. No TIA ––– short for Transient Ischemic Attack, also known as a mini-stroke. Dear G-d, they think I’ve had a mini-stroke. The images of my mother, after her series of four mini-strokes in five months, surge through my thoughts. How she remembers the past more than the present. How she rarely speaks anymore, when she would always be the conversationalist. She barely looks up while we are talking to each other, when she looked me in the eyes all the time. She is physically sitting there but seems to be absent on every other level ––– it is so painful to see her like that. How can the All Knowing let this happen to me? I’m not even forty-eight years old yet. What will happen to my brain? How will I ever be able to write again? How will I ever be able to stay in college? It just can’t be a mini-stroke. I don’t have the time for this kind of shit. I am meant to graduate with an MFS, goddamn it! I’ve gone long enough without anything, struggling to survive. I deserve a full rewarding, enriching life. I want the life I’ve worked so hard for these last five years.

            The doctor in the emergency room explains that the common symptoms of a TIA may include: Sudden numbness, tingling, loss of movement in your face, arms, legs and especially only one side of your body. Sudden vision changes, sudden trouble speaking, sudden confusion or trouble understanding simple statements, sudden problems with walking or balance and, or a sudden, and severe headache that is different from any past headaches.

            There was no minor heart attack. No brain aneurism. No infections. No Bell’s Palsy. I had never heard of Bell’s Palsy until that day. I didn’t even know what it was. The hospital had to explain it to me, as I am the curious type.  Inquiring minds and all of that even then I didn’t have it.

            “So what is it then?”

            “Mr. Dale, we have no idea. All of the tests have come back inconclusive. You’re going to be released later today. I need you to try to get some rest. See your HIV/AIDS Specialist, your general practitioner, and in three weeks I would like to see if you in my office for a follow up visit. I want to see  if any of these symptoms persist after your release and we will go from there.

            My beloved, I ask that you watch over me. I ask that if they find something wrong with me that it is nothing too serious. I ask that somehow these symptoms just simply go away and never return. For now my darling, I must end this note to you. Know that I love you still, more than anything else in this world.

Eternally yours,

Your Charlie ––