The title should read Lonely? Lonely? but I couldn’t emphasize the second in the way that Dadaji asks after his Americanized granddaughter who finds herself apart in the Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny. Her grandparents are baffled by the concept. They have never experienced any kind of impactful alone. The very house they sit in holds generations of belonging and all the items are storied. The novel, by Kiran Desai, was pressed into my hands by my friend and housemate, Pam. I loved this, she said. She had read it on her kindle but ordered the oddly weighty and beautifully embossed hardcover copy the minute she finished it to hold it more properly in her hands before putting it into mine. I am now inhabiting it as she did and have been sending her lines I like.
A few weeks prior, I had put The Shell Seekers by Rosamunde Pilcher on her bedside table. I have read it almost every year since my mother left it lying around when I was in high school. I read everything then. Charles Dickens and Steven King. With Love from Karen and Clan of the Cave Bear. Some novels were snuck and others were shared. I went on to read The Shell Seekers over and over, in my dorm at Uconn, my 3rd floor walk up in Paris, every apartment after every heartbreak, usually in bed or on a couch, except for Costa Rica where I read it on a hammock in my treacherous yard. I orient myself by the age of the various women. First, I longed to be Antonia, long-legged and tan spending summers with her father in Ibiza. Then I was sure I would be Olivia, childless and fashionable with white furniture and easy meals of salad, a rotisserie chicken, a loaf of bakery bread and chilled wine with her assorted but no so very many lovers over the course of her adult and very professional life. I dreaded becoming Nancy. She was (and is) fat, an ineffectual mother to brats, neglected by her husband in a drafty estate she cannot afford to properly heat. I am still in the Nancy era and think of her if I struggle to zip an old woolen skirt. Penelope will be last. Aged by an interesting past and cozy in her home with an old Aga and a conservatory loamy with plants. I know every word of the story and would greet Pam most mornings with What is happening in the book? when I would find her bent over her tea and crossword. There is a giant gas stove in this house and a garden room loamy with plants in case you are interested in life imitating art (as I am).
I am still reading Frankenstein and as my primary student is moving slowly through it, we have only just begun Volume Two (of three). Volume One speaks a great deal about the nefarious impacts of too much solitude. I must have a friend begins the sea captain in a letter (one of four) to his sister. Not only to share in his adventures (friends multiply joy!) or his hardships (and divide grief!) but also to call him out on his bullshit schemes or narrow viewpoints.
Victor Frankenstein is too long alone in his solitary and zealous enterprise. He had no interest in sharing the direction of nor the joy of (I wonder if I can say it was joy he felt) his discoveries with his contemporaries as he had no desire to share in the singular glory he was aspiring to while descending into a carnal and consuming state, ignoring loving queries from loving home asking after his health and his studies. If he read the letters, he didn’t reply. All the better to work quickly without competition, surely, but also without the scrutiny of witness, which the sea captain knows we need. Victor is alone, feverish, and wretched, despite his operative success, by the time his dear friend Henry arrives. He looks awful and Henry, frankly, says so. Then Victor collapses entirely (he actually faints) and Henry nurses him back to health for months. He reads him the poetry of Rumi and Hafez, encourages him to walk about in nature and to write home. Victor recovers, but not entirely, as he still hasn’t told his dear friend, or anyone else who loves him, what he has done. This kind of alone is a creepy kind. Creature apart while in company kind. I will never be understood nor forgiven kind. So his silence on what matters most continues to separate and sicken him despite making it out of bed and back Home.
I am Home and also not home. I am back in my country, a few weeks shy of an entire year since I left my Costa Rica expedition and began a Northern journey with my dogs before, as I have written, the high cinema tug that re-jiggered my timeline entirely by depositing me a few miles from the house we loved before leaving and into the house of my friend which I have also always loved (house and friend alike). I am in my third season here and I still have Florida plates.
I am also in a functional collapse. It took some time for me to recover from the Expedition, the Exodus, the Exploration, and the sudden reversal of my plans. But as my days and new plans took shape (writing, tutoring, teaching, acclimating the dogs to new terrain, and recalibrating with my now very close by son), I did not ramp up in the ways I usually do. I have instead slowed way down. I do not go into the world very much aside from two days at the school, church visits, and the market. I sit outside and watch the flowers and then the leaves and now the temperature fall. I watch Jupiter chase rabbits and deer and squirrels. I watch Piper watch the birds and turn her face into the wind and sun. I watch for bear, and coyote, and now for the fox that visited one dark and early morning out the back kitchen window as the unwitting dogs sniffed the bushes out front. I stood in my pajamas so still, so chosen by this moment. Just me and the little red fox who looked friendly and quite at ease as he, too, sniffed the dark morning air. I am watching my son learn how much it means to not just fall but be in love. I am watching my housemates live bustling and active lives, working and golfing and traveling and opening good bottles of wine with old friends. I watch them gather their people as often as their people are willing to gather and I watch them try do what is right by everyone they love. I watch Steve clearing the forest of felled trees and boulders and I watch Pam checking on her sourdough starter and bent, as I have mentioned, over her morning crossword and tea.
I am slowed way down. And only just now reckoning with how sick I am (still?) again. I am almost entirely without drama or distraction and so I can see what is and is not getting better in my body since leaving the three year onslaught of jungle things. My hair is longer and thicker. That is what is better. Either everything else is worse or at least can no longer be explained by relentless heat or relentless crisis or unpredictable weather or people. So what is going on is baseline. And baseline isn’t good. I began writing a (this?) memoir when I was in the very Dark. I was years into undiagnosed and intreated illnesses (maybe all lyme co-infections, one will never know), unmoored by Sarah’s death, looping toxically with Ty, and convinced I was going to ruin my beloved son before I ever got better. But then I did sort of get better. I think I was better. But now I do not know. It was so hard and hot and hostile and hectic in Costa Rica. It is hard to say if it was the spiders or the spirochetes, the menopause or the mold allergy, the joint pain or the heart ache. When everything hurts, I just seek solitude, a good book, and air so cold I can be cozy. And I collapse until I can get up again.
Pam and Steve are now watching my cycle of collapse. Always by 7 pm, often earlier, for 2-3 days after too much activity and output. I slip back upstairs and am stationary and quiet and in lots and lots of pain. Like physical pain. Like I cannot sleep because of nerves in my arms, and inflammation in my fingers, and stagnant lymph and an inner alarm rousing me before all my limbs go dead. Pam is watching me try things. Arm braces and vibration plate and infrared sauna and bone broth. A dozen supplements that keep showing up at the front door. But are they doing anything? Pam asks frankly. I don’t really know, I say.
Back when her daughter and I first called what we were both fighting lyme disease, Pam was the one to keep the notes because nether Sophie nor I could think straight. Pam wrote down our protocols and sent reminders and drove Sophie all over the state to find something to help her daughter and maybe also help me. She installed the sauna so we could use one every day any time we needed. The same sauna that 6 years later I am using now. Pam is still taking notes even though I am not in the Dark. I told her, just two days ago, how bad my arthritis (??) is and we talked about trying CBD. She drove to Massachusetts to get it an hour later. She left me with another book, Unlocking Lyme by Dr. Bill Rawles.
I took half a dozen pictures of what Rawls had to say that I already knew and sent them to Pam with the caption DUH. At least now you know she texted back.
Years ago, naming something scared me. Protocols felt unpronounceable and inefficacious if I could even choose or follow through on one. But I read his book like an old scrapbook. Boriella, biofilm, yes yes, I know these. I cross-checked with my year-long log with chatgpt. Yes, yes, I had been logging bewildering inflammation and all things I was doing that weren’t helping. But I hadn’t said lyme disease to myself. Because that chapter was a nightmare and I had healed myself and moved on to other hard things. But Pam has known me a good long while and she said, frankly, at least now you know what to do. And I do. I ordered the right herbs and rubbed my joints with a cbd balm before strapping my arms in for the night, and sank into the full permission to just be as still as I need to while I, with much less fear and fanfare, do what needs to be done to rebuild the cartilage that has been nibbled up and bring this flare back down. And to stop wondering what is wrong with me.
Pam has not taken to reading me Rumi or Hafez as of yet but we do breathwork in the yoga room almost every day and we write the names of our children on torn notebook paper, fold them into a little altar box, and we sing. Hands on our hearts, we sing. Kali Durge Namo Namah. As mothers to Great Mother.
“Kālī Durgē Namō Namaḥ” is a Sanskrit mantra honoring the fierce, protective, liberating Mother.
Kālī — the dark, time-shattering aspect of the Divine Mother; destroyer of ego, illusion, and obstacles.
Durgē — O Durga, the invincible one; fortress, protector, she who removes suffering.
Namō Namaḥ — “I bow again and again.” A deep, repeated surrender.
“I bow again and again to Kali Durga, the fierce and benevolent Mother who protects, liberates, and destroys all that is not true.”
Cuts through illusion
Burns away fear
Summons courage
Strengthens boundaries
Calls in fierce compassion
Clears old karmic threads and stagnation
There is a medicine here. Then and now. A no- nonsense and still tender-hearted presence in not only my friend but in her home and in, too, the land. The land harbors all kinds of haven-seeking creatures and just this afternoon Steve sighted and called me out to see a mother bear and her three robust cubs. I had texted them both yesterday to look out at the deer and this morning to inquire Had they heard the coyotes shrieking at daybreak? There is space and time and no one is mad. And an old diagnosis can just be a reminder of a pathway. An answer to a riddle not the shadowy descent in pursuit of a new way of asking the question what is wrong with me?
I have been one kind of sick or another since I was a little girl. I still wonder who I might be if I had been a healthier bodied and minded person. But this is the story I am still living. And when I become too solitary about it, I now have a friend who knocks on the door and says, Steve made a fire, come be sick downstairs.
And there is a fire still and the bears long settled I hope and a fox, I also hope, somewhere nearby, tale draped over his nose, watching over us all from high up on the wooded hill, before the moon drops light all over the bare trees, and the coyotes find me, finally, finally too deeply asleep to hear their calls.
