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reading as temporal insanity 

reading as gluttony 

reading as religion

reading as fuel and as love

reading as dearth when reading becomes impossible for me which has been happening more and more lately as my disease progresses when reading becomes impossible for me in the dull clomping dance of depression and words jumble and boil on the page I want to tell you how it is to lose this elemental comfort this joy that has been with me my life entire  and now it goes away for long stretches at a time and yet I tend the library in my house with its piles of to read again and not yet read books I surround myself with stacks of books in every room I wait for reading to return to me I stand in my forest watching the trees or sit in the living room watching the reflection of trees on the glass of my coffee table or on the black empty screen of my iPad I have these windows now that open when reading is alive my brain on fire with it and it's all I do and I luxuriate and rest and learn and eat and eat and eat always aware that the window can slam shut at any moment so I hurry to gulp it all up

I have been writing by sending emails to myself usually a few words in the subject line and so the email arrives with the warning (this message has no body text)

not being able to read means I am disappearing

not being able to read means I am in the undertow about to drown

not reading is a bottle fly inside my body

not reading is circular

not reading is a paper cut in the wound of my being it has tiny teeth that never stop moving

not reading is grief

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(I am actually disappearing)

sending my work to myself in emails is a way of hiding or burying it because I move the notes to a folder I rarely open if I keep telling myself it’s a hoax then it becomes a hoax 

out here on the North 48° I can feel the moon pulling my brain more specifically than I could in the city and I feel the seasonal changes more profoundly as well for instance I have always found spring to be frightening and harsh and savage but yesterday it finally got warm enough to put the screens up in my bedroom and the feral kittens got extremely excited talking and stalking the winds and the smells that came in pacing around heads up ears tilted forward last year they were so wild they only watched at the window in a pantomime of hunting that was actually a mixture of fear and desire which drives all our animal selves

this morning I woke to the owls and they called from 5 am to well past 11 am I drove to the grocery store on the island for apricots and blackberries and cheese then I drove to the library and I didn't have a panic attack until 2 pm as often as not I cannot drive inside this looping mess in my brain so I live on brown rice and yogurt today I made sourdough flatbread with Greek yogurt and chopped fresh rosemary

I keep trying to write here and I am stopped I keep stopping I have lost the flow

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here are some of the empty (bodiless) emails I have sent myself

because once a man told me I was perfect and I believed him

rotary Bakelite telephone as an instrument of malice

Alex Trebek vs. Jimmy Gator in Magnolia

on being a mentally ill child

fish farms in Spokane in the 1950s

the blue glass bunny

terminal lucidity museum dream nursery was I even then dreaming of my body of what was happening to me at night

my chaotic work

collecting canning jars as a way of warding off anxiety

my anxious blood

circuit rider

Barthes

every small crime

my face is long like hers

refusing to mourn

it makes no sense I make no sense I have lost the thread of me

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but these lilacs