Musings from the Invisible

Story of my Life by Sandy

…it is hard and the frustrations are endless. However, I've learned we must learn to laugh at ourselves some of the time. Sometimes, I misunderstand things in a way that is hilarious. I'm always getting email jokes about Senior moments and funny responses. I've been there, done that, in almost every instance or joke!

When I told a coworker that I purchased a new hearing aid, she asked, "What kind is it?"

I replied "ten o'clock!"

A Chicago grocery chain had radio spots for breakfast-size melons.

My godchild was with me and I asked her, "How big is a breast-sized melon?"

This is the story of my life. I love to laugh and make people laugh. I do it even when I don't intend to.

 

michael's story
and
It Must Have Been Her by T.L. Randolph


end of submissions/deadline met

xoxox

 

Thanks. I think this is an amazing project. A lot of power in it.

 

Horsefly by Michael Goldman

Perspective is a funny thing, because, even though I knew what I was seeing and hearing, it was impossible to know for sure what the woman standing three feet in front of me saw or heard. The same way that it was impossible to know what the horsefly that cut a path through the evening air was seeing. I couldn’t remember if horseflies could hear at all. I had collected insects as a kid and I remembered that they were in the family Tabanidae and were predators. Their larva hid in silty water until they pupated into the adults that snatched prey as they flew and that they bit hard, leaving welts and sucking blood. It was safe to assume that that the perceptions and impressions of the world that horsefly was receiving would be harder to get at than any woman’s. An animal half an inch long that was flying at speeds a dozens of times the length of its body every second and that that gathered information from a thousand composite eyes and balanced itself in three dimensions while it hurtled through the air would have a slim chance of seeing the same world I did. I was thinking this as the horsefly buzzed off into the distance rapidly becoming invisible over the fleet on cars in the parking lot. It reappeared once as an illuminated blip in the cone of spotlight and few yards away.
I probably wasn’t too much more knowable to her than that fly. All sounds in my left ear were muffled and dulled. The nuances of speech and music and every sound were replaced by the whine and interference of constantly howling tinnitus. My eyes, however, still worked fine. As I looked at Maggie, I could stand and tick off the features that were so familiar even though I hadn’t seen them in months. The red hair hanging down to her shoulders and framing her face, the light brown eyes and slightly thin lips that could peel back in a smile to reveal a crooked eye tooth on the right side of her mouth. I had probably appeared just as foreign to her as a passing horsefly when I heaved my guts up on the table of the restaurant an hour earlier while my head spun. The completely familiar face of the lover she had spent two years with had become as alien as flying insect as the disease that was housed in the internal labyrinth of his left ear took control of balance and his body. Tilting the room to left the same as it does in every attack. Tilting and spinning, always to left but always only in my head. The world tilted and spun only for me. Actually, it tilted and spun for anyone else with Meniere’s disease too. The nausea, vertigo and hearing loss are symptoms that the doctors can prepare you for and that even websites can explain to you. What is missing is the knowledge that you have entered into a realm of perspective that is lost to anyone else. The same way that streaming information pouring into compound eyes travelling at staggering speeds is unknowable to me, even though this bug and I share a parking lot on a June evening. With my hearing half gone, the constant heavy metal, lawnmower in my bad ear and balance that is only partially my own, I am unknowable to Maggie. And it is the same parking lot and the same June evening that we are occupying.
I had been diagnosed the previous winter. Maggie’s attempt to “be there for me”, as she put it, consisted of always looking for parallels with her experience with migraines. Looking back I see a need for letting her off the hook a little, sure, migraines were episodic just like the vertigo attacks and even make the sufferer vomit on occasion, but at the time it felt like abandonment. What I had was unknowable to her. My body had failed me for the first time. I had always been strong. I had always been healthy and this had come from nowhere. One afternoon I had stood up from the door of a pickup truck and the world had spun. It spun and didn’t stop for hours. Vomit and sweat dumped from my body, the strong body that had never let me down. The same body that had stormed down watery lanes in pools as a high school swimmer and the same body had collected a shelf of trophies in martial arts tournaments was now letting me down.
The first time, I had called her to tell her that I was sick and that I had no idea what the problem could be. “Food poisoning, I’m sure of it” she answered into the phone. Some comfort, I thought, what did she know? I lived in this body. It had taken me over mountains and into deep water where I saw the inky purple of the abyss and now it was no longer the body I had owned and depended on for so long.
After the diagnosis, things had gotten harder. I withdrew and couldn’t talk to her. My body’s failure had provided a shell and perspective that was mine alone. I had to stand with people on my right side if there was any hope of understanding them when they spoke. Every action I undertook now had to be evaluated for its ability to take me off of my feet and make the world tilt and spin. Maggie said the relationship had changed, that I had changed as well, and us together was no longer what she wanted to do. She left on her birthday. And we hadn’t spoken since.
Months later, Maggie called out of the blue. She needed to talk she said. She said that there were unresolved feelings that she needed to discuss. She needed to piece together what had happened to us. It sounded clinical and forensic. It sounded vaguely reminiscent of the tests the doctor had run on my ear.
She tried to run her tests seated at dinner. I cooperated. I listened. She was with someone new. He had just moved into the apartment with her. She said it had felt right at first and now she wasn’t so sure. She said she needed to see before she could commit to him. I didn’t have to remind her we had only broken up 3 months earlier. She didn’t describe him much. She spent most of her time gushing about how heroic he had been while recovering from cancer. She had seen the awful pictures before and after the surgery. She had heard the stories of his recovery. I started to wonder whose benefit this was all for, of course, surviving cancer is heroic and much than anything I’ll ever see. My first assumption had to right. She was telling me not everybody collapses under the weight of their diagnosis. Not everybody retreats into depression and pulls away from someone that loves them. Not to mention he had a real problem, he had cancer and not some weird inner ear condition that nobody had ever heard of. She of course she never came right out and said this, I could feel it and read it between her lines. She was hurt and angry and had the right to be. I had withdrawn from her. I didn’t want to hear about migraines and I didn’t want any help. She might have filled in the blanks had I given her the time and space, had the world not tilted and spun first. Had I not vomited across the table. Had I been able to stand up and get up to the bathroom by myself. I bounced into another table as I lurched around the dining room, unable to focus my eyes. The world tilted and spun and my feet came out from under me. To the room of people, I looked drunk, massively drunk. Like I had been guzzling whisky all afternoon and deserved no sympathy. In the bathroom, I vomited and sweated and breathed in giant heaves. The world continued to tilt and spin. I leaned against the sink. A few other men came in and out while I leaned there and waited for the tilt and spin to stop. I looked in the mirror and my face was reddened and it dumped sweat. My eyes were watery and bugged and redlined. A half an hour had passed until I could walk. I am sure for Maggie, it felt longer. A pretty girl sitting by herself after the entire room had seen her date lurching towards the bathroom, a drunkard who couldn’t hold it together. By the time I had gotten to point where I could walk she had paid and was waiting out front. Apparently we would finish her tests standing at my truck, under the lights of a parking lot.
We stood facing each other in a parking lot that was growing darker in the retreating light of dusk with cones of light from lamps on poles illuminating the fleet of cars and the few glittering shards of glass on the tar. It wasn’t how she thought the evening would go she said. She had learned to stand on my right at least. She sounded clear on that side. I wasn’t walled off on that side, it was the side where I was still who I always had been to her. The last horsefly that would be flying for the day whipped between us. They are day creatures and loved the bright sunlight. Moths were starting to gather at the lights, the guard was changing, day to night, me with my failed one ear and lousy balance was traded for the heroic survivor. I watched the moths buzz and flip in the illuminated cones of light. She spoke and I realized that I had drifted away from her for a few minutes watching the insects and pondering how the world must look to them. I looked at her and realized that she and I were not much closer to each other than we were to the pin-wheeling insects whirling in the early summer evening air. She said had to go. I nodded. I am sure he was waiting somewhere. She hugged me and I turned my face so she wouldn’t attempt kissing me, my mouth still tasted like vomit and would until I was home and cleaned up. I was feeling better and knew in a few minutes that I would be ok to drive. The world would always tilt and spin and sometimes I would tilt and spin with it. Maybe, that’s what the doctor named Meniere had detected in us, a perspective that could feel the spin of the earth and the moon and stars and could mimic that spin too.
I watched her drive away and turned back to watching the moths. From where I stood I was pretty sure I could indentify a few of them.