Cherry vanilla ice cream during creation phase. Also pictured: my mother’s favorite bubbles.
A couple weeks ago, on March 21st, I woke up at 4:30 in the morning.
Bad news.
Once up, I can’t go back to sleep — so I set to making coffee, feeding the dog. It took me a few cycles to realize what had woken me.
A smoke alarm was chirping. Somewhere in my building. Somewhere close by.
It wasn’t mine, but it sounded like it was right outside my door. I ventured out with a step stool and stood, neck craned, staring at each unit until I heard the chirp — and saw that there was no blinking light on the alarm I was staring at. I closed my eyes and tried to envision where the sound was coming from.
It was the exact same spot where my alarm lives, but directly across the hall. My neighbor’s.
This, I thought, was a very good thing. My property management company has terrible reviews online, so I’d been terrified that, if it was one of the communal alarms in the hallway, my service ticket wouldn’t go through for days — days during which IÂ would not sleep. At all. When I say I’m a light sleeper, I mean it. I have brought earplugs to third dates’ houses. IDGAF.
But when I finally saw my neighbor later that morning, standing wide-legged in the hallway in her bathrobe, she announced that while it was a “nuisance,” she would take care of it “as soon as she went to Walmart” to get the required 9-volt battery — an errand for which she clearly, she motioned, was not ready, and which she made clear was not going to be prioritized.
When I responded with a joke about how little sleep I’d get until the chirping stopped, her face fell.
“Well, then, I’ll get right on that for you,” she said stonily.
I hadn’t slept and had developed a terrible headache immediately upon waking and couldn’t concentrate on much, so I called in sick to work — probably the worst idea, because it meant I sat there, listening to that alarm chirp, for eight hours.
It actually sent me into tears. Deep, bitter ones. It was the beginning of a new week and since I’d woken up I’d felt displaced and homesick. Something was pulling me to St. Augustine. I felt sure I’d never sleep again.
I was being dramatic.
Regardless, I ventured out around noon to buy my neighbor a battery and a bag of Cadbury eggs. I knocked on her door and told her I’d found the battery in my house, and offered the chocolate as an olive branch.
As soon as the alarm bleeped into silence as she replaced the battery, my problems got worse and better-defined.
I’d sent a text message to my mother outlining my shitty morning, my sleeplessness’s ripple effect into a general melancholy. In the little digital box of our attempted conversation, my father responded that my mother was with the doctor having X-rays done.
My parents do not go to the doctor.
Turns out my inclination to go home had been right all along.
I got to Saint Augustine just as my mother was being admitted to the ER, and spent a week working from an uncomfortable hospital chair as doctors buzzed around my her, sometimes wearing ominous-looking face masks, sometimes placing a mask over her face. She couldn’t breathe. Fifteen years without seeing a doctor, smoking on and off, had caught up with her. She’d been noticing breathlessness with exertion for a while. Now, an elephant pressed on her chest in the night. They fixed her with a series of tubes.
I played housewife to my father, doing the dishes and feeding the dogs, walking around behind him closing boxes of cookies and clipping bags of Cheetos. Pulling quarter-full cups of coffee off the table. I made them ice cream from scratch. Cherry vanilla. My mother’s favorite.
The day she got out of the hospital, I was rear-ended at a stoplight while I was out to pick up the $1,000 worth of prescriptions she needed. The pharmacist had asked me which ones I wanted and when I looked at her quizzically, she told me the price.
I almost cried. We could pay for it it — they could pay for it — but not without concern. It’s so much money just to be well — an amount of money that you should not ever be required to spend on medicine to keep you alive.
Bad news.
Good news? My mother says she’s never going to smoke another cigarette. I learned in the ordeal that the once-and-for-all “I quit” I heard at New Years hasn’t been so sterling. Now at least I know it’s done. That might have been worth the whole ordeal.
And as far as the car accident is concerned, the other guy definitely got the raw end of the situation. His car was leaking fluids all over the road and wouldn’t crank. I’m not happy for his suffering, per se… but he definitely hit me harder than the 5 MPH he estimated.
More bad news, and newer: I’ve cancelled my trip to Barcelona.
I’m not proud. Please see the link above if you have questions. Please god don’t ask me in person because I’ll probably turn inside out.
Good news: I’ve booked a trip to Montreal instead! At the end of May. And now my early-morning Duolingo ritual won’t be entirely in vain, non?
(Well, maybe. I’m told Quebecois French is a whole different animal.)
Things keep moving down here in St. Pete. I’m happy. I’ve lost over ten pounds, largely stopped drinking (caveat: I have a new wine review for you soon!!)
And I recently decided — finally — to do more yoga. I’ve long put off this decision — I work out so much, prioritize strengthening and moving my body so much, and I never leave yoga as wrung out and sore as I do when I lift or do intervals at the gym.
Yes, I know that my “yoga isn’t hard enough” sentiment is even more evidence for how badly I need it.
I practiced three hours today. The crick that’s been in my neck since February is not gone, but it’s moving. Good news good news good news.
And more to come. It always prevails. Especially if we make it.