This incongruence of facts

It feels like my brain is floating away.

My friend patted the air around my head last night and I could feel her touching my brain particles which have somehow expanded beyond the size of my skull.

There is an unstuckness. The lack of a reference point. There is so much thinking about past memories and imagining impossible futures and getting lost, getting lost again in the moment. You can't be all of those places at once. That's when you lose your grounding. You are unstuck in time. You are not sure when you are. As a result, it is hard to know who you are. You can't pretend that you have been the same person across all of those years of your life. It has material consequences.

So I am in Madison, but it is like coming home from college on a winter break. Except that I am 28 and not in college. This incongruence of facts means that I can't tell you who even lives here or who I should call, because I don't remember when I am here. I get messages from people and repeatedly find myself saying "Oh! Yes! My dear friend! Right! She lives here." I know that objectively I shouldn't be confused about who my friends are: I have only been gone 3 months. You aren't supposed to forget that people exist. But my brain is floating away. I could be in high school, or five or twenty. My parents have lived in the same house my entire life. It's hard to remember what year this is.

I'm pretty sure they won't lock me away for admitting these things. As a mental health researcher, I understand the implications of what I am saying.

But someone should tell the truth.

Honestly, I was surprised by this development. I am a grounding force in my family. I can be counted on for difficult things. I expected that would keep me grounded too.

When I arrived in Madison, I had already cried myself out. I felt exhaustion, the very physical kind. Then it was that things had to be started, had to be gotten moving, the funeral home had to be called. There was still shock, and being in shock is like having pillows belted around on all sides of your body, muffling the sounds and softening whatever you run into. That first day was a normal kind of tired for someone who hasn't slept two of the last three nights.

Then the exhaustion became something deeper. You walk your parents through choosing a casket for their son. You try to emerge from that with any kind of energy left over. It's not even sadness. It's more like your bones are tired. Your bones feel like they are 100 years old. And you are asking them to just take a stab at the Olympics anyway. You realize you have to post on facebook, because it has been three days. Three days. You have to admit this sometime. It becomes a kind of weariness that you can't just sleep off.

There is no one in the world this will be harder for than my parents. You're not supposed to ever have to bury your child. I add this onto my grief. I wonder how they will do when I leave. Not that I know when I'll leave.

I have no idea how many days will pass before I am ready to leave. Nor am I sure it is a question of readiness.

So I woke up early this morning. Surprised. Surprised because each day feels worse than the last. But in new and unexpected ways. I have seen a great deal of death already in my life. And things that I think of as being far worse. I know how I respond to tragedy. But for some reason I didn't foresee how this would shift my grasp on reality. 

It's almost like the news takes a while to travel into your cells. You can feel sadness or grief or shock, but you don't really feel it until every cell in your body has gotten the news. And by then, by then, parts of your brain have already started to float away. I wanted to borrow a sweatshirt yesterday because I thought maybe the fabric would help to hold me in myself. A hoodie, I thought. Perhaps a hoodie would hold my brain in.

I'm sure that Sylvia Plath is not the only person who would understand these things. I know this because when I called my family back to hear the news, my father had to ask who I was. He didn't recognize my voice. He didn't realize that if his other daughter was already sitting next to him, there was only one other person who would be calling him "dad." I had to tell my own father who I was.

Each day is a new process of realizing that everything is still true. Still happening. Except that with each day that passes, it feels like there is less of me to hang the news on. There is less solidness ready to hold the information. I have changed from a body to concrete to wood to a sort of flimsy coat rack. Soon perhaps I will just be a wire hangar.

I don't know how one returns to solidness from being a coat hangar. I assume it is quite a process. I'm not worried though, because wire hangars can last forever, if they need to. Even if they're not particularly useful. 

Of course it doesn't help that my newsfeed and phone are full of election news and campaign calls.

I can't vote. I'm in the wrong state. Add that to everything else. Take away one more thing.

I guess, for what it's worth, my brother and I would have cancelled each other out anyway.

Right.

Great.

For what that's worth. 

Because, remember?

Yeah. It's still true.