Drenched in sweat, starfished on the kitchen floor, the dehumidifier blowing musty air in my face as I come back into my body… it’s the closest I’ve been to anything like an orgasm in what feels like ages and it’s tachycardia. I’ve just installed a new bike seat on the vintage Schwinn my landlord gifted me a month ago, lime green with a hole cutout in the middle, a reminder of yet another accommodation for what’s between my legs, but at least I get to make it green to compliment the purple bars of the bike, a genderqueer tribute to my dysphoria. Biking surprisingly doesn’t hurt my discs, and while the soreness of my groin is the closest I’ll be to a hard fucking in a long time, I lost most desire for sex since my breakup anyway.
I need the new seat otherwise I can’t handle the freedom and endorphins of the 11 mile trail I’ve been blessed with outside my home. Although I loathe the 90 degree weather and humidity signature to Jersey summers, I’m completely claustrophobic with the contexts of this particular July from academic to personal obligations. My mental health is rapidly deteriorating to the point where I don’t even know what self-care looks like anymore. Today it looked like a new bike seat and a quick ride to test it out, but it also neglected hydration and included caffeine; it forgot that I took a Vicodin for my back last night after 10 days of classes sleeping without an actual bed and how opiates trigger my SVT episodes. So my last mile push home included palpitations, followed by a half hour sweat-out on the kitchen floor, my only space left in this apartment currently to sprawl in semi-privacy.
I’d cry if I had the tears, the heart-rate, the spoons, the understanding of what I should mourn first. The cats who aren’t even my cats came to lick the sweat out of my hair as I nudged them away, reminders of what I can’t handle. I looked to the ceiling fan, a snakeskin lightning bolt charm hanging from a chain reminding me of power symbols as I tried to focus my eyes and breath to cut the palpitations. I meditated and affirmed myself as best I could, prayed nobody came into the room and the cats could give me some peace.
As the 180 finally went back to 60 bpm, I opened my palms to the ceiling and noticed my right arm had been touching my No-Face backpack of books the entire time. At first I went to push it away with disdain and then recognized the conflict of this action. How my academics are the source of my frustration and strength, how my love and hate and fear and insecurity are all blended together through my journey and academia is what taught me to blend my heart and my brain. How appropriate I chose No-Face as my bookbag for all the character represents and how placeless I feel in life all the time, how dependent I am on others for my own existence, how the familiarity of this hard kitchen floor brings back the warmth I felt sleeping on wood during my stay in Philadelphia and how I thought my self-care this week would include solitude but it really requires comfort around positive people.
I still firmly believe my heart thrives in nature, that I cannot handle living in a city for all the infinitely unique thoughts of people buzzing directly around me, but right now I feel so ungrounded. My skin hunger is nauseated but present, my boundaries of self-in-world are blurring, and there is so much I want to do but here I am: starfished on a kitchen floor trying to figure out my next move.