Rainbows and Chronic Illness

I woke up with the taste of blood in my mouth. I paint my nails a bright orange - construction cone orange. This person is under construction; proceed with caution.

I stepped outside today and saw a rainbow. Hope swelled in my breast at what is really just refraction, scattered light turned into a symbol by my pattern-seeking brain.

I try to find the thread of it all, and suddenly there are many, lapping, running into each other, until it’s a conspiracy board, bleeding red thread and sharp pins, and I’ve lost the plot and I’m in a waiting room again. No, now it’s an MRI machine. Now a CT machine, now I’m in a little room hooked up to an IV, blurred from the drugs, no color here, except for the beige of the walls, and the nurse hits the plunger and pushes the drug into the IV.

A trickle of blood oozes out of my nose. It is dark red and it hits my lip. I stare into the mirror, letting it drip into the white porcelain sink. I feel the urge to take a picture. To document. The swollen eye, the bloody noses, the IV’s, the pill bottles, the needles. And I wonder why this urge to have a record. A record, how clinical sounding. No, this would be a scream into the void. No, not a void. A scream atop a mountain, for all to hear. To prove to myself and others that this is happening. This is real and I want you to hear it.

Is that selfish? Annoying? Or is it pain fashioned into something, that in my insecurity I hesitate to call art? Or is this a gauntlet, a tribulation? None of the words seem quite right. I search online dictionaries and thesauruses when I really need the physical flipping of pages but my bookshelf is empty.

Finally, after reading a favorite author, I come across the word clarity - a word that rings like crystal. Pulling sensations and feelings into words is hard. Words are…rocks in a tumbler. Some are rough and dull, others are bright and shiny. They roll around in my mouth, breaking teeth and I spit out gravel and bile and blood. I turn phrases over and over in my head, rewording, refining, cutting, editing, adding, until I come up with something that can fit into a box. Only then am I understood. Or rather, I am told “you are a complex case.” A case. A box. A trunk. A locker. A vault. A tinderbox. A coffin.

I reread “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman. I wonder if behind the beige walls of doctor’s waiting rooms is the yellow wallpaper with the crazy red pattern and a woman, a woman shuffling, rolling, leaning into the wallpaper, getting smooches of yellow on herself like pollen. I look down at myself and see the yellow pills in my hand. The thick yellow med that has the texture of paint in a cup I suck like a jello shot. The little vial of yellow that I inject into the subcutaneous fat on my leg. Sometimes red wells up, a body releasing a single tear at the pain and I cover it with a Bluey band-aid and go about my day.

I go about my day. I go about my day.

I dress myself with intention. I apply black eye liner, hoping I look mysterious, removed, angry, a bruise. Black reappears over and over. Black skirts, black tops, black leather jacket, black black black. I bend to put my black shoes on, stand up and the vision goes in my left eye and I stare into darkness, counting the seconds for it to return. Like a wave, it does return and I layer black on top of black, my construction orange nails a hazard light blinking against my black back drop. But then I feel the need to soften. Women need to be soft, right? I add in a little purple, green, or blue, not realizing that I am the woman hiding in and behind the wallpaper, laughing hysterically, unable to remove the stain of yellow sickness.

The bed is anchored to the floor in “The Yellow Wallpaper,” a detail I forgot or missed in past reads. Like a bed on a ship out in the middle of a storm-tossed sea. A body told to stay in place with no room to move, change, grow. Even then, things still morph and questions trail them followed by blank looks. Sad looks. Pitying looks. “What else can we do,” looks.

The fury is like a black sludge beneath my skin. What I wouldn’t do to cut my skin open and take it out. Be able to look at it like an organ. A placenta comes tearing out of the body leaving a dinner-sized plate wound in the body after having a baby. But this doesn’t. No, nothing so obvious. What I wouldn’t give for obvious. Straighforward. Easy.

I contemplate tattoes, specific outfits. I grow my hair long. I lift weights and I run too much. I get jewelry welded around my body - something hard to remove even though I have CTscans and MRIs that require divulging my body of metal. I see it for what it is. Control. I dig my nails in and hold on, leaving behind bloody half moons on my life.

I wake up with the taste of blood in my mouth and when I finally walk out the door there is a rainbow in the sky but I never find the ending.