Summer was a season of imprisonment for my younger brother. Like most families with neighborhood age offspring, he tagged along constantly. Jack and I undoubtedly felt that he was contaminating our scatters outdoors and indoors and dealing with this harboring of exasperation manifested itself into locking him in the basement most days, after which we would realize we had nothing to do. Playing with Legos or struggling with Jack's older brother's baseball Playstation games were infinitely more fun when we had someone to blame the failures on. So he would be released from the cellar, scowling; but his expression of victimized disdain would be temporarily relinquished when we included him in whatever we were doing that day. We all played boisterously, fought constantly, and broke things pretty much all the time.
This forced my brother to develop survival skills, at least until he found his own friends to pick on smaller kids with. He soon discovered that if he was charming enough to make us laugh, he would be better equipped to duck the punch when we struck out in MLB 2007. As the smallest one on the couch, the power to amuse and disarm was extremely helpful to him. A person who is making you laugh is a very hard person to slug, a concept that probably saved him from many a bruised arm.
Winters saw us overcompensating for the absence we felt during school hours. Jack and I both understood that, because I was a girl and he was a boy, during school our friendship was nonexistent. This was tragic, but abandoning our association for six hours was necessary for the sanity of everyone involved. However, after the last bell and on the weekends, we were kept warm by winter coats and the sweat produced by endless shoveling and tunnel-making. If a successful hole through a snowbank could be dug, the day was not wasted. The Big Dig had nothing on our frozen architecture. This chain-driven relationship was something I could put in my pocket and forget about as I grew up into learning that I was supposed to be friends with girls instead.
Saturday, March 31, 2012
Sunday, March 25, 2012
Charles Bonnet Syndrome
Dear sir,
More specifically, I see beautiful people in Eastern dress. I see children with huge, gleaming teeth. It's not like a dream, it's like a movie. A boring movie, but a film all the same. I've lived ninety-five years and this is my first hallucination.
It is curious to me for two reasons. It is first because these people have waited most of my life to introduce themselves to me. When I say most of my life I mean my adult life, for no one questions the illusions of a child. No one calls a child schizophrenic, but rather prone to meeting imaginary friends. The second reason this is curious to me is that I have been blind since the age of forty-three.
The last time I saw anything at all (apart from those I have mentioned just now), I was going to school in Paris. I was living with a friend and going out drinking every night and dancing on the weekends for cash. My friend and I would use this cash for cigarettes, mostly. We would sit on the fire escape and inhale and exhale with the cigarettes perched between our lips. I always allowed the smoke to absorb into my eyes. I liked the feeling of pain and the feeling of seeing through the smoke. This was obviously very damaging. I was blind within four months of living in Europe and had to be deported back home to my mother.
The figures I see now: I do not recognize them. I had been fascinated with Freudian determinism but I assure you I have never in my life met this population of illusions. The only person I have ever seen and recognized is that of myself in a bathrobe and tobacco pipe. The mirror image of myself was then divided into four other people and at that very moment I shut my eyes because I did not wish to experience this horror any longer.
I wish to be very clear, sir. The only reason I am seeking help now is that I have become very bored and tired of meeting these people over and over. They do not age. They do not develop as characters. They do not even change clothes. If they acted as real people I would be most excited to entertain them in my life, but not so. I would much rather be blind again.
Regards.
More specifically, I see beautiful people in Eastern dress. I see children with huge, gleaming teeth. It's not like a dream, it's like a movie. A boring movie, but a film all the same. I've lived ninety-five years and this is my first hallucination.
It is curious to me for two reasons. It is first because these people have waited most of my life to introduce themselves to me. When I say most of my life I mean my adult life, for no one questions the illusions of a child. No one calls a child schizophrenic, but rather prone to meeting imaginary friends. The second reason this is curious to me is that I have been blind since the age of forty-three.
The last time I saw anything at all (apart from those I have mentioned just now), I was going to school in Paris. I was living with a friend and going out drinking every night and dancing on the weekends for cash. My friend and I would use this cash for cigarettes, mostly. We would sit on the fire escape and inhale and exhale with the cigarettes perched between our lips. I always allowed the smoke to absorb into my eyes. I liked the feeling of pain and the feeling of seeing through the smoke. This was obviously very damaging. I was blind within four months of living in Europe and had to be deported back home to my mother.
The figures I see now: I do not recognize them. I had been fascinated with Freudian determinism but I assure you I have never in my life met this population of illusions. The only person I have ever seen and recognized is that of myself in a bathrobe and tobacco pipe. The mirror image of myself was then divided into four other people and at that very moment I shut my eyes because I did not wish to experience this horror any longer.
I wish to be very clear, sir. The only reason I am seeking help now is that I have become very bored and tired of meeting these people over and over. They do not age. They do not develop as characters. They do not even change clothes. If they acted as real people I would be most excited to entertain them in my life, but not so. I would much rather be blind again.
Regards.
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