The Third Unconscious

subject-object relationship interrupted

Speaking in signs. I’m at my limit with language. Gesticulating furiously, like the Italian that I am, I strain to explain: The mouse in this house is very real. No, I'm not sure how schizophrenia feels. Sensing the joy of a vision vindicated, the rodent reveals itself to my bedmate, scurrying along their side of the mattress. The same thought briefly crosses our minds: are we both schizophrenic? The jury's still out on the appeal of apparition, but the court agrees on honoring omen. Let's venture a verdict to palate this portent.

Faltering underground signal. The man with the tattered sneakers opens his phone. Slowly loading job application portal. It’s midnight on a Tuesday. Bad day at work, huh? As someone who prefers shoes well above their pay grade, I’m surprised when he types $165,000 in the "estimated salary range" box. Something worth remembering: the differences between two soles cannot be reconciled.

The pond’s edge. His spot in the park. I tell him I look to the birds for signs, like the augurs in Roman times. As we speak, three geese make their approach. Closer, closer, closer to the stone where I’m sat. Before he can comment, some line on the synchronism, I’ve fled the scene. He’s a world away, but its always been that way. 

Oversold train. View to nowhere. Lead head, ferritin low. I quell my craving for blood meat with a designated bag apple in the side pocket with uncapped pens. In my messenger until the message arrives: low blood sugar. Closing eyes. Symptoms many, treatments few. I’m toying with the idea of a psychotic break but decided against it. I do hear things, but not from that type of stereo. 

Multi-factor authentication. Text sent to my phone I’ve left in another room. A lazy reason to neglect what I’ve spent the last week avoiding: the dreaded patient portal. Multi-factor authentication, too many degrees removed from myself, self-authenticity contingent on too many factors: bits and pieces of me dispersed over microscopically infinite corners of the digital sphere. I feel like a glitch materialized. A fallen piece of detritus from some outer pocket of the atmosphere. All this en-soi, pour-soi Satrean servility for what? To find comfort being with my nothingness? Everything we are, we have to play at being. But we’re too busy playing other games. Candies crushed, words crossed.  

Getting on my own nerves. My internalized misogyny indicates its time for a hormone check-up. Doctored delirium. Cross ring, NBA championship big. Basketball team owner? No. I’d imagine the endocrinology practice must keep him busy. “600 percent.” he’s close enough to taste Jesus on his breath. “600 percent more likely than the normal woman to commit suicide. SUICIDE.” I want to assure him. This medical chair might be high, but its certainly not high enough. To him, Roe and Wade are two buddies who started a craft brewery. “I owe you” he’d say to the barkeep with the heavy pours. “IUD” he says in derogatory tone “get rid of it.” I go home and run a bath.​​ Tell the draining water to expect companions. 

I dream of my urologist Stephanie. In the vision, she introduces me to her sisters. Are we friends? Lovers? Never to be discovered. 3:44 am. Woke to clanging coming from the room next door. “DAD? IS EVERYTHING OK?” I shout bleary-eyed from the crack in the doorframe. Peering in, I see him. Urinalysis vessel in hand. Plastic bedpan. Hollow and booming as he thwacks it against his wall. “It’s for the squirrels. They’re in the chimney, keeping me up. Trying to scatter them.” A novel use for the piss cup. The urologist stays in my dreams for now. 

In that kind of headspace. The mood for a simple place to go. Streamer homepage: Fireplace for your Home: Crackling Birchwood Fireplace. #10 in TV Shows Today: the suggested destination. “Birchwood Fireplace” in a serif typeface. White on black screen, consumed by poorly animated licks of fire. Created by George Ford. Owner of a pet store, his 9 to 5. Creator of “Adventure Cat:” television video for feline distraction. Self-proclaimed realist auteur: if I can film these rodents, what else can I capture? The Fireplace Trilogy, the resulting masterpiece. Two years to produce Crackling Yule Log Fireplace .Five years for Fireplace 4K: Classic Crackling Fireplace. Cost for production? 35,000 dollars. Contemporary mastermind, the most coveted artist of our time. 

EEG technician. White man, mid thirties. Gluing electrodes to my scalp. spends the entire hour of my procedure on TikTok while I’m chained to the medical chair. His feed an amalgamate of Christian sermons, far-right conspiracy, and ASMR videos. There’s certainly a brain malignancy in this room, but I'm not sure the right patient is being tested. 

Hoping for divine intervention. Nuns in habit reminding me I'm overdue for a history lesson. At the museum I sulk in the shadow of a Duccio. The Madonna looks overworked. The angel Gabriel never stipulated overtime pay. I'm no mother, let alone to a God, but the plight in her eyes cuts deep. Recognizing our fated flatness, I make a measly attempt to give myself dimension. They tell me freedom is unpredictability, so I line up for a Nathan's hot dog outside the steps of the MET.  The pork tastes vaguely like plague, though maybe it’s just the listeria.

I'm provisionally stable. That is, until I count ten I <3 New York shirts and six accompanying tripod mounts in my near vicinity. You ever heard of brand loyalty? New world cult worship. The people line up for the line itself: the only remaining place of resistance. 

The voice from my meditation app telling me "you mean something." Without the words "to me" attached, I close out the gratitude practice to pity myself.

Outside the labwork clinic. Eagle in the trash. Birders here to crash. I’d guess its the styrofoam in his beak that’s making him bald. Can’t be good for the feather follicles. Mega zoom lens corner in on washed up treasure, like the paparazzi’s outside of a rehab center. The tragedy of visibility: erosion of era, dented democracy. What’s left to be seen, immune to the virus of transparency? Opacity of the unconscious, maybe its a laboratory too, I think as the phlebotomist sticks his needle into the tender crook of my arm. 

Cardboard. A 2D vision of reality: paper houses, paper people. The glasswalled coffee conglomerate opens at 4:45am. The time I head home from the party. LED bulbs spotlight the bakers, working like windup dolls in an antique children’s game. The car stands still for eternity. Long enough to see the souls turn to automatons: flour sift, sugar stir, eggs crack, muffin made. One worker looks our placidly at my window. Subject-object relationship interrupted, I wonder, as my car speeds off, if I can tear my hand in two like an unchecked to-do list.  

Headstones the same color as the trees. Tombs that form a wonky line. Were they always slanted this way? Or has time moved them astray? Enough mudslides and rodent tunnels to mess up the undertaker’s architecture. Does the situation in the ground look the same? Caskets tilting to find eachother’s oaken touch. Catacomb contact. Better comparatively to Hi, we’ve been trying to contact you about prescription clearance. Insurance payment. Appointment rescheduling. Bury me where the ground is tough, so I can’t hear my voicemail play from the grave, so only seismic shifts can wake me from the REM of eternity. 

One little pill. Ten milligrams to make a one hundred thirty-pound body feel like a coil of rope. An animated anvil a box of books in the basement. I sleep like my waking hours are the dream, like my life begins at the pillow’s soft contact. Sloped ceilings, old feelings. I’ve known this room, I’ve known this home. Light that pours in from dirtied windows, howling from the wolven wind. Why must I sleep with the doors closed? No creaks, no gaps. Like whatever I fear will turn its back on a threshold denied. Like the reaper lacks opposable thumbs. Can’t work the knob. 

I was reading, Proust I think, when I heard the hawk. Swooshing down like a lightning strike into the bush beside me. For a second, I thought it was a meteorite, fallen from the cloudless fall sky above. Complete silence, one minute, before it emerged again. Flying back out to its point of provinence, coronated in conquest: a long snake dangling between its talons. I fixed my gaze on it as it flew into the distance – fading, with time, into the shape of what I ask myself everyday: Y?

Predictability unexpected tears. Eyes brimming, thoughts spinning. Is this what aliveness feels like? Or death? A thinning. A loosening. It’s all a dialectic anyway. Neither here and there. A feeling of everywhere. But where am I? My couch. A home. A time and place. Gazing out my window. It’s night now. The moon glints hungrily, and I look to it, hoping it will eat my longing away. Suddenly, a curtain closes in my periphery.

I guess, after all this time, I’ve been looking at the wrong show.