night, missed dinner, and we had gotten into a fight and I slammed his finger in the door. Now he would have to go to the doctor and ask for a splint.
I don’t remember any of it, which isn’t exactly a surprise. Lately, I forget things I’ve done. Big things and small. Jake has to tell me after the fact that I was in my darkroom for twenty hours straight, that I refused to go on a camping trip by throwing a tantrum, that I was the one who finished the bag of snack mix. I’ve stopped asking him when I notice something off, because it’s too humiliating to not remember.
I wish I remembered the argument. Where would I have been, that I got home so late? Maybe I was at Kid’s, or out at the beach, maybe it grew dark and I didn’t even notice, not even when I had to change the exposures or when I drove back through purple tunnels of sky.
I’m sorry, I said.
It’s okay, Jake said. It was an accident.
JUNE 28 1987
I find myself thinking a lot about that Diane Arbus portrait of a headless woman draped in a silky printed sheet. She is sitting in a big chair, like Abraham Lincoln at the D.C. memorial, and the fabric pours from her shoulders down over her arms and pools on the floor—this is how the illusion of headlessness is created. All you see of her, actually, are her legs, ankles and knees pressed together, feet shoved into black flats. Her arms are dead and waxy. Propped up on the chair, fingers dangling down like elegant sausages. You can see she has breasts but they are high and unlikely. She’s on some kind of stage.
She makes sense to me, this pile of parts. There must be a real woman buried under there somewhere. She is sweltering beneath the display, the clothing and the fake shoulders, contorting her arms to sit just right, to create the impression of a person. Arbus shouts at her to make her fingers look natural but she can’t manage it.
She really does look headless. But the breasts give her away.
JULY 14 1987
Ups and downs. I am a boat on a bumpy ocean.
I wonder if I am suffering wrong.
I want to do the glamorous kind.
I want to suffer in bursts and splats and scintillations. Something more than lying awake at night running my fingers along my veins, wondering which one is the most fragile, wondering which one would be the first to break.
SEPTEMBER 19 1987
Dr. Grady switched my medication again. One of my old ones was recalled. As if just putting out the notice could recall it from my body, could take out all the weeks and months and years I’ve absorbed it into my bloodstream, into my brain. But no. That drug is a part of me now. I must live with the consequences.
RECALLED. My medication has a better memory than I do.
The new medication, unrecalled, unremembered, makes me sleepy and still. I spend hours sitting at our bedroom window, watching the knife of the sea in the distance and the leaves of the trees brushing the sky. Wind comes and flips them over like a thousand gold coins. Hours, days up there. Jake is getting angry. He’s always worried I’m not producing enough. Like we’ll run out of money. But we’re drowning in money.
Does the medication keep me from making art? It’s hard to say. Let’s break it down:
Made When I Was Good
Capillaries
Bottle Girls
Empty Spaces
Rancid
Made When I Was Bad
Tricksters
Zero
Fever Dreams
Four and three. Some more, I can’t remember where they fit. But which ones were better? That’s what is hard. Four is not necessarily greater than three when three includes Fever Dreams, “today’s TOP SELLER!”
Hal asked me if I ever think about quitting my meds, if I think I’d be OK without them. OK enough to live, he implied, but not so OK that my art is mediocre.
I would never tell him this, but I worry he’s right. You hear so many stories about these crazy artists, their depression, their alcoholism, the wives they killed. And the masterpieces they made in the meantime. Suffering for their art. You know who I mean.
But those are men. Men are always better at being crazy. Better at being forgiven. The blood on their hands can be real, not imagined. They can be bought and sold and still no one thinks they are owned.
Creation ≠ sanity? If I am too medicated then I have no energy,