Dead Letter Department #97

weather report

Apologies, my dear readers, for the long delay. When I got back from vacation, I thought I’d picked something up on the plane, or more likely in the airport, when I went down with a fever for almost five days. It’s been so long since I’ve been sick, & I spent a lot of time slipping in and out of coherent thought, with the usual baseline anxiety making itself known in a sort of constantly increasing drum beat. Then, a couple days after I staggered back up into what I thought was health, the rash cropped up: an enormous dark circle on my forearm, which I at first attributed to a spider bite, until another one showed up, and then another.

It turned out to be Lyme disease, brought to us by our tiny, terrible enemy, the deer tick, although I never saw one on my skin or felt the bite. Fortunately I had a friend to advise me, since Lyme is uncommon enough out here in Washington that even getting the test for it turned out to be an argumentative gauntlet to run. I’m on the last day of antibiotics now, huge green pills that need to be taken a hour in either direction from anything containing calcium, which has made me realize just how much of my average day appears to be devoted to ingesting dairy. I’ve also been even more sun avoidant than usual, since apparently a blistering rash can happen on this medication, even with sunscreen, which means the box of plants I optimistically bought right before I got diagnosed has been sitting sadly on the lawn still in their plastic pots instead of stretching their roots out into proper soil.

I've been extremely low energy, though I can’t really tell if that’s recovering from Lyme, gut bombing myself with medicine, or just, you know--everything. The whole business. Living in this world, or doing my best to, anyway, hearing news and trying to figure out if I can feel a modicum of hope or not.

As I’m starting to feel better, the mountain of shit to get done began to seem absolutely colossal, so I finally did a full brain dump to-do list in my notebook, literally every single task I’ve thought of over the past couple of weeks, so that it wasn’t all just swirling around my head like Pigpen’s dirt cloud. I ended up covering two full pages with everything from the petty &/or small (WD40 the stupidly loud creaking hinges all over the house, mail the recent Secret Dead Letters) to the enormous (finally start the legal name change process, get the next section of my book to my agent).

It helps a bit having it on paper, instead of constantly circling the drain of my attention span. Now, of course, I just have to start doing the things, maybe knocking one or two easy ones off first so I can have some nice cross-offs on the list, just to increase my frankly withered morale when I’m contemplating it.

In slightly more optimistic news, I did manage to have a really nice birthday weekend. The highlight was probably the morning at the lake with my friends, which I spent alternately being pursued by my niece in her toucan floatie so she could peck me with his inflatable head, or pushing her across the water as fast as possible until my shoulders started to ache in that pleasant way. It felt so good to swim, and be someplace beautiful with my friends, just doing normal summer things that we’ve done very nearly every year together since my niece was tiny. As a bonus, for once I actually remembered the bug spray, which means I have three mosquito bites instead of thirty.

I also ate my weight in delicious food: banh mi & spring rolls from the food truck down the street, Indian takeout, including an absolutely inadvisable amount of garlic naan, lavender Earl Grey cake from my favorite bakery, and fancy coffee at some point every day. I took naps & played video games & went all the way up to the beach just to have morning coffee, sitting on a log, with the hummingbirds and swallows zinging around. It was both extremely indulgent and low-key, which was just how I wanted things to be.

Also, in what felt like a special bonus just for me, the weather took a dip from the 80s down into the low 70s the day after I went swimming, and we even got approximately five drops of rain, which fell directly on me while I was sitting on a picnic bench at a food truck. It’s been so dry I was honestly thrilled by the experience, and this morning I’ve got all the windows open, fresh air in the apartment flowing through for as long as it lasts.

one good thing

As a long-time Naomi Novik fan, I can’t believe it took me this long to get into it, but when the ability to focus started to come back, I snarfed down the first two books of The Scholomance (A Deadly Education & the Last Graduate), a fantasy series about a school of magic, family legacy, destined heroes—but with all of the horror that those things would actually encompass. From the first line— “I decided Orion Lake needed to die after the second time he saved my life” — to the deliciously infuriating end of the second book, I’ve been enraptured. It feels utterly fresh, and tapped into the particular nightmares of adolescence in a way that I think a lot of work fails at, often making teenagers either miniature, slightly less sensible adults, or just marginally more acne prone children, when in fact those years are something else entirely, a strange, shifting, painful time.

I’m just waiting for the chance to pick up the third volume so I can squeak comprehensively about the whole series with my friends who have read it, and if you are among them, let me know.

Thank you as always for reading, and for your patience with my unexpected delays. I’ll write to you again soon, and in the meantime, may you get to be weightless on the waves, even if it’s just for a moment.