Cats

I keep telling myself to write about then- the beggining- the start of it all. before i got lost in this disease. i keep thinking that somehow by searching my way through that i can find my way out of this. understand it better. me better. figure out what got me here. but the words dont come. i can talk about the pain. today. i can talk about how i left the gym and my lungs suddenly seized and the world became confusing. i can talk about how i spent who knows how long- way too long- in the grocery store staring and fidgeting and circling the aisles. how i stood in line and clentched my fingers back from poking the magazines. just poking them. and the man behind me's paper towels. how i understand that that is not ok but how my hand somehow realizes that it NEEDS to be done. or just can not NOT be done. i dont know which. i can talk about how i heard people on a balcony laughing when i got out of my car and thought they were perhaps laughing at me and had to make sure i wasnt actually talking to myself out loud. when i was a child i didnt quite realise that even if you werent audible people still looked at you funny if your lips were moving. i think i didnt quite realise my lips were moving. i had to learn to talk to myself without my lips. without facial expressions and hand gestures. i still havent quite mastered it. i sit in my car in traffic and talk to myself in my head- thinking the world around me is none the wiser- then i look over at the person in the car next to me who is staring at me curiously and i realise my face and hands have been making gestures inappropriate for sitting in a car in traffic. i have taken to wearing an earpiece even when im not on the phone. so i can talk to myself in peace. i often still pull up beside someone who is obviously not fooled. i have talked to myself my entire life as far as i can remember. it seems like the most natural thing in the world to me. i had a paper route for a 3 or 4 year chunk of grade school/ junior high. just a few blocks within a 1/2 mile radius of my house. there were three things i particularly enjoyed about this paper route. one was timing myself to see just how quickly i could possibly deliver all of the papers. i would pedal as quickly as i could, drop my bike, sprint to one porch, dash through the hedges to the neighbors stopping as far as i could and still manage to fling the paper onto their porch. i believe i got it down to somewhere around 15 mins. which may or may not be at all impressive for the amount of papers delivered. the second thing was the cats. i loved cats as a child and on days i wasnt timing myself i would stop and pet the neighborhood cats. i was a super shy child but cats always seemed to love me. i could get anybody's cat to befriend me no matter how unfriendly i was told they were. i especially liked getting the timid cats to trust me. it was just a matter of getting low and being patient. moving slowly and letting them come to you. i had nothing but time for cats when i was a child. i didnt talk to people much but i had no problem talking to cats. the third thing i loved was talking to myself. i would ride from house to house and interview myself as i rode. one day 3 boys a bit older then me rode by on thier bikes while i was conducting one such interview and stared at me like i was crazy. they rode away laughing at me. at first i didnt understand. i wasnt talking out loud. if they couldnt hear me what did they think was wierd? it took me a while to understand that they saw my lips moving and that was enough for them to look at wierd. it didnt matter if people hear you speaking. from then on it has been a daily effort for me to speak to myself only in my head. which is hard when you are person who speaks with as much of her body as i do. i practically pantamime as i speak. i write by whispering a line out loud to myself all the while moving my hands around above the keyboard. then stopping only long enough to type it. its almost as if my mind and hands work together to form sentences. the thing i didnt like about the paper route was collecting the money. talking to the adults. knocking on doors my heart would race. i think that above the understanding of money this is one of the lessons my parents wanted me to learn by delivering papers. people were not my thing. adults especially. they still arent. my mother tells a story of my preschool teacher calling her in may and asking her if i enjoy preschool. my mom said that yes i seemed to and the teacher said its just that she hasnt said one word to me. ever. in the 9 months i had seen this woman 3 days or so a week i had never said a single word to her. and probobly not to any of the other kids either. that is the type of child i was. i was the kid who walked around with a snotty nose a box of tissues and did everything to avoid making eye contact with adults. i cried when i forgot my homework. never talked to adults but talked incessantly to cats.