I wake up with a knife in my throat. I am sick, suddenly. It came on in the night as I woke and slept and woke and slept, my face hot against the cool cotton pillow.
I was dreaming of nothing. This morning, after phoning in sick to work, I lie on the bed with my legs out of the duvet, bare, open.
I am sick and turned on. My head against the pillow feels stiff and wrong. My eyes throb. My hand finds its way between my legs to pet the short hairs, the warm crease.
I am watching Phillip Seymour Hoffman in Love Liza1, delirious with grief, out of his mind, yelling up toward the upstairs window of his mother-in-law. Hoffman plays a character whose wife has recently taken her own life. He doesn’t know why. He’s yelling up at the open window at Kathy Bates who has her hair up in a towel. He wants, all of a sudden, photos of his wife.
He yells up at Bates, I have nothing!
In the movie, Hoffman has begun huffing gasoline and model airplane fuel and flying model airplanes.
Bates yells down at him, you had everything!
*
While I wait for the clinic to call back, I watch the movie with my hand between my legs. I am in no hurry, I have no motive. I am merely lying in bed, sick, waiting to be seen.
*
I recall bringing a bowl to my son to puke into. Placing a towel along the edge of the bed. I recall making a washcloth wet, and the hotness of my son’s forehead.
I make an online order for a sex toy called Tracy’s Dog because it sounds loyal. So much has changed over the years. There is a pain in my chest that must be my heart.
The phone doesn’t ring, and I am too hot. I fling off the duvet so that I am naked from the waist down on the mattress. I want something sordid. On top, I wear a yellow t-shirt printed with the words Nice People Use Drugs, pulled up so that what I see from my throbbing eyes is a body, fragile and sexualized.
And then I am cold and pull the duvet back. I am a warm white cloud. I am a puffy duvet with knees sticking up.
*
The phone doesn’t ring and there is all day to be with myself. I carry on being sick, turned on. How fortunate I have been to know love.
Love Liza, 2002, https://m.ok.ru/video/7773866232398