November

It's November again, November again, and everything is death and fiction. The month Jinglekitty's dad had, after all that fanfare, finally rounded the corner and began (nearly finished) heading to his cancer death. The month Jinglekitty's boy had lost a brother, a tempest of a young man, a brooding fraternal figure that Jinglekitty can never now meet. Jinglekitty's boy and now she too politely reject the traditional, communally tragic mourning of soldiers, the cheap bright red poppies with their beady black eyes and sharp pins. November again, and it's Jinglekitty's boy's father - the one who didn't have it coming and in fact was owed a defensive entourage of green beret guardian angels to keep something like this from happening, but again, again November, and he was rediagnosed with an illness that over the next several months would take him too. Jinglekitty's boy, though he could not always be motivated to go to much trouble about his own happiness, made that shining man's remaining months a time of joy and fulfillment. He did it month after month, all the way up to the final day, and because Jinglekitty was on the scene for this one, she helped all she could. All those months of relative happiness, almost? Almost a time of peace and triumph? All those months, but at the head of their bed was still November. November, again; November, cursed. Too much death to be borne.

But also fiction. Because when luckier years do come, and the most they have to face is the ghostly Novembers past that lurk and chill and haunt, that leaves one other November tradition that has to be faced: fucking. NaNo. WriMo.

Jinglekitty and her boy are having one of the luckier years, as it happens. She cradles him in her arms through the hardest days, but too has days of her own, where for no special reason it seems her body just wants to sleep, or cry, or take expensive street drugs for days at a time. Everything she knows about survival is to just do her best to accommodate her body's volatile and depressive/escapist and headstrong urges, so at this time she is up at 4:00 AM after a twenty-four-hour-plus two-person celebration of MDMA. She's got her laptop on her lap and her shaky fingers are jumping nervously around on the keyboard and she knows that she's bipolar and that. furthermore, she is right now very clearly-cut hypomanic, but what does that matter? Or more specifically, what does that matter in the face of NaNoWriMo?

Basically ever since she got internet access - in her teens, for Christ's solemn sake - she has run into NaNoWriMo every year. That's how it works: recurring, reliable, making November for other people about mustaches and fiction, and making November for Jinglekitty about death and fiction. Her psychiatrist contends that with all this death going on, she must have more than enough material to write a piddling little novel. Jinglekitty, hypnotized by the bright laptop screen and too manic to tell whether she's even typing sensical English still, is distracted by having this ADHD-ish flashback to this thing her psychiatrist has said, and Jinglekitty is reminded of the Lou Reed song where he advises gently that "you can't always trust your mother", and thinks, Yup, that is true of the person who is paid to ensure and maintain my sanity, and then as an afterthought Jinglekitty also thinks, And it's true of my mother too. Man, Lou Reed knew shit.

Back to the novel. She's accepted, again, the challenge of writing a novel in a single month. Now, as always, the things she wants to write about flow over her in so overwhelming a rush that she feels mentally waterboarded. Probably that's the kind of comparison that you only make if you've never been waterboarded. Temporarily losing griip on the reins of the hypomania, Jinglekitty realizes all over again how unbelievably, stupidly privileged she is, and it makes her feel unworthy. And shitty. Like unworthy shit. (She is just putting words together now and hoping for the best. But really, what would worthy shit look like? She scrambles after those runaway reins.) After the reliable self-loathing for being so lucky and lazy and undeserving, she feels the next thing, which is always a kind of meta self-loathing; now she hates herself for, in the face of such luck and luxury, still being so mopey and droopy and impossible all the time. If she must be one of the lucky ones, then why can't she at least enjoy some of those unearned but nevertheless bestowed luxuries?

Jinglekitty's precious boy is asleep in their bedroom, and now out loud to the room and the blue LED lights and the cats she does a quiet and unhappy mimicry of her imagined self: "Boohoo," she murmurs, "boohoo, I've got a designer hobo tote and a man who loves me and so much food that I may someday actually die of having too much food, but oh, how I suffer. Wah-wah. Boohoo."

But saying it aloud unexpectedly exorcises this lapse into self pity, simply because it is now so undeniably pathetic that even Jinglekitty cannot tolerate it.

She reads back a few paragraphs and realizes she is mostly stream-of-consciousness recording her own thoughts and actions, as they occur. Could that ever be considered a novel? Could she somehow charm some publisher into looking at a manuscript that was just endless blah, blah, narration of a life that unfortunately falls just short of being remarkable in any way that would make such a work useful in any way.

When she panics about writing, she panics about having a "voice". She wants, desperately and cravenly, to have a "voice". But she isn't sure how to find one, or what hers might be like, and what if she finds her "voice" only to be told it's not saying anything interesting?

Write what you know, she thinks, ever hopeful that words someone else has already found will help her find hers. Draw on any unique experiences you've had, or a socio-cultural group you belong to. Represent the people you have things in common with.

Jinglekitty has been: abused by a sadistic boyfriend. Abandoned by her stupid fuckup father. Stunted by her even more stunted mother. Seduced by a high school teacher. Diagnosed with bipolar disorder, OCD, and a host of little related issues. And of course... she's been raped.

Jinglekitty stares at the declarative statement she has just carelessly typed. She has never seen this written down before. You wouldn't think it would make a difference, but apparently it somehow does, because what she forces herself to do next is type it in clear, no-two-ways-about-it first person: I have been raped.

Hummm.

She stares at the sentence. She tries to clear her mind to even better focus on that sentence. She has never, even in writing fiction, had cause to type those words in that order in that sentence. She takes a stab at thinking that it's a misunderstanding, that rape is for starters waaay too dramatic a thing to actually happen to her, she's probably exaggerated something or misread a situation, she is a real drama queen, there is no denying that. Wouldn't it in fact be just like her to go and--

No, she is not really buying it, and not being able to buy any other explanation probably means she has to get used to that sentence and keep going, right? Like her Pollyannaistic, rose-tinted-glasses psychiatrist would tell her. "Oh, Jinglekitty, yes, I understand that you have been raped and I can see that it was an event you find important but you really have to at least try just playing Frisbee in the park sometime--" And then whatever she says after she says that, which Jinglekitty doesn't know because she obeys her body's urges and one of those urges is to lose herself in a peaceful dissassociative drift every time this woman tells her to do something dumb. Because she'd rather be crazy than play Frisbee in the christing park. You can't always trust your psychiatrist.

Well, fine. Then she'd been raped; so what? She certainly didn't feel like writing about it, so it wasn't really of any importance right now. Total "back burner" issue.