White Sheets

Sophalette Silhouette
May 2018
Los Angeles

to Allison, Heather, Christy and Bonni

This morning I lay on my back in my bed barely woke, my son rummaging around the bathroom on his way to work out and then the sound of Sophie seizing from her room and his bark Sophie's having a seizure! even as he walks out the door (the quotidian) and my sigh and hobbled walk (I'm working out, still) down the hall at no great speed because I've done this before and again and again. That I was lying on my back thinking about seizures and Sophie and what to do next and how very tired and sick unto is irrelevant, redundant, mundane and tedious. I settled my girl and climbed back into bed with my thoughts, my incessant thoughts, what to do, how to do, a kind of solipsistic world except that it's not me my mind but, literally, Sophie, her mind. Or brain. Or not -- the solipsism, that is. Then the world broke through. I had conversations right then and there, as we do in the world's mind, that vast space that some call unconnected but we know better, conversations with a friend in Maine and a friend in Colorado, both of whom struggle with their sons' seizures, both of whom know everything there is to know about cannabis in addition to seizures, both of whom fiddle and adjust, grow and learn as they go, as we go. The world broke through the way it does (the universe is abundant) in the form of these women and another who spoke to me from Greece, and another from San Diego who was the last person I spoke with the night before and who figures in my dreams. In the moment of the morning, flat on my back in the bed, post-ictal, I willed myself toward signs, out of the pull of darkness and toward light and lightness, acknowledged in my mind the miracle of these connections, our wisdom, these women. I made my bed. I lie down in it. We lie on our backs in these beds, this bed, next to one another, I feel them there, white sheets, these women, and we are connected and everything is ok. It's going to be okay.