The Intervention

Day 1

“I don’t know what I am.”

When I first walked into the writer’s residency, 7 people were sitting at the dining room table. At 7 PM, I was the second-to-last person to arrive.

The silence in the room wasn’t awkward, but it wasn’t meditative. It felt like I was interrupting an intervention where no one knew their role. Struggling to make eye contact, I glanced in the direction of strangers & attempted small talk, hoping a mediator would come forward and tell me the people who love me are concerned.

Once we all loosened up a bit, I was asked, “So, are you an essayist?”

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The mattress in my temporary room is bouncy and soft. It cradles me like a baby. Louanne and I must balance our weight strategically or risk conjoining at the hip even more than usual. We both took our anxiety medicine and sank in.

I don’t have any interest in attending a modern cruise. I would prefer most any excursion to a floating mall with entitled, unleashed children, and their even looser, day drunk parents. The one thing that interests me about sleeping in the middle of the ocean is the exact thing that deters many: the rocking of the waves. Movement relaxes me. Road trips, train rides, and even flights (minus takeoff and landing), make the space between my eyes melt into something softer. At the beginning of the year, I got a new mattress, and I learned that if I shifted my hips side to side, I could rock myself to sleep. The memory foam doesn’t have much spring, but it does the job.

My mattress here works like a charm. The first night, my brain still swayed from the winding drive up. It was as though the bed was breathing heavy beneath me. I dropped into its belly: rising, falling.