The Grenade

Category C: Highly Commended (2023) Monash Short Story Writing Competition
Author: Maria Anders

I have a grenade inside, live ammunition ready to go off at any time. I look for the reason, a cause, a trigger each time, but after every attack I’m left battered, broken, wondering why and when I will have to endure it again.

Between attacks, life goes on. I have adapted quite well to going deaf, even when funny acquaintances make jokes at my expense. (To think I used to hate being woken at 5 am on hot summer days by birds singing and chirping non-stop. I wish I could remember how they sounded and not just the feelings they inspired.) I now use a cane, it’s quite lovely, with bright, small flowers. I bought it because I was concerned about having to hold onto every solid surface on my path when I stumbled about at the shops. With my cane, I’m able to be free, on my own, somewhat living life. My pretty cane makes some people uncomfortable because they don’t understand that I can’t tell up and down, if I’m vertical or horizontal, walking or falling. My gyroscope broke. There’s so much healthy bodies do that we take for granted until ours can’t anymore.

Next to my grenade sits a time bomb. This one I built on my own. I assembled it from fear, bit by bit. The memory of each violent episode tightly packed into a shrapnel shell, secured tightly with despair. All hope and optimism stripped away. It sounds melodramatic but living in this dark fog is staggering.

My illness and I are terribly inconsistent. People see me out one day, having fun at a party (I’ve had great days), laughing and warming-up a flute of bubbles in my hand, helping in the kitchen, acting “normal”, and they assume (how we like to assume) that I am cured. They see me again, perhaps the next day, eyelid heavily draped over my bad eye, slurred speech, stringing nonsense into garlands that I vomit syncopated, free-from with no syntax, and they ask frustrated, “again?”

One Sunday morning I woke up feeling great. I dared to move in bed, head side to side, freely (gently and slowly, every care taken to not awaken the beast): up, down, left, right. “I’m free!” I went to find something to accomplish, something postponed from last time, I threw clothes in the washer, poured toilet-cleaner in the bowls, I even had a shower. My freedom lasted from 6 to 8. The room began to spin again. Slow and tentatively at first, a warning that the tea cup ride was gathering momentum. I tried lying down, contorting my head into different positions, trying to find one that would make it stop. It didn’t work. I got up defiant and stumbled around the kitchen bench (always holding on). The bounce in my steps mixing and melding with the vertigo made it seem less horrible than usual, I managed to confuse the enemy (my brain), but after 3 minutes and two close calls, I went back to bed and took “the medication” (it doesn’t stop anything but it can sometimes make it a little less brutal- if it doesn’t make it worse- every pill’s a gamble). I closed my eyes and pretended to be in Hawaii.  The loud pulsatile tinnitus pounding in and around my temples soon ruined the fantasy (the terrified rhythm of my racing heart too fast to pass for waves).

I almost quit my job last week. Work is the last connection to the person I used to be. I made myself wait a few days, but I still can’t understand why they would want me to stay. I had never considered myself a fool but, the fact that waking up to a static room makes me hope I’m cured, proves I am, at the very least, naïve. I should have forgotten by now what it feels like to trust my brain to work as it once did, my body to take me places (like out of bed), to be able perform daily tasks from beginning to end (to shower), to be a reliable employee or a decent friend. To be able to do more than just want to show up.

 From this side of foolishness, I often wonder why I persist with hope. When my dad got sick, I flew frantically to my family; a 36-hour trip, clearing three sets of customs, always running to make the next connection. All that time I kept being assaulted by the thought that at that precise moment he was both dead and alive, my Schrödinger-like dad. Delaying my arrival as much as possible as I cleared the last inspection in my hometown, I wished for a “miracle”. I never talked to him again.  My dad who was there for me my whole life, even after I moved as far away as the planet allows. I never considered that he would be gone one day. It’s the same with illness. My brain and body were strong and reliable one day (and for many years), then never again.  I still hope that this curse will magically lift, that I can go back to a healthy, productive life. I still wait for a miracle.

I was raised in a very religious culture and in a family that yearned for the “good old days” before the Second Vatican Council, Latin mass and all. I played my part better than most. I read the bible over and over, looking for answers. I went to catechism as a pupil and became a Sunday school instructor in high school. I sat through daily mass on the way to university and read countless books on world religions to compare and contrast. I was after the truth, I wanted all of it. After a bad experience in a youth group, I concluded 15 years of research. At 21 I changed my focus to science instead. I aimed to always be pragmatic, rational, empirical.

Recently, however, I often find myself wondering if I need an exorcism, or even a traditional cleanse: smoke, eggs, spit, herb flagellation. As I fall asleep at night, I wonder who shakes and tortures my pin-covered voodoo doll at all hours, don’t they have better things to do? (What did I do for them to hate me so?)  Fantastic thoughts assault me all day long: if I pop this pill, I’m in control; If I stay clear off carbs, I won’t have attacks (but I do anyway); If I avoid chocolate I will be fine (I’m not). Most days I only sleep over the deaf ear to prevent angering the other. I go outside barefoot every day, to let mother earth take away my negative energy and give me something, I don’t know what: help, charity, pity? I take 20 minutes of sunshine for vitamin D when I can make it to the yard in the morning. I have evicted phone chargers and electronic devices to the other end of the house, far away from my head. I ingest every supplement some stranger declares miraculous on Facebook. I eat more protein, no seed oils, no sugar, I always eat clean and free range (or pretend to believe this is the case as I don’t source my produce from the wild). I’m surrounded by plants in every room (but only the good kind that purify the air or sanctify the space). I stimulate the vagus nerve with guttural chants and cold water when I manage to shower and, occasionally, I even wonder if perhaps after retrograde Uranus leaves Aquarius, my luck will change… magical thinking is exhausting.

And then there’s the pain. Fire from scalp to toes, stabbing at every joint, crunching, creaking, popping, electric shocks that come and go, internal tremors, hot and cold poison circulating, spreading to every pore. This pain I smile through and share my life with. Pain is no grenade, just an old friend (who’s a sadist).

I have a grenade inside me, an arsenal in fact. Each blast takes another piece of my soul, another week off my life, and I’m left holding onto a shred of humanity in a universe of despair.

I don’t like war. I don’t like explosives. I was recruited against my will. Why is my body the battle ground? Why did my brain surrender without a fight? (Is life a war?)

It has taken years to understand what a privilege it was to be in good health. To have once believed that when one gets sick, the natural progression is to get better. Lately I have come to accept that there is no end to how much worse an illness can become (without the mercy of ending one’s suffering). This understanding gets caught in my throat every time someone tells me “how glad they are I’m, finally… (there’s always a slight but clear inflection here) better.”

If I could talk to the younger me of 10 years ago (I have aged 30 years in the last 6), I would strongly urge her to live life enjoying every moment, good and bad. I would tell her to not waste another second making faces at her reflection in the mirror or the size of her pants. I would suggest that she adjusts the metrics of her life and, always wearing a smile (real or fake, it doesn’t make a difference), be grateful that she can get up and walk away at will, that she’s able to vacuum and mop the whole house in one go and drive herself places; work, dance, walk, and play with the people she loves. Wake up! We all have a time bomb inside, waiting to go off.