Instructions on Falling

 As a child, I had a panic attack regarding the nature of colours. I pointed at the sky, called it blue. Someone agreed. I made a mental note, colours are taught by agreement. But is the blue I point at the same blue the other person sees? How would I know? When my parents put me in psychotherapy, for unrelated reasons, this was something she remarked on. What an interesting fear, my therapist said, as if it awarded any sort of merit. A real original fear. 

I had my first seizure age 14. This created another original fear. I tell you this in the car, on a blank stretch of highway. We are invited to dinner with your parents, which I haven’t met. You told me your mother is somewhat insane, and sometimes I hear her screaming through the phone, preceding your arrival. What do I do if you fall, you ask, and I shrug. Just let me be, don’t call an ambulance.

Along the way, we are forced to turn around and caught fighting within the rear-view mirror reflecting a darker blue. It kindly informs me things appear further away than they really are.

These are things I wasn’t informed of: Childbirth causes bruising, so as to form a brace around your neck. The temporality of discolouration stretched out over months, a different stretch than the sky, less vocal, much less malleable. Depression is often recurrent, inherited as well. Beforehand, you had asked me if there was a familial predisposition for postpartum depression, and I had said no, my predisposition is all mine. You tell me, you’re just like my mother. I look at my daughter, asleep in the backseat.

I spend the rest of the day from four to five and five to six and wash rinse repeat until the sun arrives back where it always does and nothing has really changed. In the early hours, the tv rearranges a million colour variables before deciding on a silent blue majority, endlessly performing. The liquid-crystal display is a flat panel unnecessarily stylistically aware, constantly plotting itself to cast something back at the intruding light. This isn’t as much an appearance as it is an utterance. You can’t expect us to listen to what we see, the way we cannot acknowledge every Freudian slip for its image. Judge Joe Brown informs us the defendants' curtains were blue, and gets corrected, aquamarine actually.

Supposedly, women are able to name more single differentiated shades when it comes to colours, but the idea the visual spectrum has an affinity for one gender over the other seems somewhat naive. Maybe we teach girls to place pink over red and chartreuse over green. (When asked why the curtains were blue, and not aquamarine, consider answering the author was raised male.)

Historians say before the Egyptians, no ancient language had a word just for blue. So I ask if it’s blue and you reassure me it’s not. It’s the way tomatoes smell like bell pepper and bell pepper like anything else. 

I help your mother set the table but forget the hierarchy of cutlery. You find me staring at a spoon. How would you kill yourself with a spoon? I ask and no one answers. I ask you why I can’t hear my own voice the way it really is, and you tell me this has its own name. Voice confrontation.

I wonder what the name is for the confrontation with your own words after you’ve said them out loud, and it turns out there’s no word for that yet.  

When I wake up the back of my head is sticky, and the neon uniforms inform me of another seizure. You got up and sat down at the table, your mother tells me, your pupils were huge, so I told you to lay back down where you fell, so you went to where the blood was. 

Sometimes the seizures are felt only as a slight current, spreading out like ferns as my eyesight doubles. On the way to the hospital, I get tested for covid twice. I ask the doctor in the ambulance how anaesthesia works, and she seems unable to explain it. Suppose it’s a bit like dying, she says before catching herself, except in the end you don’t.

After, I don’t notice the loss for three days but spend my time mainly cursing the hospital food. They say smell has an extraordinary associative use, the way someone’s perfume can cause you to confuse a stranger in the subway for another. I question if I have lost this now, but you refuse to give a straight answer. At least this won’t be hereditary, you say, in the same tone you’d allow a remark about the weather. If my blue isn’t your blue then the way an apple smells might be uniquely my own. I doubt this, the extreme fragility of perception scares me again. The sky is grey, and this is mentioned, but we have already agreed on what grey is, so we all sigh in relief. Anything said is stripped, you say by way of nodding when I turn my head. 

They tell me my sense of smell might return. It might not. It really depends. As I sit in a nondescript office, I am told it’s not uncommon. The word for it is anosmia, the Greek prefix an- announcing a deficit, a lack, quite literally a ‘not’. I tell the doctor they say the human experience is a detailed hallucination anyway, an automated response to various input signals with at least five commonly known variables. The neurologist points at my glasses and jokes, maybe your eyesight will attempt to make up for this then. 

My daughter spends her evenings dedicated to a ritual that has her laying out all her toys in straight rows, naming them one by one. She wears her face seriously, I ask her why and she ignores me, continuing her litany. She asks me to read to her at night when the naming is done, but she doesn’t want me to do it out loud. Instead, she sits next to me, emulating the silent act of reading. An act she doesn’t understand nor inhabits, but whose body language is so distinct as to be recognized from across a room. She doesn’t know I’m hiding my phone behind the book, or if she does, she doesn’t seem to care.

Shortly after settling, there’s a storm coming up. It has been announced days in advance, at least that’s what I assume, my memory is hazy still. It causes a rise in sea levels to the point of being easily recognised, and as the wind is heavy with moisture we retreat. The floors annoy me with their weight, I half expect little heaps of crystallised salt, neatly. Please close the windows, you tell me, it will rain. I wonder if you can smell the water. I wonder if rain has a different smell here. What did your father smell like, I ask. You look at me, eyes narrowed, I don’t even know what I’m supposed to say to that.

I fill out the silence recounting what my grandmother smells like, or lavender, a well-burnt steak. I still know what my perfume smells like, even as spraying it elicits no response. What does it smell like then, you ask, and I shrug. It’s not that easy, what does blue look like? The well-known test for colour-blindness shares its name with its creator, a Japanese army surgeon named Ishihara. In the waiting room of the paediatric office, there’s a booklet, filled with the coloured plates. What numeral do you see, I ask you, sending a photo I take with my phone. 

I don’t see any, you reply. We find out you can’t differentiate between green and orange, so I ask you to describe both. They look brown.

 I am told I might experience smells more pronounced within my dreams now, and they are right. I would prefer more expressive haptic sensations at night, I complain, watering the plants on the windowsill while you read. You inform me smell is among the least common hallucinations, even less than visual, not that easily auto-produced. I would let all of them go besides touch anyways, that’s the one I’d like to keep if I had to choose. You call me a liar for that, and we agree on sound being of importance as well.

 My mother visits, helping us prepare. I turn towards her, wanting to ask her if she is also 

Also what? I must have stopped my sentence mid-thought, a result of the bad habit of intermingling the processes of thought and speech to the point of subsumption. Impulsivity, my therapist called it. Try to think before you speak. 

Frightened. Frightened? I’m not sure if that’s what I wanted to ask, I tell her, but are you? There’s no reply. The TV that night tells us of the storm inching closer, an ominous presence that crawls closer with a fury so immense it slows itself down. The newscaster asks us to remain calm, to hold onto our presence of mind, the water will once again retreat. Our neighbours call it a bit of rain, nothing driving your car south to the deeper, harsher regions couldn’t give you. People have a way of talking down to threats, as if approaching the worst with a diminutive will magically render half of it worthless, a forced return to docility. It won’t be that bad, you reassure me, but I know you don’t actually believe that. I ask you if that mindset won’t automatically make it worse in retrospect and you let me have the last word. In anthropology, liminality describes the literal and figural space one inhabits in a state of betweenness, mainly used regarding certain rite of passages. (See: The Spearean exclamation of not being a girl anymore, but not yet a woman either. The liminal quality of anaesthesia.) Here I propose a new usage, the liminality of being between the forecast and the impact. It stretches.

Within a week the floorboards are perpetually wetted, if we’d lick them we’d taste salt. I told you to close the windows, you sigh, the Atlantic always had a way of finding itself locked inside. I don’t understand what that means, but I close the windows every night going forward. One day, we find the cellar underwater, and you curse the house. The salt leaves the wood stained, and at night I tell you about an article I read. An octopus has three distinct brains, I tell you, its head can’t know what its limbs are doing. The ability of being aware of your own position in relation to yourself and your surroundings. Sometimes when I lie down, half of my body feels too big for the other. When you wake up a third time you ask me what’s wrong, and I can’t find you. How common are tactile hallucinations? I don’t know, you say and try reaching out your hand. I try looking it up the next day but can’t find exact statistics. Instead, I find out, old people who lose their sight late in life often start to hallucinate. I bring this up with my neurologist who doubts the possibility, but, as he says, I suppose I can’t rule it out completely. True hallucinations are the ones you don’t recognise as such, so I ask him how I will know. Hallucinations you are aware of are called pseudo-hallucinations and are surprisingly common among all people. My mother tells me she occasionally hears her name being called when no one is home, and it remains in the room unquestioned.  

Later that day I think I smell pancakes. Do you think the voice your mom hears is one she knows?

I don’t know, what would it say if she doesn’t? At night I lie awake trying to discern if the people in my dreams look real or not. Someone once told me you can’t read within a dream, and whenever I wake up I can’t even seem to pinpoint the language it was in. Keep a dream diary, google tells me, promising better mnemonic results. It then proceeds to tell me about a peculiar face that has been dreamt of by a concerning amount of people and I ask myself how much of that is courtesy of being a front-page result when looking up the art of dreaming. Freud calls dreams the uninterrupted unconscious, something along those lines at least. I wonder if that man, whose face remains abstract enough to be found within a million faces, is just the occasional bursting of the collective unconscious into the lived experience of the select few. I wonder if I should envy them.

When I go down to the cellar I put on boots to prevent getting wet. It smells weird down there, you inform me.

Understanding the attributes of smell doesn’t always equal knowing, or how do you narrate the way something smells? (When my smell returns months later, it is gradual, and I encounter a new roadblock. What do you mean, ‘things smell off’, people ask, and the words don’t come. Things can smell sweet and citrusy, but what if I have never eaten a citrus fruit? The citrus of a man that grew up with grapefruits instead of clementines.) It occurs to me the linguistics of perception remain undercut by the body arriving there first. The water is up to my knees now, and the water is much darker than I assumed it would be. It seeps into my boots. Saussure didn’t address the leap of faith it takes to agree on blue, it was already claimed before we arrived there in conversation, but as a last resort you can call the sky wine-coloured. 

Marije Bouduin is a Belgian writer living in Germany with her daughter. She believes in Jacques Derrida and the filmography of Andy Warhol. Her work has been previously published or is forthcoming in Posit Journal (2020), Allegory Ridge's Aurora Poetry Anthology (2021), the Oakland Review (2021) and The Vital Sparks (2021).