Camelot

The girl belonged to her sadness. Like the tide, it overwhelmed her everyday (though without warning; not enough time to bring in the towels, you see). And with just as little notice, it would leave her, like a spurned lover, abandoned and even more miserable; muddy feet her only souvenir.

The girl belonged to her sadness. It helped her build the walls, grey and high and impenetrable, around her. She remembers twirling, watching the air catch her skirt beneath her as the bricks were laid like magic, delighting in the constancy, the anticipated 'clink' as each stone met stone. The sadness had built her a home—or a prison, a place of solitude to be sure, but one which did not lack a particular serenity.

Last night, driven by insomnia (despite having swallowed two sleeping pills), I searched my apartment for something to read; something appropriate for 5am; something to compliment the sounds of traffic, blaring ambulances and horn honks. I selected something generic from an open box of books (I've already begun packing my things in anticipation of my 'escape' from Korea)—a large anthology of English poetry; I'd used it several years prior in a British Literature course. Examining the contents, I turned to an old favorite, Tennyson's The Lady of Shallot, a highly appropriate choice for an isolated foreigner, I should think.

Reading with the freedom of one who will not be tested at a later time, I said each word slowly, letting the syllables twist around in my mouth. Reacquainting myself with the sounds, I found myself becoming somewhat uneasy; familiarity has always upset me somehow, like repetition means that something wasn't quite right the first time around. I closed the book slowly and shifted flat on my back.

Tossing a pillow to the floor, I was suddenly overcome by an immense weight—the sleeping pills—like I was hit and blacking out, like every ounce of energy was being siphoned; a plug released at the back of my head. Alarmed at this onslaught, this deprivation of will which I'd decided to inflict upon myself some several hours prior (they sometimes work very slowly for me), I propped myself up in bed, heavy and light (it's hard to say, exactly, which would overwhelm the other in a struggle to describe the sensation) at the same time…Deep breath, check your pulse, check for a heart beat, see if you can stand up.

On wobbly legs, I made it to the fridge where I downed a few gulps of water and decided an apple would be okay. Taking a few large bites, I brought it back to bed and lay down chewing, trying not to choke.

Sleeping pills are very strange. I've tried many and there are a variety of side-effects, which differ by drug or brand. With Nyquil for instance, you just kind of slide into a light sleep, like immersing yourself in a bathtub. The dreams I experience though, are rather fucked up.

I recently had a memorable dream about quarters and how the government decided they were superfluous and should be recalled and destroyed. Like any issue of interest, however controversy surfaced and two separate viewpoints emerged.

One side declared that quarters were a blight to the wallet, the eye, and to national security (don't ask me why). The supporters of this side claimed that dimes and nickles would serve the needs of the people quite well, that quarters were ugly and cumbersome.

The rabble-rousers on the other side of the debate, however, protested that all the vending machines and public telephones that take only quarters would have to be replaced, and that this procedure would surely put the country into a state of financial deficit, if not total economic ruin.

In the end--although it's really hard to pinpoint an "ending point" in a dream before the dream physically finishes--there was a world-wide recall and all 25 cent pieces were taken in and melted down for dental fillings. As a result, fanatical coin collectors became maniacal about rounding up as many quarters as possible. At night, people were burgled for the dusty quarters in old piggy banks (the weird thing about dreams is that I did not actually see—in my mind's eye—images of robbers climbing through windows, but somehow, the idea was inferred by whichever part of my brain is responsible for such inferences). In any case, 'quarter-theft' was on the rise.

Meanwhile, I'm in Korea, neither thinking nor caring about quarters and the (apparently) global repercussions of owning them, when I'm approached by someone in a trench-coat claiming I have something special. Mildly freaked out by 'trench-coat-man's' lack of a discernible face, I start running. The dream is essentially one of those typical chase-scene dreams and it's through what looks like a mixture of Bucheon and Ottawa—I can see the parliament buildings, but the vegetable stands and the garbage-lined streets, not to mention the exclusively Korean people walking about, overwhelmingly suggest the former.

Eventually, I trip and I fall, and notice that there's gum wedged onto the toe of my sneaker. Embedded deeply in the gum is a dirty, 1970-something Canadian quarter, sticky and disgusting. My pursuer stops dead in front of me, and screaming, "Take your damn quarter." I throw it hard, hitting him directly in the center of his forehead. It sticks, like a dirty, pinkish-reddish, possibly cherry-flavored third-eye. He looks upwards and goes cross-eyed. All around us, sirens blare and my alarm goes off, proving once again, ladies and gentlemen, that I am completely deranged.

Anyway, last night, I didn't take Nyquil (I have run out), but something inappropriately (and rather unoriginally) called Simply Sleep. Though I can't recall any actual dreams, the process of "drifting" off to sleep was terrible and mildly hallucinogenic, I think.

So, like I said, I'm laying flat on my back, chewing my apple when I'm struck with a sense of paralysis, like there's something sitting on my chest, not letting me breathe. My mind races…incubus, succubus? I convince myself that it's only the pills working their magic, so I try to relax and slowly lose consciousness, but each time I close my eyes, It's like I've plummeted off a skyscraper and pounded flat on my back, into pavement. My eyes refuse to do anything but jolt immediately awake.

I decide to pass the time (given I can't get up and am not motivated enough to try) by letting my eyes trace the patterns in my bedroom's lace curtain, the useless dollar store purchase thumb-tacked to my ceiling. Unfortunately, this proves disastrous, as I begin to convince myself that there are suspicious shadows, like circular shaped blobs that seem mildly tarantula-like.

I close my eyes tightly and when I open them again, the shadow is on the other window. A moment later, it's beside the wall near my head, and looking, I realize it's merely a trick of the mind and the light. I am still terrified and anxious, however and wake up several times in the next several hours, convinced that insects are crawling all over me (and my just-laundered sheets). Eventually, hours later and sometime after dawn when the racket usually starts in the hallway—doors opening and closing, dogs being let out for a walk—I sleep. And, people wonder why I'm so exhausted.

Anyway, perhaps this recent bout of insomnia has to do with my anxiety about a wide variety of things, the most prominent of course, being the end of my contract at Bicycle Language Institute here in Korea, and my return home for a month or so before I pack up again and move to Las Vegas. It all seems slightly surreal, like it's not really my life I'm writing about.

I'm worried about my final pay-check and severance bonus (a reward for staying a full year), as well as my plane-ticket. Will my boss try to screw me over—as he seems so fond of doing time and time again?

I'm worried about going back home, the questions and the silent assessment of my mental and physical health—the awkward hugs that always seem more like a search for prominent bones, the way they watch me eat, suspicious. What if my return home—home, with all its bad associations--catapults me into a bout of depression and rage as it so often does?

I'm worried that I won't be able to handle being shut out and bored, trapped in the middle of nowhere's-ville, rejected by friends with more interesting engagements—handling life at home the way it usually goes, I mean. And, after living in such a manic, neon, so-fast-paced-it's-blurry year-long mind-trip, will I, unable to cope with such a blinding contrast, be quick to embrace that part of myself which I despise, but am intimate with, regardless?

So, I'm worried about leaving and I'm worried about coming home and falling into all the old, anticipated behaviors that come so naturally around certain people. But, I'm also a bit concerned about leaving again and returning once more to utter uncertainty about my life, my abilities and of course the nature of the experience itself—I've never lived with another person, especially one who I care a lot about and who knows me better than most. Basically, what if I just can't keep it together? What if I become paranoid, that feeling like the chastisement of strangers, the disapproval of friends and the rejection of blood-relations combined? What if seeing my face, the sound of my feet on the floor, the way I open cabinets becomes an un-ignorable irritant? What if I run out of things to say, to think, to imagine? And worst of all, what if old habits become necessary? And, what if I can't stop; shake off its parasitical leech-grip, and turn my mind inside-out, you know, like beating a rug clean? What then?

And so, trying to forget the tingling imaginary spiders dropping from the ceiling and crawling all over my body, I grit my teeth and 'suck it up' (yet another expression I think makes little sense, but which I will use here as it seems to fit--and I am feeling a bit at a lack for words), I think of habits and how terrible and addicting they sometimes are. Finally, bored and in search of distraction, I decide to read The Lady of Shallot once more for good measure,

In the poem, the lady is trapped. Alone in a tower, on an island near Camelot (where King Arthur was thought to live), she lives a cursed life. While we do not know why she is cursed, exactly, one might think it is partly self-inflicted (but maybe not). In any case, the lady is not allowed to leave her tower. Furthermore, she is forbidden to look out the window.

She does however, have a mirror and the mirror is her salvation. She spends her time gazing into it and catching the reflection of the people and the world below her. They fascinate and terrify it seems, at the same time. She documents what she sees by weaving into her tapestry these things she cannot touch, the people she cannot speak to,

The people of Shallot know she is special, magic, maybe. They hear her singing, but they don't know her curse, all they can do is speculate.

One day, looking into the mirror, the lady sees Sir Lancelot on his horse coming from Camelot. In love, and unable to resist, possibly looking for a formidable hero to save her from herself, from the curse, she approaches the window for the first time ever. She feels the sunlight upon her face and she gazes straight down at him, self-destructive, but so satisfying. The mirror shatters. Her life's work, the meticulous tapestry is rent from its stand and flies off on the wind, gone. The lady knows she has ended it.

Outside, it is the dawning of a violent storm. The people return to their homes. It is autumn and the dead leaves swirl violently, symbolically. She walks along the river and finds a boat and writes her name on it, as if to tell the world, this is me; think of the stories, know what I am and how I lived, how I suffered.

She gets inside the boat and sets it adrift towards Camelot, the home of the man who managed to kill her and set her free in the same instant. She feels the onslaught of death and begins to sing her final song. She lies down in the boat and dies, sun on her face, released. Her body is found in Camelot, her intended destination. The people read the name on the boat and realize she is indeed the mythic Lady of Shalott, her curse ended. They mourn her death--though they did nothing to help her in life—and pray for her eternal soul.

Lancelot, however, cannot see her internal struggle to break out of confinement; to gain recognition; to be accepted among people; to be loved. Instead, all he can do is to assess her beauty, because for a woman, you must realize, that's the most important thing.

"But Lancelot mused a little space
He said, "She has a lovely face;
God in his mercy lend her grace,
The Lady of Shalott."

It's a sad poem—very demoralizing—but its significance and meaning is certainly not lost to me, as ubiquitous as the parallels are. It's crazy how things kind of stay the same.

I met up with a friend in Bupyeong recently for supper and a few drinks. What I find striking about this day is that for someone I barely knew up until then, the conversation was remarkably deep and thought-provoking. It's a very rare thing to really just observe and exchange ideas with a person who speaks honestly and without much reservation. Perhaps it is the cynicism that's seemed to have worked its way around my heart—dark and slow and random, like ink released into the water—over the years, but most truths are candy-coated, a little bit of sugar to cover up a bitter pill.

We talked about a lot of things: our families, work, the factors that drove us to Korea; but watching him speak, my entire perception of him changed—something a little sad and slightly tired, like a long, drawn out sigh, gradually became apparent. It's hard to find the right words to describe this 'something,' but I know it as most do, as the accumulation of life as it piles up—too much to simply sweep under the rug, too little to become over-the-top alarmed, but just enough that you can feel its oppressive, suffocating, rather unpleasant scent. Garbage.

The world is a funny place, I've learned, and it's really not so different on the other side of the world. People will always tell us how to think, that things are true when they're not; they'll judge us by our appearances, not by our skills, not by our intelligence, not by our compassion. They'll size us up, assess, medicate. In the name of making us better, the world will try to change us, cover up our insecurities and fears and model us after itself. They'll do all this to make sure we're perfect, like a proud parent counting fingers and toes, checking.

It's always been a challenge for me to discuss my unhappiness. I'd been resistant to therapists for years. But somehow, there, in the near-empty bar with bored servers meandering about pretending to clean the counters, I somehow managed to be candid. The walls of my tower did not crumble. I did not have a moment of revelation. Lightening did not strike me down. But, it was surprisingly easy to say the words I said, to talk about the pills and the fear and how I'm really tired, but not in the sleep-sense; how sometimes I think I might just die, that I'll become resistant and numb to everything; that the final brick will fall into place cutting off my oxygen, my contact to the outside world; that I'll just let myself fade away—out of sight, out of mind. No dramatic trip to Camelot for me, no one to marvel at my life or achievements, just gone, like dandelion fluff on the wind.

I alarm even myself sometimes and this moment was not an exception. Not really looking forward to "the reaction," I slowly raised my eyes from the glass where they'd been firmly planted as I'd been speaking, and actually, he didn't really seem so surprised after all, like maybe, my 'something' sometimes shows through it all; like maybe, I'm not a very good liar and my friends are not so gullible after all. It was one of those moments where my mind could conceive of nothing clever to say to make what I'd just said seem less severe. Nothing at all.

He told me that his idea is that the world has very few individuals who allow themselves to be different and honest. And that, coming from a world where 'different' translates to 'strange' and honesty makes people uncomfortable, these rare people are often unhappy, maybe a little escapist. Some kill themselves and the rest come to Korea to teach English, I guess. Anyway, he told me that these individuals almost have a duty to the rest of the world to stay the way they are, to make an impact. Winston Churchill was bipolar, he said. An extreme man for an extreme time, I think, though I'm just some girl on a precipice, waving frantically, trying to get a little recognition, not some revolutionary. Tough luck.

It's hard to recount quite what he told me next, but the long and the short of it is that to get a little satisfaction, a little peace, you need to stick it out, otherwise you kind of deserve to be forgotten, It's like bowing out of the game early actually makes you pretty unremarkable, not rare, not different, and not so honest after all.

This conversation was something I needed. After an incident at the bar, when someone mentioned (over a plate of strange, Korean-ized poutine) that I looked like I need to eat more (to which I did not respond, and took up a forkful of cheese, annoyed), he told me that he wanted to talk to me. He said that he was going to think about what he wanted to say and that it was important and so, I should really try to remember. He told me to write it down. Okay? Important. It was one of those conversations that feels kind of like a release, cathartic, but also keeps you up at night, brain on fire.

I did see a counselor—Jane—during university, for several years, and while I admit that our sessions did tend to upset me (sometimes), I do miss talking to someone like her, impartial. While I do feel as though I've been quite honest with John—more-so than I've ever been with someone with whom I've been in a relationship—it's an honesty that sometimes feels a little censored primarily because I know that sometimes he's a bit scared for me and thinks its possible for me to just suddenly be alright, like magic, ta-da.

On the weekends, they go to a vegetarian restaurant. They stumble across it by chance and consider themselves pretty lucky, checking carefully that it is actually, honest-to-goodness meat-free, true vegetarian cuisine and not just pork or fish piled on top of soybeans and a block of tofu, Korean-style. Inside, they see the glass-door fridge and give it the thumbs up—soy meat.

By mistake, they confuse the waitress and order too much. It's delicious, so they eat it all anyways.

Walking from the restaurant back to the hotel, the girl begins to feel a little nervous, a little weighed down. And, by the time they're back in the room and the man plops down onto the bed, "stuffed," he says, she is in full-scale panic mode.

Worried about the food she's just consumed, she is in fact very unwell. It's only vegetables, she tells herself…There's pressure on her stomach and the man is sitting there, watching her fix her hair. He tries to put his arm around her waist (she swats it away), which feels about ready to explode. It's a sensation that makes her want to run away and hide out somewhere. Physically, she feels disgusting, yes, a sluggish lump, but mentally, the girl is on a rampage, shrieking, to the nearest washroom. But, she knows she can't. She'd promised. The man watches her as she eyes the toilet. She just can't.

She'd been trying really hard lately, even putting on several upsetting pounds. But, she thinks, it's really very difficult sometimes to pretend to be alright. The guilt, the worry, the sadness, all of it adds up to the pile of what she calls 'the something," emotional rubbish. She tells herself to deep breathe, again and again and again. She is worried she will start to hyperventilate. In her head she can almost hear her mother's voice telling her, "It will go down soon. Wait. For people who don't eat a lot normally, food goes through the system really quickly when you occasionally eat a lot." Not very helpful, mother, the girl thinks.

Standing in front of the mirror, watching him, the man pulls her down onto the bed and asks her to please not do it, but if she really must, she can. He asks her what it will look like. The girl's eyes roll upwards. She is not in the mood to divulge details and can feel the anger rising. He tells her he loves her and is worried about what her body must look like from the inside. Innards, he calls them. The girl feels terrible. She really can't do it now. Not today. Fuckfuckfuck.

She has never been in this sort of situation before. It's usually a yes-no flash judgment that does not require discussion with a second party. Opinions do not need to be formed; it's really not one of those decision-making-sort-of-circumstances. Honestly.

Time passes as they lay there on the bed, all stretched out. She can feel digestion. Her stomach aches. He asks her if she's still upset. Yes, she says, "It's painful."

The man takes the girl by the hand and says they should go for a walk. "You'll feel better; It'll help," he tells her. "I know it will." Standing up, the girl is not so sure.