About the project:
“Isles”was born from a desire to understand. I have felt, all my life, the weight of mine and my family’s story, our circumstances and our belief systems, be them conscious or unconscious. What I express, repress, keep a secret and dissociate is interwoven in every single one of the cells in my body, including my hyperactive immune system. My emotional state and my glucose levels are inseparable. My life story and my insulin intake cannot be looked at as different concepts.“Isles”is a meditation, a way for me to look at myself and weave together all my parts. The hope is to integrate, to understand the whats and whys.
Hypoglycemia can kill you fast. The brain, our most self-centered organ, is also the greatest consumer of glucose. If blood sugar levels drop, it starts to shut down the rest of the body, in a desperate attempt to save fuel —it will drink every last drop of sweet sustenance before collapsing.
That’s how it feels; like parts of me slowly go dark. If I collapse, right here, in the middle of this park, I won’t have had a chance to say goodbye.
It’s a beautiful day outside. Beneath the trees, the filtered light takes on a greenish hue. A dog yawns on a patch of grass in front of me. I’ve found a spot on the corner of a bench facing a fountain—I can barely see it though, given the sheer number of people coming and going, dodging one another and getting in the way. I rub my right hand against my thigh, starting from the knee, pressing down with my thumb. I look around and crane my neck, trying to scrunch it down over my shoulders like an accordion.
I need to drink this entire bottle of pineapple juice. I bought it at a street stall the moment my alarm went off. Something must have gone wrong—with my meal, with the heat, with my nerves, or with who knows what, but my blood sugar is draining away, slipping right out of my body. Within the nebula that is my mind, clusters of stars begin to vanish. Suddenly, in a corner, the light goes out. A void emerges in the upper-left quadrant; I lose an immense cloud of hydrogen, and, along with it, all sensation in my feet. Blinking becomes a conscious task that demands effort; I don’t want to make it, so I simply close my eyes as I drink. There dies a sun, leaving its entire solar system in complete darkness. My hand has already made a hundred trips up and down my thigh. It occurs to me that all this back-and-forth motion is burning glucose, but the movement helps keep my anxiety at bay. Fighting this panic is costing me the very sugar I don’t have; I am living proof (at least for now) that sometimes, resisting the inevitable only makes things worse. If you fall into quicksand, stay still.
Someone shouts, somebody laughs and claps; there’s people making music, but it’s all distorted, as if the hot air were making the sounds bubble. I hear the beep of my insulin pump. It hasn’t stopped vibrating; I pull it out from my pocket and imagine it’s screaming at me, threatening me. My sugar levels are very low, and they’re stillplummeting. The app on my phone—connected to the glucose monitoring patch on my arm—picks it up, too: my screen turns crimson, filled with arrows pointing straight down. I don’t have much time.
At least I’m sitting down, though I doubt I could stand. I think about calling an ambulance, but I suspect that if I had to start speaking to explain the situation, my voice would sound like a soaking-wet mop dragging across a school hallway floor. Besides, wouldn’t it be better to call my mother? Or my father, or my siblings—or the girl I dated a couple of years ago? Because I’ve only ever managed to fall in love once, with her; what a waste it would be if I died here, alone in a park bench. I’d lose the chance to experience that feeling again.
I should tell my mother that I love her, but there’s a six-hour time difference between New York and Madrid, so she’ll be asleep; and honestly, I don’t think I have the time or energy left to unlock my phone and make the call. I ought to keep drinking. The more pineapple juice I gulp down, the higher my chances of survival. I’ve never really known exactly when a person loses consciousness and slips into a coma—I don’t know how close I am to that edge. I don’t know how far away those thresholds lie, or how quickly they’re being crossed. I want to call someone, or cry out for help, or at least make sure that someone sees me losing consciousness—if only so I can say that someone was there, that someone witnessed it. That they saw the sun go out.
I don’t do it. I move only my arm; I bring the juice to my lips. My fingers tingle. I tremble.
A blink of an eye lasts longer than before.
I stare at a shapeless, unfocused mass of people. There’s this phase in hypoglycemia in which I feel myself reverting to something animalistic, primitive, a beast between two palm fronds; I’m in awe of the certainty I feel that nothing matters except my own survival.
An example: I drag my body to the fridge, haul myself forward, shove everything into my mouth without thinking; juice and Coca-Cola drip down my chin; I mix bread and fruit and cheese and sauces and whatever else I find; I use my hands—tearing, shredding, and stuffing it all into my mouth—barely chewing, coughing and spitting, then swallowing again; my fingers slick with grease. A ravenous urge burns across my forehead, and I breathe with incredible depth, as if someone were pumping oxygen into me through a funnel embedded in my throat.
I remember having done that several times.
I exhale, emptying myself out, and sparks fly from between my teeth. I can’t see clearly. Things—people? —move before me, but they’re terribly blurred. It doesn’t matter; I’m the center of the universe. I’m like a child. I drink my juice.
The feeling of losing control is a curious one, for it seems to be well-organized. From the bottom up, my limbs go numb. Mental fog seeps in through my nose and settles in my glabella. It concentrates; crystallizes. My thoughts cease to be mine—though I wonder if they ever truly were—and questions of this sort—like the one about love—begin to bubble up. Flashes.
Suddenly, I find myself wondering if I have ever truly been rebellious. I don’t know. My mother used to say that as a baby, I never cried—that I was pure tenderness. The thought of dying fills me with distress, for tenderness makes everything interesting, and I long to hold a little girl in my arms—to know that she’s my daughter, to watch her cling to me, burying her fingernails into my skin, like tiny half grains of rice. I tell myself that this is my life’s dream and purpose; for a moment, it feels as though my body might finally be able to relax—but it doesn’t. There remains a starry corner of my mind that still clings to the juice, to the park, to the yawning dog, and to reality itself. I take another sip.
A sudden flash: a line from a John Ashbery poem that says the bedroom of the soul is our moment of attention. I force myself to pay it— I tell me that, in doing so, I’m bringing myself back to consciousness. A minute’s passed? Or is it already the next day? I can’t tell.
Tachycardia is the worst part, for it forces itself upon me. It tramples my chest, imposing a rhythm of time from which there’s no escape. The only thing I can feel is my heart.
A hundred beats.
Hundred and twenty.
Hundred and forty.
Panic and tachycardia are close allies —and panic is a diabetic’s sworn enemy. It wants to trick me, it whispers, tells me everyone’s watching me, says all can hear the frantic hammering in my chest. Random clusters of thought dissolve, giving way to a single, definitive question. It is here that my illness bifurcates, and I ask myself (as I’ve been doing for years): which comes first, diabetes or shame?
I don’t dial 911, I don’t call my family, and I don’t ask for help, because I am ashamed. Right now, on the verge of losing consciousness, nothing should matter except staying alive. I ought to scream, to make a scene; for if I simply let myself fade away while sitting on a bench in the middle of Washington Square Park, no one is going to stop and help me. New Yorkers are more than used to seeing people sprawled on the ground, asleep on benches, or passed out in the subway; they won’t be the least bit fazed to stumble upon a twenty-something year old with his head lolling and his eyes closed, sitting upright, back straight, clothes clean, beard neatly trimmed. I need to grab their attention—my life’s slipping away, my blood feels as if it’s being pulled downward—I have to do something, right here, right now, but I can’t.
Asking for help means intruding on another person; it means meeting their gaze, making demands, stepping out into the spotlight to take a bow before the entire audience. It is here, in this theater of interaction, where human beings are made and molded. In my case, the guiding emotion is shame. The gaze of the other is the place where we all live and die. What is it, then? What’s about to kill me? Hypoglycemia, or my own inability to step outside myself?
Web image from Wiki Commons.
