Out of breath

January 3rd, 2023

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fever_Dream_(Schweblin_novel)

It happened to me last evening. I had to get up and walk around just to break the unsettling mood for a while. I would go into the kitchen, turn up the lights, look around and turn them off. I would go to the window, look into the darkness outside, and pull the curtains back. I would go to the bathroom, splash some water on my face, look at myself in the mirror and go back to my reading chair. My safe and comfortable and familiar reading chair. My safe place, my refuge from the madness of the world, my shelter from the ordinariness of life. Except for this time, I felt frightened as hell sitting back there and picking up this book again to read it.

Not even a book, it was just a 65-page-long novella. Something I could read within an hour and forget all about it on the way to make myself an evening snack. Last night was different though. I am a grown man, emotionally (more or less) stable, and yet I was profoundly disturbed and unsettled by reading words printed on pages of this book. I thought about stopping for a while, maybe even leaving this book until the next day, but in a perverse way, I wanted to get to the end — to find out what happened and to be done with it. To have peace of mind, I wouldn’t have known that there are still more pages for me to read.

It didn’t work.

My mind was racing out of the normal frame of reference for a weekday evening. I couldn’t sit in one place. I felt like a surreal disaster was spilling from the pages of this book into my life and my emotions. I could almost feel anxiety overwhelming my senses. Scratch that “almost” — I was physically apprehensive in a way that made me take deep breaths and made my movements nervous and erratic and clumsy in a way that I broke a stem of my fully grown Anthurium plant while watering it to calm my nerves after I was finally done reading. I still need time to process and reflect on what I read.

Reading is supposed to be an activity that gives pleasure or learning or escapism or aesthetic experience. But on some occasions, a book comes along that defines all those expectations. With plain and simple words, it creates an extreme tension that can only just be taken by a reader. But it is also a cathartic experience, at least for me. After the discontent of last evening and broken sleep specked with nightmares last night, I feel much better today. I feel a better person as a thinking, feeling human. I feel stronger as an emotional individual. And I will still look and actively search for those kinds of experiences