The Thing in the Whirlpool Eye

Words flood my ears. The old man across the aisle is talking and gesturing. I’ve never experienced language as viscerally before reading this book. After 11 days in this foreign environment, I’m tired of Spanish. The losing battle of grabbing sporadic words like footings on the moss-covered cliff under that waterfall. I cover my ears with the hood of my jacket.

Words flood my head. I become aware of my constant inner dialogue, currently in Chinese. Chinese is for banal things. Logistics: flight status, checking my passport and wallet, ruminating on the stinking clothes in the checked luggage. These words are calm, neutral, and reserved. They form the clean white shroud covering a decaying body.

If I peek under the Chinese words, I see English. The English words are clinging onto my body like what I imagine escamole to be like in the wild. What they describe is a feeling of a thousand ant larvae nagging my flesh. Are my arms tingling? My thighs hot and itchy? I’ve got words for them. I feel restless, anxious, agitated, and angry. I’m tired, I tell myself in therapy words, it’s a vulnerability factor that makes me susceptible to these emotions. My chest is glued solid like a piece of concrete. Air seeps in and out, giving me just enough oxygen to think of these words. I feel restless, anxious, agitated, and angry. The space in the airplane crushes on me from all directions. I am stuck here for five hours.

These words bring out action urges. The English words, associated with the situations where they’ve been used to convey my restlessness, anxiety, agitation, and anger to healthcare providers, pull my nerves towards a whirlpool. The words I slapped onto myself when I stomped my feet as if on an imaginary whack-a-mole machine, carved with my fingernails red streaks on my arms, banged my head against the wall behind a couch, and screamed those silent screams. The words that I picked up from the floor where I crushed my body from that deliberate futile fall. They are all blended to be the medicine for a failing mind.

The center of the whirlpool is the unspeakable. Words collapse into meanings and concepts too dense to hold. The medicine of English acts like glitter sand trying in vain to make this whirlpool pretty, or maybe slow down a little. Things in the eye of the whirlpool are resisting. I step closer to the eye of that whirlpool and open my mouth, but I can’t fish out any words.

Someone grabs my wrist. I stare at a wide-angle camera. I smile meekly and stick out my tongue. Someone forcefully penetrates me. Someone drills a hole into my skull. Someone smiles and says I don’t have other choices. I can’t move. Don’t fight it. I get my orgasm.

The thing in the whirlpool eye.