Complex partial seizures, he says. I stare at the wall with a vacant smile. Consistent with epilepsy. Yes. I’m answering yes. I don’t have epilepsy, do I? Even if I do it can’t explain the time difference. Time lapses. Time that I’ve lost. I try to answer him about his epilepsy theory. But the stove is boiling the pot over. Noodles spill across the lining of the heating coils. It spurs and and hisses and then it is over. No more noise. My girlfriend wakes me up to tell me that I woke her up talking about Simon and Garfunkel’s “3AM”. I am sad. She breaks up with me. At the doctor’s office the receptionist tells me that I can look her up online. Look her up? Yes, she says. She gives me a doctor’s note with her name and e-mail address on it. She is pretty and blonde and compassionate. She has complete access to my psychological record and still gives me her information.

Complex?, I ask. Yes, complex. Partial. Seizures. Staring off and losing time. There are autonomic functions or something like that indicative of my condition. I ask him if I have a condition. My doctor. The pot is boiling over. It’s too late now. As I let the overcooked noodles slide down the drain the pretty blonde receptionist calls from my living room and asks me if I need help. Need help Help me.

I stare vacantly out of a car window presuming the lives of those in the cars that pass me by on the freeway. My father is driving me to a clinic because I have complex partial seizures. Last week I hit a wall until it broke. It was made out of wood, lined in some smelly redwood wannabe. I’m not as strong as I like to imagine. This is not reflected in my complex partial seizures. This is why I am going to a facility. For people like me. I don’t think that anybody is like me.

Rain starts to pour. I tell the blonde girl whose name is Stacy that I’m fine. We’re going to order carry-out. She rushes to me from the living room into the kitchen and scaredly puts my hands beneath the sink as she turns it all the way to the right. Cold. Water runs over my hands. I think about her smell. I think about the aroma that stems from her and pours onto me but cannot connect the dots of this idea before she is rushing from the refrigerator with ice cubes. No, I don’t have any plastic baggies. She puts the ice against my hands. I imagine her sucking on a cube while she goes down on me, telling me that she loves me. Or something.

You’ve burnt your hands. I have. How embarrassing. I need her to tell me this. When I look at my hands they are red like a sunburnt child’s stomach. She asks me are you okay.

I’m simple. When it rains I cry sometimes because I can’t stand being along as long as I have been. I have a doctor’s appointment the following week. Rain bounces off of the window sill. I am still. There is a permeating wind that touches everything in the world but I alone shake. All remains still but me against this incomparable wind. It’s as if the earth were shaking me awake.

Yes, you burnt your hands. She holds me for a second and I watch a tear drop onto the kitchen floor. What have I done? Have I lost another? Another girl. She isn’t just some ordinary girl.

She wears her scrubs over to my place and asks me about disability. I tell her that it’s a paycheck and ask her what it’s like to work in a doctor’s office. To see the sick all day, including Sundays, which is rare. She is unique. She cares. She is compassionate. She asks me about my condition.

Complex men don’t have great sex lives. Not that I do. I’m not boasting. It’s nice and simple to have sex. Such a crime these days. I feel alive in the mirror of a woman’s eyes as she is underneath me writhing. Pleasure. Fantasies concluded. Life and death and sex. The sweet smell of freedom from an orgasm. I don’t have any bizarre fetishes I tell my doctor. I tell my doctor I don’t have any bizarre fetishes.

What’s more bizarre than coming to a doctor for answers? The personal search keeps us alive. Some days I don’t feel alive at all. I call up old friends and have twenty minute conversations that I don’t remember and I don’t remember why I don’t remember.

I’m not sick. Please don’t say that.

To say that is to diagnose. I am so sick of these diagnoses. They are all wrong. The first book that I ever read was written by Freud. In a collection of great books that my father had I picked Freud and loved his ideas about psychoanalysis. Freud’s dead. My father is going to die. My father is dead. The letter, the obituary, is handed to me by an orderly at an institution that my father himself drove me to. I miss him already. Because of my condition I will not be able to attend his funeral.

I miss him already.

The night after I have dreams of a blonde girl fishing me out of boiling water; she spits ice out of her mouth before she kisses me and tells me that everything is going to work out. These things have a way of working themselves out, she says. You burnt your hands. She is next to me. Perfect height. About six inches shorter than me. So cute. She douses the water over my hands and looks concerned. The ice feels good against my skin, which is red. Blistered and painful as they are my hands do not resist her touch. In all reality her touch is adored by me.

So complex.

A blonde receptionist that I barely know helps me shop for pants at the Salvation Army. I have money for designer jeans but she insists that I am cute enough to shop here. When I look at the sizes of the pants they are all too small. When I try them on they are a bit large on me. The pockets of them fold in next to my bare skin and I feel refreshed to be touched and she says that I look handsome in them. It’s been so long since I’ve felt handsome.

He hands me a bottle of medication. Complex partial seizures. The pot is boiling over. I leave and pay my tab at the doctor’s office. As I stare vacantly into a magazine I have no interest in a pretty blonde girl asks me why I always wear the same jeans. I don’t know. She slides her information across the counter and says that she will send the bill to my address.

The pot is boiling over. I stare vacantly at a wall. Couldn’t attend the funeral. A nurse slides Diladin across the counter. But dinner is ruined. She’s never coming back to eat. I was never very good with pasta. A pretty blonde girl told me that if you can cook a good pasta you can cook almost anything. I stare vacantly out of a third story window. The frame reminds me of a car.

I wonder how I got here. It all seemed so goddamn simple.

i really...really...love your writings!

That's amazing :O

"I actually like this." ????? Sometimes we are our own worst critics. This is an amazing write, rich in depth and detail and eeps you glued to the write from beginning to end. You do have a way with words OUTSTANDING pen here my friend!

You have a way of getting around my intuitive sensing as I read this. A rich surprise.

very nicely done...