Nausea

I don't produce a lot of poetry, but when I do, I like to write about nausea. I suppose 'like' isn't the most precise term; I 'like' to write about nausea the way a dog might 'like' to lick its own skin raw. All the same, there's an attraction to nausea that surfaces again and again in my work, and not always an existential nausea, either. When I say nausea, I mean it in its most somatic form: a certain internal quality of unsteadiness, inseparable from the threat of vomiting; spectral in word form but unmistakable in embodiment.

Whether it first approaches as a ripple or a tsunami, it rocks and rocks against the small ship of you, against the small ship of your "you"-ness. Queasiness. Biliousness. That sort of nausea. For someone like me, it comes with its own history as well.

I am an aging princess on a throne of medical symptoms. In my early adolescence, I would spend my summer afternoons alone in an air-conditioned bedroom, caught in a sensation of swimming despite the heavy blanket. It was a funny thing to experience: to swim, and yet, go nowhere. To bleed through time in pinks and greens and blues, like watercolor paint on paper. Family members understandably thought of it as laziness; more accurately, though, it was nausea.

Nausea is a sensation that demands to be felt, and as far as my body was concerned, I had nothing better to do those days than feel it. An iron deficiency will do that to you. A brush with anorexia will do that to you. But at the time, I didn't attribute it to anything in particular. I saw no doctors for it, so I didn't worry too much about where it was coming from. I would wake up in the morning, do most, some, or none of chores my family wanted me to do, and then immediately go back to bed, my brain an overfilled pitcher. It would teeter this way and that, and then, inside, my thoughts would swim.

Nausea didn't always have the serene aesthetic qualities I'm recounting here, but like people do with certain elements of their past, I'm choosing to remember the more enjoyable times. Other times, the nausea came on like a sort of body-frenzy. It would hit me deep in my belly: fat roaches racing around and around in a spinning yellow bowl. The bowl: rising up towards my throat every time I moved.

Nausea is primarily a signal of body-wrongness, after all. An insistent warning that some bodily process is being disrupted; the polar opposite of homeostasis. I know this, and yet, when I reference nausea in my creative writing, it's often during scenes where there isn't a tangible body at all. I enforce a sort of homelessness on nausea this way. Nausea without a body, without a host. Why? And what is nausea without an animal to inhabit?

Regarding the why: maybe to catch it. Maybe to feed it. To further some process of artistic domestication. I destroy the natural environment of nausea, and before it can run away, I rescue it from the very destruction I inflicted on it. Then I pin it down in its new home: a flat, cool enclosure of white paper and black text. I walk in. I appraise the work. I say, "Hello, again."

Regarding the new essence of nausea: it's like an Impressionist painting, made of undulating colors. It's softer, sweeter, and it turns this way and that. I can make it into something beautiful. I can. I'll make it swim for me.