Nausea is the Worst

I have gotten many colds. A few cases of the flu. Bugs. The expected set of mild illnesses. But there is something about nausea. I cannot stand having nausea. Or dizziness. Something about it panics me. I know no one likes puking but I really do not like puking. And there is nothing to be done but lay down and hope that it passes.

This morning I had a bout of it that thankfully passed with some acetaminophen and a bit of bland food. I still have a headache and don’t feel well, but at least I am not nauseous anymore and barfing is no longer a possibility.

To Sell a House

Grace Period (Tempo de mercês) is a novel by Maria Judite de Carvalho, a writer that has newly been re-discovered after languishing in obscurity for a number of years. Her style is precise and demands that the reader analyze the events in front of them without a lot of guidance. Her work entertains, but it also makes one parse apart the many meanings behind the events she details and the phrases she chooses.

Grace Period is about a man named Mateo Silva selling his childhood home that he hasn’t seen in over twenty years. Leaving Lisbon and revisiting the small town he remembers only vaguely, he is accosted both with the familiarity and strangeness of locations he left so long ago. He also has to confront his own memory of his parents and how their lives changed forever in the wake of his father’s infidelity.

To Confront the Past

During the course of selling the house, Silva is faced with who his father was and how little he knew about him. The emotional violence his father put his mother through is imbued in the property left abandoned. In the dusty, disused spaces and dereliction around him, Silva sees the dissolution of not just his parents’ marriage but the lost potential of who he could have been if he had remained in this town.

Furthermore, when he is invited to dinner at the neighbours’ house, he is confronted with the woman that his father had an affair with. She has aged along with everyone else, but more importantly she is a boogeyman that is revealed as just another horrible human being that he was too young to know anything about. Selfish and unaware of how her actions could impact anyone outside of herself.

Echoes and Ripples

In addition to directly confronting the past, when the deal is said and done, Silva has to confront how that past has shaped his present. He sees ripples of it in his overly accommodating nature and his intimate relationships, but also in the work he sought out and his inability to truly trust and connect with others.

Silva also speculates about how his father’s callous disregard changed his mother and how she treated him and looked at the world in general.

For My Lovely Spouse

My lovely spouse is always so patient with me, even when I’m not a good patient. She gives me medicine. She holds me until I get less scared. She sits nearby and makes sure I know that she’s there. Even when I’m at my sickest, she makes me feel better.

Though she does worry a bit too much and I worry when she worries and then we’re in the middle of a loving-yet-far-too-worried vortex. We’re working on it.