Unhinged

• Lori Palminteri
• Uncategorized
• April 5, 2020

Charlotte (2), laughs maniacally at all the jump scares in a bad shark horror movie we’re watching. If we’re frightened or jump, she laughs hysterically. She does the same thing when you put on something loud, like a vacuum or a blender. She screams, hands over her ears, as loud as she can.

In one way, my niece and I are a lot alike— when we speak, people rarely understand what we’re saying because we mumble. However, we are complete opposites in the sense that I am to myself and mostly quiet, where as Charlotte doesn’t spend a waking moment not talking. Truly, I’ve never met ANY human who talks this much, let alone a toddler.

Even when we put her down for afternoon naps, half the time, she doesn’t sleep… she sits in her crib and has full on conversations with ????? Herself? Ghosts? Inter-dimensional beings? She doesn’t stop talking for over an hour, by herself, in the room.

Surely, we’re not in the original dimension our creator(s) made. We must be the 19th dimension— too much shit has gone awry and rippled into this reality we call home, even if it doesn’t quite feel like home right now.

The place I’ve always called home is now the epicenter of human history, as I watch from a couch in Florida. In retrospect, coming down here was a great idea, though I suspect catastrophe if the virus starts striking in nursing homes in Florida.

There’s a yearning to go back— I even have dreams I’m in my bed and wake up confused for that first minute. Oh yeah. The pandemic. The quarantine.

Though isolated, I miss my studio apartment. I miss the skyline of Manhattan from the East River in Astoria Park. Dank comedy clubs, ruthless green rooms, the sound of laughter at a new joke. Writing sessions with my partner, when we both had a little more hope. Cheap drinks at dive bars, laughing with my close knotted friends. Passing a joint around, mocking our mistakes and creating ideas that we’ll never see come to fruition. Hands of a lover over the skin. Hands of my chiropractor relieving my neck of persistent pain. Hands high fiving watching hockey. Hugs across space and time.

I miss New York.

And yet… the universe shifts. It’s happened before, so surely it will happen again. And we evolve. We evolve. But it’s frightening not to know what that will look like. What the new reality will be. What the new New York will become. Nature says, “evolve.” And we oblige.

We grow. Until we are something entirely different, with the same exact bones.