“It’s gotta be carpal tunnel,” a colleague had said right before I moved. “That same shit happened to me, and I was out for an entire semester after surgery.”
I didn’t believe he was right, even though I wanted to.
Everyone in the department had carpal tunnel syndrome. We were all chained to our desks, lesson planning, researching for our never-ending publications that might someday end up on obscure syllabi in random community colleges, typing responses to irate parents of freshman students, who thought they could get away with the same helicopter-mom bullshit they did in high school.
But I knew my problem wasn’t that. My hands would be fine for a while, and then all of a sudden, they would just…stop working. Like every muscle from my elbows to my fingertipswould give up. Anything I was holding would be on the ground, and when I tried to regain control, the tremors would begin.
Sometimes, they didn’t stop for hours.And every now and again, days.
I told myself it was stress. Hell, I’d been saying that for a while. It had to be.I mean, what other reason was there for all the stuff going on because it wasn’t just my hands giving me trouble.
The fatigue appeared a little while after the tremors, and then the dizzy spells came. I fainted twice in my office after just barely making it past the door last semester on a very hot day after having a run-in with a student pissed off about failing his final.
And it hadn’t helped my stress that I’d been living in a tiny town in the Bible Belt.As a queer history professor getting constant side-eyes, the fear of looking at the wrong man twice had gotten to be a bit much for me.
I’d needed a change.I’d needed to get the hell out of there before everything got worse, and I stopped being able to get out of bed.Not that I’d been afraid that would happen except…I kind of was.Because whatever was happening to my hands was also starting to happen to my feet.
The day I fell walking to my office, tripping on nothing except floppy toes, I knew it was time to go.So I’d drafted my resignation, called up Creek, and told him I was on my way.He and Nash had given me an open-ended offer to stay at Nash’s house, and hell, some sea air could really do me some good.
Living on the West Coast had always been kind of a dream of mine, anyway. I knew San Francisco was no longer the epic queer hub of the eighties and nineties, but it was still better than where I’d been living.
And the fact that Creek had settled here after getting discharged felt like…
Well, kismet, maybe?
I’d left Creek alone for a while. I knew he needed to heal. It was more than just his leg. There were plenty of veterans who had sat in my classes over the last couple of years, and I’d seen it in their eyes.
Haunted. Scarred. Afraid.
The idea that he was feeling all of those things gutted me, but the fact that he wasn’t alone allowed me to sleep at night. The truth of the matter was, Creek and I had never really been taught how to love in a way that wasn’t smothering.Before he was deployed—back when I first came out—he took it upon himself to fight all of my battles for me.
And every time I complained about something, he would swoop in with his vicious glare and inability to care whether or not there were consequences to his actions to try and save me.
I loved him for loving me that much, but I also realized I couldn’t tell him everything that was going on with me.He was the kind of man who’d attempt to fist-fight my stress if he could, and that only made it worse. Going to the West Coast to be near him and getting some space from the life that had been weighing me down came with a cost: cutting him out.Not entirely, but I knew I couldn’t talk to him about the way I was feeling.
Or the worry that was sitting heavy on my chest.
I had to figure this out on my own, and take comfort in the fact that he was nearby and if—or when—I needed him, he’d be here.
It felt like a fair compromise, though, even if life became a bit of a whirlwind after deciding to pack up and go. I didn’t have much, and since I would be moving in with Nash, I didn’t need to bring much either.
Just my clothes, myself, the pieces of home that made me feel like me, and the hope that this would fix my problems because I wasn’t sure how long I could go on while everything was deteriorating.
The biggest risk I took was being out of a job. I thought, if I were lucky, I might get an interview or two over the next couple of semesters for positions I didn’t want. But then Bayview Community College put an offer on the table I couldn’t refuse.
It was better money, better hours, better classes. It was everything I’d ever hoped to get after walking across the stage for my doctorate in ancient history, looking out across the sea of people and seeing no one but my mother and sister there to watch me.
I couldn’t blame Creek for being absent. He’d been deployed at the time.
But it was lonely without his intense energy that helped me feel like I deserved all of this.
And now…
Well.Now, he was nearby, but he was changed.And so was I.It was nothing like I’d pictured and as much as I’d hoped that the breezy fog off the Pacific might help set me right again.It hadn’t.
Things were the same.
And sometimes, now, they were worse.The weakness, the tremors, the fainting—they were happening weekly, if not daily.I could keep it mostly to myself, but it was getting harder, and at some point, I was going to have to tell someone.
