I can’t write for long — I’ll explain why in a minute.

But sometimes I get this psychic itch, this bad floating feeling like a tooth is loose in my mouth. It’s then I have to find my routine again. I have to get a grip. Come down from that zero-gravity trick that a stomach suffers on a pirate ship. I usually start by washing my hair so that I feel new, and then I find a pattern to knit. It has to be quick and mindless. I search and search for an album I’ve never heard but now have to listen to on repeat. I satisfy something on my to-do list just so that it’s done, and I did it, and I know I can still do things. Then, I like to finish off an item in the fridge or the cupboard. Finish it or accept it’s time to throw it out. That way, I get to clean a jar and see the good space it leaves on the shelf and know that life moves on.

In moods like this, that’s when it feels best to read a book I’ve had on the shelf forever. A novel everyone else seems to have already read but that I still know nothing about. I only know the cover of the book well by this point. It doesn’t really matter what the book is. Doesn’t matter if I excavate the last of the peanut butter to find it’s somehow desiccated and tasteless and — no, I wouldn’t have eaten it anyway. This is just when it feels best to read something for the sake of having read it. This week, that poor book was Lapvona by Ottessa Mosfegh, published in 2022. Black background, blue lettering, a painted lamb that looks like it might be dead, sleeping, or captured. I didn’t enjoy the book much but I read it anyway, and I think it’s probably worthwhile explaining why I insist on completing books all the way to the end even when the jam is wearing white fur.

Lapvona’s story is set in a medieval fiefdom. The people are poor and superstitious. There’s a bandit in stocks, a lamb herder, a nun, a priest, and a woman who can talk to birds. That woman heals people. She breastfeeds every baby, and some of the adults as well. There’s also a lord at the top of the hill who wants to be entertained every minute of the day. There’s a drought. There’s a lot of violence and filth. Bad things happen to people whether they deserve it or not and, I don’t know, it’s probably a book full of nervous laughter if you’re in the mood. A book like a kid making dolls, dressing them in scrap fabric held together by safety pins, and then mashing the dolls together. Now kiss! Now fight! Now jest! But it was just comfortably boring to me. Too many violent things happen to call the book neutral but that’s still how I heard it, like white noise or someone telling me a story through a wall — and I’m sort of okay with that.

I wonder if me reading every page of a book instead of giving up is me being a polite reader to the writer, because I write, and I know there are stories that don’t bud for a long time. I don’t mind staring at soil on occasion. I know chronic illness well; I am used to waiting a long time for something, if anything, to change. I’m a patient, and a critic, and I don’t feel resentful if a book doesn’t become more like a book I would personally enjoy by the time it’s over because I know that it wasn’t written for me. Still, there’s something about reading a whole book regardless of my own enjoyment that feels sly on Ottessa Moshfegh. In this tooth-loose mood, I just wanted to be reading. I might as well have read the dictionary. So I’m not that convinced I read Lapvona. It’s more like I used it. Lapvona was simply a way to time travel myself through some hours of life, like the author had volunteered to stick a finger in my mouth and hold the tooth down for a while.

I’m not even depressed! Though I’m not particularly happy at the moment either, and it’s less a chemical betrayal and more the world around me. My health has been trending downwards for the past 4 months. On Sunday, I went to see a family member in a hospice. On Tuesday, I was in a clinical trial for Long Covid. They took 14 vials of blood, put anaesthetic in my eyes, tested my pain tolerance, and took three cylindrical biopsies of skin down my right leg. I told the scientists they could do this to me every day if it meant something would come of it and everyone laughed. I went back to the hospice as soon as it was done and while I was there, I got a call that another family member had fallen and broken their back. When the call ended, I realised I had bled through all the gauze on my leg.

On Wednesday, I had an appointment with a cardiologist that I’d waited 12 months for so that I could start new medication. He’s not sure there’s anything left after this. This one has to do something, has to change, has to make the soil bud. On Thursday, I withdrew from all upcoming work that would have taken me out of the house. I need to rest. I’m sad and livid. I should have been speaking in a museum in Barcelona next week but I know I’m too sick to wing it. On Friday, I also withdrew from the PhD I’d been offered. I applied when my energy was more level, but now I am desiccated too. I read Lapvona in between the events of this week. But what does a book about a drought matter when I’m already in one?

There’s something about feeling headless these days. I accept that I’m typing this stuff but nothing I’ve said is a particularly interesting thought or new idea. Everything is an observation. I see the book I’m reading but I don’t feel it. I see the man who knocks on my door, and how he looks like an off-season Father Christmas. A courier from the hospital with that long-awaited heart medication. It’s why I cannot write for long today; I took the first pill a few hours ago and now I can feel the veins taut down my arms and legs, like the cardiologist is a puppet master pulling on all my terrible wet strings. I told my boyfriend I feel like the close-up shot in a film of a clammy face before the main character has a nosebleed, and then you know something is wrong. The cardiologist said he’d see me in 3 months to make sure I didn’t feel that way; I got an email this morning that said our follow-up is in 7. It’s going to be a very long film.

Everything always seems to come undone like that. Gets loose in a new way every week. That must be why I need to read things from beginning to end, otherwise grief for myself and other people would be completely unguarded. It’s probably why I’m not depressed yet, though on paper it would suit me. I might be most like the lord of Lapvona who needs entertaining every minute of the day. I get it. I get ‘the medieval royalty urge to always have entertainment while eating’ Tweet from years ago, but I feel it for my whole life. No time to breathe out. And this is probably why some people get pathological about the gym, and other people start collections, and people with the legs for it go travelling and never come home. Everyone is trying to be a conquerer, because otherwise it’s meaningless chaos, and that doesn’t make for a good story.

As a writer, I suppose I get pathological with words. I have to finish the book even when reading is something I have to do, and not something I want to do. I already need to find the next one because Lapvona is already out of my mind. It’s not even really here in this text. In between the entertainment, I’m thinking about a leaflet I saw pinned on the noticeboard inside Room K in the hospice. The leaflet was about the tipple trolley. The tipple trolley? I had to remind myself we weren’t in a hospital. This place wasn’t about punishing people towards survival. Cutting their legs open and numbing their eyes. The hospice is also for entertainment, for diversion, for time-travel. For drinking whiskey and coke even if you can’t taste things anymore. For feeling like a lord while it lasts.

— If you’re here at the end of the text, please post a TOOTH emoji on The White Pube instagram or tell me what you’d order from the tipple trolley. I would get red wine and coke

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