Ceiling Fan Lapses
What’s a lapse, really? Is it a break? Because that sounds broken, like when it hit the cement it burst into several disproportionate pieces all with mismatched edge patterns. Is it more like suspension, the way a kite is pushed upward by the wind but is also tethered by string? Is it a pause in a conversation permeated with soundlessness but the tension, deafening?
Often when the sun spills into my apartment as I lie in bed, I stare at my ceiling. There’s a ceiling fan. It’s always there of course, unassuming. I think of the way it cycles. The blades turning in a circular motion so swiftly it’s just a blur of color. If you focus though, your eye can catch a single blade so clearly as if it stopped for only a moment. What about the space between the blades: the current? There is so much movement in a lapse.
I have a weird fascination with fans. I think there’s something in psychology about an object that is mentally able to take you somewhere. A memory cue. A fan sweeps me up and carries me to precise past instances. And when I’m staring at the ceiling, alone, I am there in those moments just as much as I am in my bed.
I’ve always had anxiety. I’ve had self-diagnosed OCD since I was a kid. At first I thought that I was merely superstitious, but when I began to rely on the oscillating floor fan in my mother’s bedroom to assure me that nothing bad would happen, I became suspicious that there was some underlying problem with my brain. It was like my own magic eight ball that I believed in. I would walk by her room and if the fan was facing away from me, I was okay. If it was facing toward me however, it meant that I would be in trouble for drinking her vodka the night before. It could also mean my middle school boyfriend wasn’t going to call me back. Sometimes it meant that my mother or sister would die. I feel so much secondhand panic from those memories; now my floor fan’s oscillating feature might as well be obsolete.
When I wake up in the morning, questioning my entire existence and the weight of the world, I’m taken to the ceiling fan from the house I lived in with my boyfriend of eight years ago. He used to sit in the basement all hours of the night trying to perfect a beat for a song he was making. And I, locked in our bedroom two floors up to keep the dog in from whining at the basement door, would look up at the fan longing to be somewhere else. The longing was deep and painful, like searing skin. What I wanted was for us to know individual happiness again. Our feelings were so reliant on each other’s. And in some way, I longed to be with someone else. I look at the ceiling fan of my now studio apartment, remembering that and feel immense guilt.
The ceiling fan at my recent exes apartment was casted by much brighter light. It was always morning and the blinds would be turned to let in just enough sunshine you would know it was day. I would be lying in his bed and look up at it as it spun, much faster here I noted, then turn to him as he smothered me with laughter and new love.
He told me once there were only three states he hadn’t visited. He was always so busy with work and I didn’t have any money to afford to travel so I taped up some Christmas lights to the wall behind his bed and hung glittery streamers from each blade of the ceiling fan. When he came home, we were in Alaska watching the northern lights.
At the apartment we shared, I didn’t notice the fan that often. Until he started sleeping in the guest room or when he stopped coming home almost entirely. When I wake up now, sometimes this is where I go. Always half-asleep, I’d wait for the sound of his car that never came. I’d cry for so long my body felt like it was drowning in a pool of me.
I’d look up at the ceiling fan almost as if to ask it my fortune. But instead it would take me to other places I didn’t want to go. Alone in my bedroom in that house that shook with every beat. To mornings that stretched like forever in that apartment filled with so much light. To Alaska. When I don’t want to remember, there is always a lapse that takes me back.
