Long-Exposure
by Jennifer Markert
“The technique is called long exposure,” my college photography professor explained in a beginner’s class I picked up on a whim. On the projection screen, a photograph of Philadelphia’s City Hall loomed large, lines of red and white light angling toward the base of its ornate clock tower, hands indecipherable on its glowing yellow face.
“By setting a long shutter speed and keeping your camera steady with your tripod,” he continued, “you can capture stationary elements while, as you can see, the surrounding movement is blurred.”
He proceeded to click through different variations on the same ethereal aesthetic, images in which lights, people, skies and cars lose their lines, rendered ghost-like and fluid. Only that which stays immobile remains: a cathedral, sharp and sturdy, but not the bodies moving through it to pray. Rocks the size of giants, but never the ocean.
I haven’t touched a DSLR camera in years, not since being unceremoniously terminated from a part-time job at a photography blog in New York’s Garden District. Now, as thoughts of viral exposure undulate, a new wave of memories of Philly days spent fiddling with the shutter and the aperture return, flooding my mind’s eye with streaks of light. They are drowned again by thoughts of germ-ridden droplets passing between frowning, gasping mouths in Brooklyn, and my own gasping mouth every night I wake in the thrall of a seizure.
Years removed from practical application, I recall those long exposure photographs and wonder: What defines the stationary object captured more—the ever-present fact of itself, or that which travels through and around it? I wonder the same about a person’s identity and how it’s shaped. It would depend, in both cases, on the duration of the forces that encircle us. It would depend on the length of the exposure.
Where a virus may be storm-like, there are other things, like disorders, that become part of a person’s foundation. Evidence of a poorly-designed metropolis, or an endless sidewalk—and if it does end, by Shel Silverstein’s telling, there is only more landscape beyond: grass, moon-birds at rest, peppermint wind. A diagnosis, the term chronic.
*****
I don’t introduce myself with the fact of my epilepsy. Even if it comes up in conversation, I minimize disclosure by stating what’s factual and never what it feels like. People have preconceived notions involving flashing lights and foaming mouths, and it’s less exhausting to let them keep them than to try and explain that it’s different for everyone and it’s different for me. It’s no less exhausting now, but I can’t deny how it’s shaped me. It has been a long exposure, a long road, and although specific incidents pass the condition itself has yet to.
And so, I try again: another minute, another metaphor.
After almost two decades and half a dozen medications, a health condition can remain the same—just controlled differently, if at all. For me, the pattern is predictable: the right arm defies the brain, the unrest spreads, the body goes limp in the night. Sometimes at dawn I still wake up shaking, nails cutting into my palms in an unsuccessful bid for restraint.
“Don’t you have stigmata?” a girl asked me in seventh grade, confusing epilepsy, somehow, with marks of the crucifixion. It was recess, and part of me wanted to smack her upside her freckled face.
I had only been diagnosed a year prior, but my teachers told students in both my grade’s classes to explain an extended absence during the time I was hospitalized. My classmates bought me Finding Nemo on VHS and wrote me personalized notes. Though I would desperately look for these notes later, as a reminder that people cared, at the time I worried more about being treated differently than accepting and receiving support from my peers. Because they did treat me differently, at least at first; they froze or stuttered when I said hello, or looked down at their feet. “At least we’ll be moving on to high school next year–by then, no one will care,” a classmate said when I confided in her. I had hoped she would say I was imagining things.
I ultimately laughed at the stigmata question, but it’s a curious mistake. Both conditions are red flags for attention-seeking as much as they are signs of the divine. And depending on your proximity to something hot, something sharp, both can leave scars too.
*****
As a child, you operate under the assumption that whatever happens to you is normal. Especially if it happens enough. If you had a pet mongoose, for example, that might not seem strange until you’d visited enough weasel-free homes to suspect you were the outlier. If every room you entered was filled with cotton-candy clouds, but only you could see them, that would likewise not be a cause for alarm. Until, of course, it started to rain. You’d put up your umbrella and everyone would stare.
I always thought my arm “going dead,” as I called it, was normal. Like pins and needles normal—just a thing that happened and sometimes tipped you sideways. A shifty, biological flaw that pulls you from standing on the floor, gripping your entire side to numbness before yanking hard, leaving you reeling until you’re able to steady yourself and feel whole again. I use “you” intentionally to distance myself from the pain of it, and because I didn’t think it was just me. Bodies are strange; I knew this at eleven. We put up with their inconveniences and their quirks until they hurt us, and sometimes even then.
“What’s wrong?” My parents would ask, finding me hunched over in a stairwell I was meant to be sweeping.
“My arm is dead again,” I’d say. But I guess I said enough cryptic shit, or made enough excuses to get out of chores that it was no cause for alarm, this dead-armed claim. Until the mongoose bit me and the thunder clapped all at once, one morning. A dead arm could be normal, but a grand mal seizure was not.
I don’t remember who found me. I doubt my parents would have heard anything from where I slept on the third floor, sobbing from my room that was more of a nook than a room, a twin bed in the open alcove just opposite the computer area, outside of the larger bedroom that Trish convinced me I didn’t want to share. I woke up paralyzed, eyes locked on an antique yellow dresser with fruit stickers still plastered to it, fixating on its ornate handles until the darkness closed in. Some frightened fragment of a thought, caught suddenly on a loop over ringing, ringing ringing choking ringing. The sound of sobbing when the motion left my small body spent; imagined sirens, wailing. Thinking someone else was in the room crying over my motionless form before realizing I was still alone. The only one crying was me.
What I described to the doctors was enough to garner a diagnosis, followed immediately by an array of anticonvulsant prescriptions. The pills made me sleepy and blurred my vision; I’d sleepwalk through the middle school as dots on the peeling wall of the nurse’s room moved up and down, up and down. They worked to an extent, and once they didn’t, there was always another combination to try: another something that would be just good enough and never perfect.
I’ve grown so used to neurological exams, I could do them in my sleep. Touch your finger, touch my nose. Spell the word “world” backwords: D L R O W; it’s tricky, so I memorized it. Walk heel-to-toe, heel-to-toe. Explain how it started. I was twelve, thirteen, sixteen, twenty, twenty-seven, I was every six-months-to-a-year in between, trying to explain and explaining it differently every time. I have all the words, but they never seem to be the right ones. I have all the memories, but they escape from my tongue already broken.
*****
There is this idea that we can control and contain any issue if only we do the right thing—an answer to every problem, a destiny to be manifested by those who work hard enough. It is a very American idea, and I can’t contest the appeal of it. Why wouldn’t we choose to be masters of our own wellness, our own success? But control is a myth: we are responsible for what our minds and bodies are capable of, yes, but we have power over little of it. As for containment, just because something is locked up doesn’t mean it won’t cause damage. Suppression is the only truth for people like me, but it works with the precision of a prayer.
I don’t know why I feel the need to defend how I relate to myself, but I do. I try to be kind to a body that has been brutal to itself; I forgive it for every involuntary betrayal. I focus on staying whole as the seizures come and go in waves. Most things come and go, even that which lies in wait or doesn’t bother waiting or lying at all. Even skylines, highways, and especially rivers, lakes and seas.
If I contain my own Judas, he hibernates in my frontal lobe, pacified by medication. But you wouldn’t catch him in a photograph any more than you would a spirit.
Somewhere in this world, there’s a video of me as a pre-teen in the throes of a grand mal seizure. This analog record represents the sucker punch of an ending to a desperate period following my doctors’ decision to take me off all medication. They had decided my problem was psychological. Can I blame them? They must have known my parents were in the middle of a divorce, suspected something similar to my sister, that the timing was more than a little suspect; and wasn’t it telling, how my epilepsy manifested during a time of stress? Could a child’s word really be trusted?
“How is her home life?” they might have asked, and I don’t know how much my parents divulged or if they agreed I could be faking it. But when the hospital’s machines failed to pick up the daytime seizures I reported while medicated—small, partial tremors in my arms and legs—no one fought for me to keep my dosage.
We tried every possible alternative: no gluten, no sugar, sharp tap tap tapping above the lip at the onset. Diets and naturopathic therapies conjured by my homeopath mother, who, it must be said, was likely more skeptical of the hospital’s intentions than mine and truly believed that a combination of flying novenas and spaghetti squash might prove miraculous if given the chance. But it still happened, still happens—on beds and couches and floors, church pews and classrooms across the Tri-state area. All scenes of crimes God never had the mercy to knock me out for. He only ever turns off the lights.
Sometimes consciousness is not a gift. Darkness can be, but only in the quiet, and only in the still. I’m not comfortable thinking of that night, how it must have felt for my mother to turn on the night vision setting while saying “honey, I’m here.” Remembering the click of the camcorder and her voice from the other side. How against her Earth Mother and God’s-Will-Be-Done instincts, she knew in her bones that what her child needed was not just to be believed, but to be granted a small sliver of protection, even if it meant pacification by cold hard pharmaceuticals. There was no need for long exposure, fancy techniques, white balance adjustment, desaturation. To capture the event raw was evidence enough, though the result was far from beautiful.
The “why” or “how” of all of this–the condition, the diagnosis, the subsequent judgments, tests, and rotating door of prescriptions–doesn’t matter today, if it ever did in the first place. All I know is this: By default—or as the result of some unknown damage—my body is not naturally kind to itself. Left to its own devices, it shudders and quakes, ears ringing, limbs wringing, thoughts mangled and trodden in the throes of a vicelike possession.
Something within me may be broken, cruel and unyielding, but the larger part of me–the woman who is more than an epileptic–is not. And so, with covers drawn every night, and never certain I will make it to the morning whole, I close my eyes and drift. I think of tranquil seas, a flurry of souls, a ring of warm light rendered still. I close my eyes, and I defend my body more fiercely than I trust it.
BIO: Jennifer Markert is a writer, mother, and marketing professional currently living in Pennsylvania with her small family of four. A lifelong storyteller and decades-long poet, she studied creative writing at Temple University and has seen her work most recently published in the dynamic arts publication KHORA. Website: https://www.jennifermarkert.com/