About Adele: shades of letters and syllables by Peter Jalesh (best books to read for teens TXT) 📖

My life looked then like a complete mess. I thought in my egotistic way that I’d have to take advantage of her love and keep our happiness under control for as long as possible.
Dr. Freud prescribed for Adele some medicine, mostly vitamins and herbs like licorice, Echinacea, ginger, nettle leaves and Reishi mushrooms.
I summoned Adele’s folks and mine for an emergency meeting. Her mom told me straight to my face that Adele is my wife and that I should take care of her until she gets better. Her mom once again wouldn’t believe that Adele is ill. “She used to make absurd jokes all the time” she said. Her dad cot involved laughing: “This is not illness. She is wired. She was always like that”. Adele intervened in our conversation saying “A baboon is a boon and a donkey is a monkey”, which was not as funny as she thought. Her mom kept laughing like a nut while her dad sat at the other side of the table, uneasy. “I told you she is weird”. “I am not wired. I am just fooling around with Peter’s fears. I am ok. I am like anybody else. I need a little bit of sleep. That’s it. I have a problem with the immediate memory. If I go from the bathroom to the kitchen the short memory gets longer. I could then remember everything. Like yesterday, I forgot to wash my ears. I got to the kitchen and I remembered that I’d have to wash my ears. I still remembered to wash my ears when I got to the bathroom. It is clear to me that I am not ill”.
Then after we had dinner she asked her folks to go. Mom asked her if she was happy with me. “We’re ok” she said. “Whenever you are not around we quarrel a bit. If there is anybody that needs therapy this is Peter” she told her dad. “I am sorry” my dad said, “Peter asked us to come. If Peter wouldn’t ask us to be here we’d not have disturbed you”. “Why did Peter asked you to come over?”, Adele shouted, “Why you are such an ass?” she addressed me. “Adele” her dad shouted back, “Peter is afraid that you are seriously ill. It’s not something like a life threatening disease. You have to exercise your memory, from what I understand. To be careful with your brain… We’re going to pray, and also I’ll ask the priest to put you on the roll for the Sunday mass call…” Adele turned towards me like a storm: “You are a big ass, that’s what you are! Creeping behind my back! You are a worm! That’s what you are, an earthworm”. She left the house running.
Her folks and mine were sitting at the table humiliated and silent. “You’d have just to see if she is the way the doctor sees it. Maybe she just ate something like she got food poisoning… When toxins get into somebody’s body it takes a while until the body gets cleared. I suppose she could just intoxicated her body with too much grease, like duck grease that is hidden under the skin and gets immediately digested. You never know. She likes to eat duck skin and grease …”
08/24
Today, I began writing “Adele’s” journal. A very uncomfortable task! I have never kept any secret from Adele. To write a journal about her illness seemed so unfair and so dishonorable…. If she knew she would have called me “hog”. She preferred hog to pig. Today we went to see a play on Broadway. She asked me if during the play the action becomes real. I didn’t understand what she meant. She asked me again if during the play the happenings become reality, for a second or so. I said no, not even for a fraction of a second. Everything is theatrical, a fiction, not a reality, I insisted. She told me that I am exaggerating as usual. She was sure that during the play there is a moment or so when the happenings turn into reality.
08/25
There was nothing unusual to deserve an entry in Adele’s journal. Adele wanted to talk about future. She was very vivacious and full of “what happiness is”. She had her own definition of happiness that night as “touching and talking”. She wrote on a scrap of paper what she’d like me to comment upon. Like, she wrote, “we’d adopt a baby and we’d employ a maid to take care of her (she wanted a baby girl)” so that our life would get just a little bit demanding so that I could still write and she could read in peace. I couldn’t tell her that due to her symptoms such an idea was not suitable at that time. I got upset when I saw tears in her eyes. She grabbed my hand and asked me to swear that we’d plan carefully and adopt a baby girl by June next year. Then she lit all the four lamps in the bedroom and asked me if I’d like to dance as she began circling around alone and then suddenly stopped looking out the window: “I think our neighbors adopted a black boy. It became a trend lately, that sort of interracial embrace… I would like to adopt an Asian baby girl with green eyes…”
08/26
We went to the Plaza restaurant today. Adele liked the crowd. She said that the crowd today was not hostile. She complained about her sight in her left eye. We waited for about half an hour for our food. When we got it I was already drunk. I have to control this feeling that Adele is going to do something silly and embarrass me. Then I told to myself that she should count more in my eyes than anybody else around. I suspected every glance somebody will throw at Adele for having some hidden distressing significance. Despite my paranoia Adele was lovely, smiling all the time and displaying a serenity that reminded me of those good times when she was completely sane. I had the guts to tell to the waiter to change her dish. The meat was sprinkled with parmesan, which she hated. She thanked me for that, kissing my hand. Then she took unexpectedly a pen from her purse and underlined on a menu booklet all dishes that she’d never like to order. I smiled, pretending that I thought that what she was doing was funny. When the waiter came back with her food he didn’t make any comment. Then Adele signed her name on the menu booklet and wrote a comment: “Those underlined dishes should be eliminated from the menu or translated in German”. She ate her food diligently, though she complained that the bits of carrots were very hard: “I am sure that the carrots are made out of plastic collared by a very skillful painter”.

08/27
Today Adele complained about her knees getting numb and she told me that she remembered being a child and watching her mom “using cactus thorns to treat her arthritis by inserting them between bones. She called what she was doing Mexican acupuncture. She would cultivate cactuses on the window frame and feed them with sugar and aspirin to help them grow sharp and thin thorns like needles. She’d cut the thorns and let them dry in the sun until they became yellowish. Then she’d insert the thorns around the knee-pans and heat the feet in a wash basin filled with salted water. Then she’d say a prayer addressed to Saint Jude. After a while there was lots of hair growing on her knees. The healing was just temporary. After a while the pain would return with a revenge. She couldn’t climb up the stairs. When it rained she had to put more thorns around her knees”.
08/28
How long her mind would still stay around? I didn’t know. I had to enjoy every moment while being with her. I was concerned about those moments when she sat on the couch staring at the ceiling, motionless and voiceless. She complained today that she couldn’t see on the ceiling the two constellations she knew about, Ursa Minor and Ursa Major. “Could you see Canis Major?” I asked her unkindly. “I was kidding you. One cannot see constellations on a ceiling. You have to be outside and switch out the sun light to make the sky dark. Stars are getting shiny when they are projected on a dark background”.
08/29
This strange mix of ill people and doctors in which there are no options for the ill one but to follow the doctor’s order: doctors are not moved by people’s sickness or by their sensitivity to their sickness. Again, today I went with Adele for a checkup. The doctor spent a whole hour by testing Adel’s reflexes. She asked at a certain moment to be left alone with the doctor. When I got back into doctor’s office he asked me if it is true that Adele caught her hair in the fire escape staircase and that she couldn’t move for hours before I came to her rescue. I confirmed what Adele said. When we walked back home I asked Adele why she invented that story. She told me that she told that story to the doctor because I don’t let her express freely. I thought that whatever she said or did was not important as long as it didn’t show any regression of her mental abilities. When we got home she immediately undressed and sat on the couch staring with half closed eyes at me. She was so beautiful. That night turned out to be one of the happiest nights I ever remembered from my whole life. “I offered my body to you because I trusted you”, she said. I felt a little bit remorseful for my happiness. “Melancholy is the worst way to treat a fuck” she said. “Nobody should feel culpable of intimacy”. Her tone surprised me. That night she wrote a letter to her mom. She could have phoned her instead. Then she cooked lamb with mint and spring potato and hot pepper salad. She was in such a terrific mood. “Doctor told me that he never saw a belly so beautiful as mine” she said. “How come that the doctor saw your belly?” I asked. “What do you mean? When I asked you to leave me alone with the doctor I got undressed and I asked the doctor to touch my belly and see if I am going to have a baby!”
08/30
Adele wanted to see our old friends, which was unusual to me. We went to a restaurant in Brooklyn. Around the table I could see all my good friends, all of them married now and restrained, afraid of the cynicism that Adele used to display in the past. The get-together night went well and Adele behaved exemplarily. At a certain moment during dinner Adele talked about the stars wearing a “winter glare” and the birds having to struggle with the wind even in their sleep. People found her likable. It was her first decent attitude towards my friends. She told to Paul’s wife that her hair was worthy of a queen’s. “Along with your petite nose” she added. “What a shame that such astonishing beauties are concealed and never put on a public view”. My friends seem to be amused and also disconcerted. When we got home she said something strange, that Paul’s face looked exactly like Bill’s face, which wasn’t true at all. “I looked at them both. I would not distinguish