“I was the one who couldn’t be left,” I cried out to a stranger on the street. I tripped on the edge of something sharp. I didn’t look down to see what it was. The pain in my leg was now stinging, strangling my breathing, but my expression didn’t betray the pain.
I entered Therapeutic Health Services and retrieved my pink cup of sweet nectar.
There is something urinary about the drink. The first time I tried it, I threw it up. It tasted like penicillin, which I was allergic to as a kid. But now it is almost too sweet to be real. How something could change over time is magical, just like the word addiction once sounded alluring to my teenager friends.
Took me a long time to go from wanting to needing. I wanted opiates for the search for an emotional blanket that was a heaven of comfort. But now I just need methadone to feel what psychologists call “normal.” I don’t understand. My moods change with the wind. Now I have something synthetic regulating how I see and feel?
Parker has just left me. He left as if I was an armed gun he had to dodge. How he sees the world has always been severed. Still, he bonded with a me. A man who has never been romantic with anybody, who jumped off a bridge when they turned 19, then spent the next 13 years of their life reading books, playing chess. Before 19, he was a chess master. Now, he is considered nothing to anybody. Except me.
Through me he was seeing things for the first time. Because of his isolation, his need for taste was stronger. But more than that, his ability to taste was incredible, like an artists. He would carve letters into my back with the gentleness of a feather for three hours nonstop. Now that will never be.
He had never touched anybody romantically before. His touch was of a virgin and he had never touched or kissed anybody before me. I don’t think he will touch anybody after me, either.
And, nobody will ever touch me that gently again, either, for he touched me with the potency of my first taste of vicodin.
I wait for group.
For once, flashes before my eyes startle me, their patchwork or pathway so intricately fatal that it registers that there was not only a fall into this grave place where I became a victim again, but also a catalyst I could not capture in words.
I can’t breathe but I stair out into space. Tears stream down my face but I stare at the door to the room where we meet, vacant. I’m not positive the tears are real until people circle me, asking me things. I can’t answer them. I feel like I am in a fish tank, looking out.
A counselor yanks a cup of coffee out of my hands as I sit in a corner shaking, unable to breathe, having difficulty from not breaking out of my body altogether. “Crybaby!” She batted at me. “You sit in a chair or you will be OFF!” Off the clinic, I suppose.
Seven other clinic patients watched her badger me as I fell apart, moments after Parker drove his car from my life for the last time. Minutes after people had told me that I was being hunted for actions I had not committed and would be killed for a lie somebody invented. My mistake was trying to follow their logic. My mistake was, as I repeated over and over again, even as a merciful God did nothing to try to draw me out of my loop- God let me keep my own faith in that road to nowhere, for I believed that one day the same thing would yield me different results. But they call this insanity, and I am not insane. The thing that keeps it different are the people, and my eyes, which are always changing.
I was always thinking that I would lose something if I was not their friend anymore, no matter who they were. Even if they were unsustainable, despicable, and repugnant.
I was waiting for group. I can’t sit in a chair, I could not explain to her. I cannot talk, I could not explain. I was nothing more than a trapped animal, but a bitch like her could not see that. She was a prosecutor, trying to make me look like I had designed this circus.
I don’t know who I called on the phone, but I remember calling out, over and over again, “it hurts, right here, this spot where my heart is, it hurts right here, where my actual heart is.” And writing these words down right now mean it hurts again and I have to stop writing soon.
My counselor wants me to write down my role in relationships. She also needs me to write a report about the counselor who was abusive, since seven other people wrote reports and theirs won’t count unless I write one too. I keep waiting. I am so hesitant to write anything. I entered a silence since the whole event.
Every day my mind thought about other things in a promise to ward Parker’s gaze off of mine. The one I never decided on. His eyes never seemed evil- they never seemed sad- they never seemed sad- but then again, would anybody that obsessed with mercy killings betray themselves when caught in a stare?
Every time I came to him with pain, he did something to kill me so I would not suffer. He became my anti-God. God would have told me it would hurt for a little while but that it was a gift, like stigmata. But my ears weren’t open… except to others pain which I absorbed neatly, thoroughly, but mostly casually, as if it were nothing more than a board game.
For once, flashes before my eyes startled me, their patchwork or pathway so intricately fatal that it registered that there was not only a fall into this grave place where I became a victim again, but also a catalyst I could not capture in words.
And now I just see peoples backs. As I try to pray. As I try to hope. As I try to understand how things ended so wrong when I loved so right. James writes me an email that is assisted suicide. He has become like the school he attends. He has so eagerly forgotten his past and now stands severely above me. It is laughable. He says he knows me for bits of information I have scattered like birdseed. But he has seen nothing. He does not believe in miracles. He does not believe in the strength of his own recovery, so why would he mine? He is probably so weak inside, he doesn’t understand why my adventure into the gutter has to go so deep. Because I do everything deeply, even purification.
The only miracle in my life now is that no matter who is in my bed, I see no flaws in them. I sleep with them like they are the only love I have known. No matter if their kisses are pecks like a birds, their tongue like a lizards that has no direction. I do not study my place in their life, nor theirs in mine. I only send out rays of light to them and then return to my chaotic whirlwind. I return to checking the voltages; seeing when the next house will fall and the next bolt of lightening will crash. When will the next fire burn and where? Where should I place the extinguisher, just in case? My life is a series of skipping from coos of love to staring ravaged patients in the face. I hope I do not flinch when I look pain in the face so many times. It is true, I have slowly lost my laugh and my smile, but I know these are small things that can return with the right friends.
I have given up the role Parker played in my life.
He was the master surgeon, attending to my wounds with the love of a mother for weeks.
But then, in a moment he would turn. His face contorted. And he became a dog with rabies who would not only undo his weeks of patient stitches and calm insertions of tubes and treatments and salves and begin ripping me open so that I was worse off than before he had cured ten year old wounds. But how I held to that hope. If he cured the ten year old wounds, couldn’t he do it again, and not turn into the dog of destruction? He could not.
I scribble on soiled toilet paper.
My Dearest Parker, I cannot write anymore. It has become hard to write, and for the first time since I saw you and you drove off, my heart aches in my chest physically. I feel like I will die from the pain inside. I think about transplants. If I die, and my heart is intact, will the person who gets it suddenly listen to a certain prelude and fugue of Bach’s on nonstop for weeks and only read holocaust poetry, listening to Jodi Picoult on tape and doing nothing else but absorbing the worlds suffering because nobody else is paying attention? Or because they don’t know why? Will they suddenly start crying for reasons they don’t understand, when previous to the transplant, they had never cried in their life? Fuck you Parker. Goodbye, Parker. Don’t touch my fucking ashes.
to whom it may concern: at this point in time, words all fail me. all words fail me? a few simple definitions, and i cant feel the geography.
what is a comfort level?
Words dance around and make me feel so sad. When I write this passage, I feel so much heavier than then when I began. consumed
out of my mind
I…cannot…write
anymore
did not think
i could even write this
entry
…..
how to say
goodbye
how to say
goodbye
…….when i believe there can be no goodbyes
oh my God, my darling, why, raw, tear, you, arms,
thank you for the short moments of reprief
but if i become an escapist in this life…….
wont there be damage to pay
and i know it already
the moments i slip into reality are payment already
oh God please speak to me
please come to me
I am not worthy please show me why I was such a pure child and am not
so
now
I need a priest, not a journal
Take Another Look 