I never came here seeking us. It is death I’ve been chasing.
What I realize making soup one day, is that I didn’t want to light two burners at once as one has a tendency to burst upon lighting which is its own problem. Suddenly, wanting to add two together, I pause. I’ll make the tea later. It’s true my problems; what I am scared of and enraptured with, drawn towards and reaching for is flame. That if the place was to catch fire, I might be so engrossed by the violence of pure element, I would freeze, take no cover, almost plead with an embrace or hold the cat so close as I lose my breath in my sleep, suffocated without waking.
“I dreamt of a fire last night.”
I am writing this to myself because later I will remember something else so long as I tried to catch the imagery with more vivid detail the first time. In the morning, it was hard. Distraction immediately began. So many inquiries first thing in the morning. I wrote as much as I could and took my usual walk later. Sometimes things hit me unexpectedly.
“My neighbor’s house caught fire when I was nine.”
But I had told myself a story first on that walk. First the dream, then going back to remember the dream and then trying to make meaning.
three
number
- equivalent to the sum of one and two; one more than two; 3.
“her three children”- a group or unit of three people or things.
noun: three; plural noun: threes
“students clustered in twos or threes” - three years old.
- a group or unit of three people or things.
“Everyone has discounted how able I am at guessing.”
“Guessing?”
“Yes, my ability to predict or guess the correct answer when there is really no reason I should be able to know that.”
I was sitting in the big orange arm chair, coffee on the stand next to me, incense lit the room when I was there now. Trying not to take the appearance of incense personally, I did understand both myself and the absorption she has to face to do this job. I had done this job too. Facial micro gestures don’t bother me. When I mention a man’s name, I ignore the wrinkle of her nose, pleased with her dissatisfaction of him as it shows her commitment to my health, her loyalty to me.
“Even though,” I continue, “guessing games seem silly, if you win almost every time, you start to believe in the supernatural. I grew up playing these games with Leana and we would always guess the color or number the other one is thinking. Of course,” I stop myself realizing how naive I sound, “she could be lying but I just told you the story of the trams at Busch Gardens and the thing about the blackout on Halloween.”
I always gazed to the right when I was trying to figure out how to word something to my therapist. She never seemed worried or put off by me. I had told her about the way the titles seemed to talk to me, how music talked to me, and she listened to my corollations without interference. I found her encouraging, honest and trustworthy and was grounded. Open to collaboration with my spiritual practice but wouldn’t support theories that aliens live in the electricity and whisper things to you all day. I needed that. Whether I gave up the theory or not was inconsequential. She just reminded me to breathe, eat, come back to Earth and take care of myself. Delusions existed in all of us. We aren’t here to fight every delusion but become unmired from them. A practice of decoupling.
“There is nothing supernatural about your Spotify,” he said. “A music fast would do you good.”
“Oh for like a month?”
“Oh god no, like two or three days then listen to it for two or three days. There is nothing supernatural about your Spotify though. You did this in Boulder, I remember. Would walk for hours listening to music.”
“Yes, you know,” I sit across from him in my apartment.
He visits from time to time to let me borrow books, hang curtains, check shelves.
“I can’t believe you still have no one to help you with this,” he says, secretly pleased with my allowance of him in the second bedroom.
“I have friends but,” I am pleased that he made amends to me once, “I don’t ask them for things like this.”
I was trying to decouple songs from feelings, the beat from influence of mood, the aliens from the sounds, the eardrums from the soreness and seizure. Confusion arises from panic which begins with daily, frequent mundane worry. The catalyst is mania and for me, music propelled me into frenzy. Literally got my heart palpitating and my legs moving all over the city, almost on instinct like a hungry centipede, I would be suddenly on the ceiling, seeking. I needed help finding ground. I liked my therapist. We discussed self care often but we also let my imagination bloom. She let me borrow her tarot deck once and all she asked was that I show her how to use it. We sat on the carpet and I flipped a few cards to begin.
“Two means the coupling, or the coming together of something. Ace is the beginning so three is the triangle, kind of like the first part of completion. Ace is nascent, spark, begin. Two is come together, duality, choice. Three is the mark of spark as all fall in line. Let’s examine some for example. What’s on your mind?”
This was risky but she answered.
“I have been having a tough time with my mother. She’s sick,” she hesitated but she shared, “and I am taking care of her.”
“Oh nice the two of cups: love. Look at these swans in the water, swimming, connected.”
We both gazed at the card and she nodded. I always spoke like that in tangles and hoped the other person was reading my mind. When I was kid sometimes I would only share half a sentence or half a story and assumed the other person understood what I was saying. As I sit here recalling my superpower of winning card games, I am, before she even leans forward, asking myself if people really change.
“The consequence of guessing correctly for no reason,” I stick my thumb out to begin recounting, “thinking of things and then watching them happen, writing stories and watching them happen, reading tarot for myself and others and getting nothing but positive feedback and referrals, and sometimes having premonition in dreams, has led me to conclude that the most dangerous thing people have done to me is invalidate my intuition.”
She says nothing because we have been talking for almost four years. All five fingers are up and I am leaning forward in the chair, not gazing anywhere but suddenly extremely straightforward, mouth agape and I am not finished with my resentful tirade.
“Even though it sounds silly, this idea that I am able to guess trivial things like the color of a tram, or the thought in someone’s head or, in a different way, seeing storms or things approaching has discounted a huge valuable part of myself. Because of this I was unable to share it, unable to thrive in it and lost control in it when it became stronger three years ago. Gaslighting is everywhere. I knew something was wrong with my body years ago when I had a steady job and health insurance and went to the doctor for stomach issues. I knew then I drank too much coffee and the vitamin drink I took in the morning was contributing but I complained of sinus, mucus, etc. only to find out five years later, it is connected, it was solvable then and now I have a tumor. I went a year ago to the ER for dysphagia and they sent me home with a referral to a psychiatrist that didn’t take my insurance without even checking my throat even though I admitted to being confused, a tiny bit delusional. How can you justify not checking to make sure someone’s delusion isn’t correct if you’re there to help them? And in the most recent assault, my doctor said I have an ‘enlarged parathyroid’ when she meant tumor, benign and when I became overwhelmed by the dissonance, the inaccuracy of her diagnosis, I cried. That led her to tell me I should see a psychiatrist for my anxiety.”
Pause for impact, self, audience, understanding definitions, facts, the way words form a sentence like a barrel of a gun.
“Because of my anxiety, my admitted sensitivity that has been, I’d say, equal friend and foe, I’ve been dismissed as hypochondriac, psychosomatic, a frazzled danger to herself. Yet, I can feel the breeze change from indoors and I can feel my own body aging each day; reject itself, the mucus climbing up my throat and sitting there like a tiny bouncy ball on my larynx. I even wrote that.”
I was staring at my shoes.
“Wrote what?”
“I wrote a poem about my voice box years ago, being stifled by something and later a story about an apparition squeezing my throat shut. The sensations. It’s just I don’t feel heard and it’s not confusing, it’s real. I’ve been dismissed as a woman with anxiety because of gaslighting. I’m anxious because I’m traumatized and everyone tells me everything I feel is psychosomatic. I have a tumor and the symbology is that I have a tumor because I’m unheard. I have to swallow my own words or yell. I feel like I’ve been yelling. I think I’m clear. Do you think I’m clear? Frank?”
This is where grief sits. Not in this office with my therapist but the repetition of a question that you already know the answer to because you’ve asked it so many times before and a bullet hits your heart when the trigger is released.
“Yes.”
“Then why did you leave?”
Suddenly, I fix my attention on someone else.
It just started where it started, an ending. That’s how things usually spark: the motion of getting up from the table, lowered head so you only see the eyelid, the silencing of gesture and voice and argument. There’s nothing left to say. You remember that painted eyelid.
You remember the back of someone; black slicker, lined in polyester, practical, utilitarian, good for rain and snow and gray, cold days and you remember it because it represents the deepest part of them; their practicality and planning. Pragmatic even in display, they were fact-based, ruled by thought and precise in many ways. Always wearing sneakers. Always wearing layers. You remember the interminable door slamming shut as your hand flies off the knob and you leave her sitting there, not stunned or surprised but gently mourning in the capsize.
“Would you say I’m frank?” she asked me.
That uneven smile and eyebrow and posture. Her constant vacillation between sainthood and possession that she spit at me in fragments, expected me to consume it, volley back, hold it, remember, care.
“Yes.”
.I’ll remember her inquisitiveness and quiet generosity where no one saw and with no explanation, I saw, a life she tried to save. She will remember me by my one-word answers and the canyon they tried to fill. But I didn’t expect to see her like that.
“Do you believe everything I say?”
The room was full when I walked in, quiet. Because I was late, she ushered me in and told me to keep my voice down. I had expected to be turned away but this was my second visit and I meant well, didn’t I? I had just started this treatment to help me with my insomnia, help me wind down in the evening, help me sleep. Life was ok. I had dreams and hidden feelings and pictures. Still had a pocket of violets and a row of soothsayers following me.
“Yes.”
They were all women there and oddly, all had the same short hair, the same fall comfort clothes, just hoodies and jeans and sneakers but I saw her first. There was no need to scan. She wasn’t wearing a hat or anything to cover her hair and I realized it was the first time I really saw her; head twisted only slightly away from me but mostly straight and supported by the chair, needles sticking out of her jawline. Eucalyptus filled the room, hints of lavender, low light and is this what it always meant, the next time we are forced to face it there will be no defense between us. I read there will be light. I read the word befallen. Sometimes I practiced dictation too: moved by a carelessness but hoarding when the nymph is gone, still enraptured by the sight. She was long, lean, her collarbone jutted out from underneath a very thin striped sweater that favored her. It was kind of how I remembered: unembellished and ordinary but shining in its plainness. She wore no jewelry. She was taller than I expected, thinner too, and simple, not like a beige wallpaper or some other muted adornment but something bigger even in the background. Her cheekbones were high. Her clavicle jutted and she was paling but olive, not milk white, not quite tan, Her neck long as I imagined. Her breathing slow and she looked content to be there. It felt like I was suddenly invading.
Not plain, no, and not ordinary just a spectacle in its honesty. Maybe it’s brave that shows, triumph, skill survives like a Renaissance portrait that lasts decades in the museum for its representation of the time; the light the artist was able to paint into the picture peeking from the corner, dull blues and grays and a very fine wine-burgundy. It’s a dark painting but it lights up the room; no sun just that one light in the corner. You pass it and you pause every time. Analytics and video tapes demand it stays in that museum. Mostly black with a few people looking up, following the cloud. You’re admiring what they were– the vividness of the devil’s outline, black against black. It’s all you can see.
A smile began in the corner of her mouth and she stretched her fingers. I saw nothing in her hands. Her nails were long and red and her jeans had holes in them. She held nothing in her hands eyes shut, the mouth falling slightly open, relaxing. I didn’t look at her feet as I turned away. What an incredible yearning for loss we face. If only to stay there that day of passing her without a word, head down only to turn around to watch her turning around too and later demanding explanation. Leaving, if only to stay enveloped in the sight of her resting with needles poking out all over her face, her neck, her jaw, her wrists. To stay in winter, in our coats, watching the Earth break into a rift and separate cliffs so all you hear are echoes. A heavy yes falling to the bottom. The portrait of the townspeople hurried to the shadow, gawked at by millions a year, never removed for its classic parable. Not a glittering, but a dimness yet the center of the room. Beware of what you seek for it is seeking you.
Just say yes and step into the consequence.
All the blades had been painted to match the handle. Even as her eyes adjusted to the darkness, she was still constricted by the pitch black chrysalis. Stuck at the entrance, frozen, she waited for a light, a door, a window, any grace to come her way. She stood stolid, resigned to a sudden phlegmatic state waiting for someone to open the door and tell her it’s a joke, to tell her it’s fine, to wake her up. She couldn’t even pinch herself. She couldn’t catch her breath. She couldn’t move. Frozen in a final quiver, she realized she couldn’t discern the difference between a thousand knives pointing at her and the one handle she was supposed to grab. Like the doe letting paralysis sheathe her before the first arrow hit, she made no move when the bomb dropped.
“recap”
this next section is called, the definitions. ways i clung to words in private.
“What I’d like is to be transformed, which becomes less possible. Disguise is easier when you’re young.”
–cat’s eye, margaret atwood
Another ok was heard from a doorway and off I ran to find my dog, her stick, our battle. It’s true I always had friends. Even in my weirdness, awkwardness, when I was called a “dork” by an eight grader with pretty hair, I was popular. I used to purposely sit next to whoever
I thought the cutest guy in class was every year. Throughout the year, I would whisper him jokes, secrets, weird things just for him. He was always popular, on a sports team or a bad boy or something elusive. He never dated me or asked me to a dance but the same guys always found themselves sitting next to me, even in other classes or would move towards me bit by bit. They laughed. We had inside jokes. They always asked if I would sign their yearbook. When I got mine back, they always included the inside joke. I was not without friends or flirtations. I was just strange.
Kids. Kids have no idea what trauma is until hindsight. Hindsight is the adult’s burden. Ignorance is the child’s.
“Of course, we realize, we are all racist. White people that is.”
“Do you believe that?”
“Yes.”
He said nothing else.
“I am derailing a bit but it’s only to paint a better story. We all have work to undo. We all have guilt festering. My story, this one, is of a nine year old girl learning how the world operates both for her and against her as she is juxtaposed against two low income neighborhoods, living in a low income house herself, however, on the right side of the neighborhoods where the schools are rich even if she wasn’t.”
“I see.”
Men always said that but rarely was it true.
“Not yet. Your job is to discern which one is the lie after all.”
He paused but I could tell he wanted to speak so I held still in the story.
“You have a clever way.”
One time, and this is true and I didn’t tell him, one time to get out of something I simply fell down. I feigned tripping so the attention would be on the sudden fall. That is how it goes.
“The time is passing at least.”
He nodded. Outside, the church bell went off.
It’s eight pm.
“Curfew,” he said.
“It’s funny,” and I did smile. “Had you told me a year ago that the city would be pitch black, ice cold, no phones and only certain neighborhoods would be patrolled for safety, I would have believed you, well, maybe not about the phones. That’s the killer, but I never would have seen myself on this side of town, and alone.”
“You always had friends.”
“My man, I grew up surrounded by people. I’ve always had friends.This,” I held my arms out gesturing to my situation, “is hell.”
Then she howled. And we danced and twirled and she threw leaves up in the air and watched them fall and I twirled the large branch and imagined I lived at the top of a tree like a fairy and that Adelmira wove a fence of leaves below me. That no one could get in. That no one could break into us. We stayed like that, enraptured with the muddy fall for another ten or so minutes before she broke our stride.
“I need to head back.”
Snapped out of a parallel daydream, both my hands were full of dirt when I came to.
“What, why?”
“I have to take care of my mom.”
“What’s wrong with her?”
“Nothing, I just have to go.”
“Ok, I’ll walk back with you.”
We both began the trudge through the ditch.
“Are you gonna get in trouble for your clothes?”
She looked down towards her feet and then turned back to me. She was leading.
“I don’t think so. It will be alright.”
She smiled at me, bright. She had a front snaggle tooth. A few other kids I knew had those. My brother said it’s because they couldn’t afford dentists and orthodontry. My mom agreed. My brother said other things too; more negative things but I didn’t repeat them to her.
“I had fun.”
“Me too, want to play tomorrow?”
She was messing with her hair a lot. I envied her hair; long and tangly, fine like mine but longer. Hair was what I felt when I twirled the leaf, envy, hair, what it would feel like to run my fingers through my hair. It was the secret thing I did that I couldn’t explain; touched things that felt like they could move–straws, ribbon, leaves, tall plants. As I touched them, I would imagine they were long locks of my own hair except it wasn’t me, it was the distorted more perfect version of me. The one with hair. The one who had good handwriting. The one who always won the science fair. The one who boys liked and girls admired and she had long hair.
“I like your hair, Adelmira.”
She didn’t say anything but she stopped playing with it. When we got to the edge by the church where we met, I asked her which way she was going. Pointing to the left, towards Chesapeake, she bit her lip.
“I’d invite you but my mom doesn’t like people over. It’s better if we meet here.”
“That’s ok. I am not allowed in that neighborhood. Or that one,” I pointed to my left. “I got off at my friend Parres’ bus stop once but I wasn’t allowed to do it again. I don’t know really know why.”
“I do. It’s cuz your white.”
“No, my mom says it’s cuz it’s too far. Aren’t you white?”
“No,” and she added. “I thought you and I were kind of the same but we’re different. I still like you though. It’s ok that you’re white.”
“Ok,” I became sheepish.
She headed towards Indian River, that was the name of the neighborhood, and I began walking home. I was going to play Kirby I decided. Or Donkey Kong if no one was in the den. It’s cuz your white. Years later, my friend Parres, in high school would turn around on the bus to face me and tell me she thought I was different but that I was white like all the white girls and that we were all racist. I didn’t argue with her but I told her I wasn’t racist. She looked at me. We had once, in third grade, gotten into a fight because she thought I rolled my eyes at her when I was trying to get something out of my eye. My mom taught me a trick–you close your eye and roll it around and whatever is stuck will fall out. In order to keep it closed, I had to pull the eye shut. Because of my predilection for attention, I often tried to get my friends’ attention no matter what I was doing or at least looked their way. Both Parres and another classmate, Tamara, saw me and took it as a slight. I actually did not know this until much later, weeks later when they decided they were done being mad and started doing my hair at lunch again.
“I love your hair,” Tamara would say and run her fingers through it twisting it into a loose braid.
Kids. Kids have no idea what trauma is until hindsight. Hindsight is the adult’s burden. Ignorance is the child’s.
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