“Not everyone returns to baseline.”
I always share this first. Regardless of audience, it is important that people understand, you don’t always return.
“Sometimes, you have a new baseline. A new stasis you try to maintain.”
I stuck my thumb to my chest like I was explaining to a child. My therapist nodded.

This was a year later, after I spent two hours sobbing to an on-site psychiatrist at Penn Presbyterian. I remember waiting in the lobby, high and unsure on whether or not to tell them that or to ride that out, not knowing they would make me pee in a cup to test for pregnancy. Drugs. I am paranoid. The lights were bright and the EMT was like a giant angel, tall, blue eyed, kind. My shorts were too short to feel comfortable doing anything but eat cherries which is what I was doing when this started.

“911. What’s your emergency?”
“I swallowed a cherry pit and now I am choking.”

I always speak like that, flatly. Terse. Abrupt. I imagine announcing the death of every friend I have loved the same way: no affect, matter of fact, let’s solve this little grief puzzle.
“She was my best friend and now she is dead,” I will say.

I am now getting ready to see the psychiatrist.
“Usually, if you’re choking you can’t breathe or talk. Can you breathe? Are you breathing?”
I am breathing. Breathe. I am breath. My hair is on end. Goosebumps line my arm. I am now getting ready to see the psychiatrist.
“The ambulance is on it’s way already. Would you like to go to the hospital just in case? For your anxiety?”
I am sobbing into a telephone and I can feel something in my throat.
“Bolus,” they say. “Things get stuck right here,” and he mimes to his own throat, “but we can take you.”
I was scared of cyanide and a $2,000 ambulance bill plus everything.
“Name.”
“(Redacted).”
“Date of birth?”
“(Redacted).”
“Can I see the psychiatrist? I am having some trouble,” I gestured to the air,
“understanding reality.”
A woman sat with me first and let me cry. I regret what I said but more her inaction.
“Do you still want your throat checked?”
“No, I am not choking.”

No, I wasn’t. She smiled. Told me the psychiatrist would be with me and then a security guard sat down to watch me. The red bracelet. I was a walking red bracelet that had to be watched. Word problem #2 (pop quiz!)

A woman walks into the psych unit of a hospital off an ambulance ride in which she has dispatched 911 because she believed she was choking on a cherry pit which she claims is still stuck in her throat. Immediately upon entering the ambulance, she asks to see the psychiatrist because she can’t tell the difference between fantasy and reality. Do you check her throat?

Spoiler alert: they didn’t.
“Come in,” a young asian man says to me.
He is younger than me and I feel my resentment rising the way my clients did when they first met smiling, sunny, pleated-skirt, white and bubbly me.

“Have a seat,” he gestures to a stiff tan chair.
The room was shaped like a cell with no windows. There was a chair and a desk for him, and a chair for me. Two security guards sat out front. So this is it.
“It says you called 911 because you thought you were choking.”
I nodded. I was being careful. This is it. This is a cell.

I was suddenly very careful and aware of where I was. I am in the psych hospital a place where the state will 302 you if you present as a danger to yourself or others, or are unable to care for yourself.
“No, I am not.”

these are first drafts.

three stories creating novella #1

there are seven novellas.

there are several stories intertwined into each novella

it has taken me forever to land on this and it’s a labyrinth

I’ll repeat this, I have very little recollection of the mechanism. All I knew is I was suddenly in mid air about eight feet off the ground and that there was a wolf below me already. What I didn’t see, suspect or plan for was the woman’s voice suddenly close to me.
“Hey.”
She was behind me. I was cradled like a caterpillar or a fetus, however you want to look at it when she said “hey” casually like I was in her seat or path and I kind of started to twist her way. I was dangling, upside down and squished. This trap was designed for smaller prey. Or maybe it was just cozy.
“How are you doing?” I heard her say.
Spinning. I was spinning, dangling from a tree. There was a wolf beneath me and a woman in black, I could see,a big black parka acting so casually, I began to tear up without notice.
“You’re out here alone.”
“My friend is dead.”
I did snap once. I wish I hadn’t. That temper. That slow building temper of mine, and no sentiment.
“So you’re alone.”
I could see her now but I was definitely still twirling. I could only see her bangs and pale face. I could also see two more people walking up behind her.
“These are my dogs,” she said.
I continued twirling. The propulsion of the net had me  in motion. It was hard not to throw up but there was nothing to throw up. It was hard to keep footing in the air. I couldn’t stop spinning. I hoped she couldn’t see my face; the tears wouldn’t break. They’d just sting. I blinked.
“These are my friends.”
As I spun back, I saw the dog that had trotted over return to my friend’s body. Almost prancing, she sort of hopped like it was a performance. It was fuzzy, everything, but the vision of her on the ground and one of them distinctly pulling her arm out of the socket was clear. There was no sound in the woods except a light creak from the tension of the rope and my body weighing down the branch as it moved, the woman’s voice as she pleased and a cracking sound as my friend’s arm was ripped from her body.
“What do you know? That could be you.” she said.
Terror.
“What do you seek?”
To be in a hot hot bath away from here.
“Can you speak?”
Tears welled in my eyes and it stung and my arm would fall asleep if I stayed like this. I was scared to move, afraid any reaction to her would infuriate her. Psychopaths made sense to me. They are triggered by both defiance and submission so it’s best to walk lightly, carry a prayer. I tried to shift without her seeing but it was impossible. I felt two hands grab the net near my coccyx to stop it.  She was a giant or
“There are wolves all over these woods.”
The two women behind her began to let out howls, loud, in my ear and then roaring laughter Startled, I finally moved my arm so I was no longer sitting on it.
“You heard them earlier didn’t you? These are my dogs, but my dogs kill and attract wolves, foxes, sometimes a coyote.”
I felt movement, then I was being spun around again to face them. Three women, all in black parkas and boots, mean and not my friends.
“We can cut you down and you can come with us, or you can hang out here and wait for some hunter to save you.” She looked up at the sky and sneered. “It’s black as death out here. What hunter is near?
Even in confusion, I took notice. My senses were heightened actually. Striking and strict and I couldn’t see her shoes but I bet they were thick soled and properly fitted and she was made for whatever this was.  She had green eyes, black bangs, and burgundy lips like she had just applied matte lipstick to them which didn’t even bother me. Whatever she was we were not the same but I was enthralled and worried at the enamoration. My arm hurt and I was freezing and her eyes were blazing pines in my way.
“Or you could freeze to death. Hopefully, faster then each animal will pick at you. “
I barely noticed her friends. She looked down at the ground and then up at me.
“It’s only about six feet off the ground.  Long dogs can get that. Foxes can wait.”
Without any warning, she turned to walk away. Her friends followed suit. I heard the cracking of bones in the distance. If I could smell blood like them, I would have. It was everywhere.

“Does forgiveness necessarily restore a ruptured relationship or simply allow a resumption of it?”

–Repair by Elizabeth V. Spelman

It’s not that I thought I would survive, it’s that instinct will move you even when you presume will lost. My ankles, calves, knees, thighs were sore but my body was propelled by a slow churning fire, a neurological release that screamed “flee!” I obeyed. I wished I could have looked up to see them in formation. If there was anything I had learned it was about formation.
“Look, watch this,” I showed my friend the youtube video of the moose stomping the guy to death outside of an Alaskan post office.
“Whaaaattt? That’s morbid.”
“Yeah,” I nodded.
“Did you see the one where the lions get the baby elephant?”
“Yeah. What about the one where the snake swallows the man?”
“Yeah.”
“Oh, did I show you snake island?”
“Of course.”
“Let’s rewatch the one where the sting ray gets the molting crab.”
“Cool.”
I spent my entire life watching predators prey, hunt, massacre. Even the tiniest carnivores intrigued me. I spent a lot of time as a kid scooping crickets in my hand to feed to our turtle just to watch the way his neck craned when he felt the movement, when the water vibrated, when he knew that something was in the tank. I had learned all about hunts, long hunts, long stalks and sprints. I knew if you ever saw a mountain lion you were dead. Same with an alligator and crocodile if you were in the water. A shark may not bite you but those other ones will sprint. And packs? You see one, you’re dead.
It’s the screech then the scream then the howl I heard, then the second howl then the third, then the cacophony. A victorious announcement calling for celebration and yes we have a runner. You could possibly see a wolf and live to tell about it but I was squarely in a forest covered in snow without any sense of direction home, had been hiking for eight hours and was experiencing a light frost in all my appendages as well as a persistent light headedness.  My body told me to run, but my head, had she stopped, would have told me to leap into the center of the four stones there and see what you get. You can’t see lakes in winter. You can’t see frozen lakes covered in snow in winter. I could hear them howling. You know what else you can’t see?

I was shot into the air and cradled there by something like a web. I felt dizzy and wanted to vomit from the movement. I felt my fingers grab the mesh of the rope. Encircled, I was encircled by fibers holding me there and something trotted beneath me. I was in mid air, suspended. It was mid-January, sixteen degrees and I felt it.

If there is something better than drowning or having your throat torn open, it’s not this.

“The woman who saw her own death’

“adversity truly introduces us to ourselves”

here i come in linear order

Right before it hit, I was at my most lucid.I had begun guessing with a 98.5% accuracy. I knew I was off about a couple of things but I felt secure in what I did know:

1.The bugs that had descended the trees had all frozen so I didn’t have to worry about killing them.
2. The power was out on almost every block.
3. I use intimidation as a tactic to seize opportunity. 

to my mother for never giving up on me (and for Matt always)