A contract with myself.

I’ve said something like this to myself countless times this last year as I have tried to dig myself out of whatever is going on inside my brain. But this time, it’s time I think to take it seriously and to try. Granted, I always try to force myself. To white knuckle it through a depressive or panicked state. I don’t know what makes this one any different. It was daunting trying to come up with the words when I made a phone call today so when I made my next phone call, right before, I wrote a script of what I needed to say to the doctor because I took too long to connect my thoughts with my mouth. Guess how long it took me to to write that script. I’m too embarrassed to clock it at this point.

Tomorrow. I friggin promise promise promise myself, the actual me, not this walking piece of crud that is curled up in its place. But I digress. Tomorrow I promise I am going to do the following things come hell or high water and since I have felt like I’ve been in hell this past year, high water wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world.

 

I promise I am going to find a therapist.

I promise I am going to work on this project of mine for two hours minimum without distractions.

I promise myself I am going to put on my shoes, tie them, and at least walk my dog down to the corner.

I promise I’m going to remember to eat. At least two full meals.

And I promise myself I am going to make another list tomorrow after completing this one.

 

I have no idea how to force myself out of this but putting it here is going to hold me accountable. I’m not even going to say I hope it does. It has to because I do not fucking know where to go from here if I don’t figure out how to be functional.

Don’t lose your faith in me baby.

Music is my favorite form of medicine. It’s what I do to process. When I’m not doing well, sometimes I need to just embrace the suck and let the storm run its course. Other times, I have to pull myself out of it. The problem is, there are two parts of me: what I like to think is the real me and the weakest and most vulnerable part of me. While I am both, when I get caught really deep in an episode, it feels like the latter part of me pushes the real me out, kind of like a reverse invasion of the body snatchers. The part of me I need in order to feel better, to know I’m more than crud, is just gone.

I thought recently about how I wish I could say certain things to say to myself that I believe when I’m not depressed. I parrot them but it doesn’t work because I know I don’t mean it in those moments. I sit in those episodes sometimes and get too comfy in that ball of shame, isolation, and immense disappointment in myself and everything I do. I will completely forget what it is like to believe in myself, to believe I have any future, or to believe I could possibly be worth anything other than simply eroding away. When I get better, it’s like this clear glass goes up: I remember how I felt and I can describe it but I can’t reach through the glass. I can’t feel or touch those parts of me. I thought if I don’t believe myself in those moments, maybe a playlist that says the things I know a more functional part of me wants to say to myself would help.

This playlist is just essentially the real me recorded as a reminder when I need evidence that I’m more than how I feel in that moment. It’s basically just me talking to myself, and a little bit of the depression talking back.  Some of the songs I personally see in ways they weren’t intended to mean so some of it may not to quite fit but for some strange reason, it means enough to me to throw me a lifeline for a little bit longer. For example, some of the songs are about romantic relationships and clearly I’m not in love with myself. That seems like the opposite of depression. It is really clear in some cases and not at all in others but I thought if it helps somebody else, great. You might also want to consider making your own if you haven’t. Give it a listen.

 

Zero and three thousand pounds of gravity.

This is the third in a multi-post piece. I recommend you read it first here. 

It was disorienting for me and I had more of a reaction than I understood, was less able to be impartial than I wanted to, and I just became somebody I don’t recognize. I don’t say that to excuse myself. This was no invasion of the body snatchers. It was definitely me and I am culpable for my behavior and conscious it speaks to my character, but I’m grasping at straws when I try to figure out what she (aka I) was doing. Being around her reminds me of that.

She was also somebody I let hug me, one of the few people because letting people put their hands around you and be that close to the most vulnerable parts of your body is counter-intuitive for me. I balk when anybody hugs me because it takes a moment for the rational piece of me to catch up with the instinctive part that is frozen between some subtle form of fight-or-flight where I back up and wall the person off with my hands.

I let her hug me because our friendship was hard-earned. Neither of us clicked initially and it was one of those relationships I had to develop over time by listening and sharing (something which feels like streaking to me) and identifying shared experiences. And one of those shared experiences is anxiety, hers and mine. She is probably one of the only people who I have ever felt really got how I felt and what it was like for me. I never told her or indicated that in any way, but she was. And when they split up, it tapped into years of family trauma and broken marriages, people moving out in the middle of the night, ripping pictures off of walls on Christmas Eve and going nose-to-nose in spittingly blind, tumultuous rage. Their separation was nothing like that and I knew that, but I got extremely emotional one night when they had a moment and it just threw off my equilibrium. It was too much to process and overwhelmed me. It activated too many sensors, opened too many dusty boxes, and rubbed too many forgotten scars–for no reason other than it had the end of a relationship in common. I have no idea why all of my previous experiences bled into that one, or what I did to let them.

I tried to gain my footing, the way you try to keep your balance walking across those fun house bridges with the many spinning black cylinders at your feet. And that footing was to be the worst version of myself and for that I will never be able to do anything but know it happened and, to myself, own my own behaviors. Anyways, her anxiety means something to me and, knowing how salient feelings of anxiety have been to me for the past two years, I was uncomfortable with the idea of making her uncomfortable, assuming I might. I had thought about apologizing. I started I don’t know how many letters. But I always thought maybe what was intended to be a sincere gesture was just me looking for a reason to absolve myself of my own actions. So I threw the papers away each time. Maybe it is so long over and, like my feelings then, I am on an entirely different wavelength and inappropriately restless with something which everybody else is past. And I can appreciate that. I am anything if emotionally and inter-personally normal. It would be selfish to apologize if it meant bringing up old wounds, right? I never decided and being at the wedding, I was not assuming I would be a focal point of tension but the idea that I could create tension for her, and through her, my friend getting married, I really did not want to go. That anxiety and tension in me built parallel to a hell of a lot of other anxieties in my life until I RSVP’d. I tried to focus on the positive and be excited. I am very happy for my friend. She deserved a wonderful day and I wanted her to know that was important to me. We never actually outright talked about her bridal party and part of me wonders if over the game of telephone, things got misconstrued and it was never a point of anxiety for her. When we went kayaking on our own and first “treat yo’self” day, she told me if we were as close when she got engaged as we were then, she would probably ask me to be in her bridal party. Honestly, I didn’t think too far into it, probably because I was kayaking. She got engaged two months later but in the midst of that, this really important relationship in our social group ripped wide open and changed everything. To be honest, I forgot she ever said that until it popped in my mind recently.

I was anxious about making people uncomfortable, I was uncomfortable (I’m already awkward in ALL social situations), and I was ashamed and insecure that, if all of these worries about me overreacting were true, that I was going to be at this event where people saw me as partially a monster, and maybe I am. I don’t want to be. I try not to be but I’m human and I’ve done some shitty things I wish I could take back.

The morning of the wedding, I got up and showered several hours before I needed to. I was excited and looking forward to the event. I planned to be supportive and I did not plan to walk up to my former friend because I didn’t want to bother her but if I came up to me, I planned to tell her she looked beautiful and I was glad she seemed happy. And all of that remained but sometimes even unrelated anxieties take over and I just lock down emotionally. I went from being happy to hearing my significant other ran into them in the hallway of our hotel and, suddenly all of it being real and that I was going to be in this room with all of this tension I felt hit me. I have gone out of my way to hide what has been going on but in August 2016, I was having such strong PTSD and depressive symptoms I stopped being able to function one day on the way to work. I pulled over on a street I didn’t know, put my head against the steering wheel, and froze mentally. I was no longer in command of my extremities and suddenly managing to sit back up and move my arms to 5 and 9 on the steering wheel felt like rocket science. Long story short, I ended up going to see my psychiatrist instead of work and he was concerned enough he had my then boyfriend take me to the emergency room. I had no means of hurting myself and hadn’t been planning on it but it came over me as suddenly and hard as a realization that I’m in a tall building and everything below me has long caught fire so the only thing I can do to keep from burning alive is jump. And I wanted to jump so badly it hurt, like when you long desperately for something you once had but it slipped through your fingers. I haven’t been in that bad of a position since but I have been really playing with the duller and razor sharp edges of suicidal ideation and intent since and triggers or stressors, like that morning, just made that itch stronger.

This post is a work in progress  but I wanted to make it public since I am linking the entries. When I finish it, there will be more to this post and another link to the next.

Zero and two thousand pounds of gravity.

This is the second part of a previous post. I recommend you read it first here.

The physical sensations are pretty much the same too. I was at the wedding of a friend a few days ago and I went into it with that same uneasiness. I have really been struggling with my self-esteem and keeping my PTSD box closed when I am in public spaces. It has been the two hardest years of my life (interestingly enough in spite of the fact it bears none of the constant, heavy trauma and violence I experienced as a child and teenager) and I had been waffling about going for a while. On the surface, it was a defining moment for somebody who means a lot to me. On the other, a former friend and the ex of my current significant other was going to be in the bridal party, bringing significant tension given our estranged relationship since they ended their relationship several years ago because, his friend at the time, I was pretty one-sided and obnoxious. That alone made me reluctant because while I genuinely don’t care about being in the bridal party, I mean given how scarred I am from past experiences, being at a family function, in front of a lot of people, with a lot of noise and sound… I can’t explain it but my hands are shaking thinking about it. Growing up, those types of events were where people had a few too many drinks and once the euphoric effects of alcohol wore off, shit hit the fan. And I was usually the fan. So needless to say, I would have found a way to make it work had she asked me but I neither expected to be asked nor had a problem with not being asked while my former friend was asked. She lives really far away from everybody now and it gave her room to reconnect. Besides, the wedding was about my friend and her now husband’s happiness.

In spite of where my priorities lie relative to this wedding, I was reluctant to attend not because I was bitter or feeling petty, both of which I have previously been in this social group and very much regret. I was really hurt because, as I understood it, my friend felt like she couldn’t tell me because, word through the grapevine, she was worried I would be mean or angry. I’ve never been mean or angry to her, not that I could possibly think of. In fact, the only person I have had an intense reaction to was the other friend when her relationship ended and I resented some of the things that brought my friend so much hurt. I am intense. I am passionate and I am a hot head. And I know it. But I am a hot head only when I really, really care about an issue. In this case, I only really, really cared about the friend getting married. It hurt me that she felt that way; it hurt me that she was in the position to feel that way or to even have to think about it; it hurt me that we weren’t good enough friends for her to say it to me and I had to hear it by word-of-mouth from a less than unbiased source. It just hurt that I felt so disconnected and left in the dark. When I heard it had been hinted at some time, I don’t know, last year, I thought maybe it meant our friendship was over and I deserved it (I can be pretty dramatic). I wasn’t even sure I’d be invited to the wedding and was prepared to be supportive of that, let alone be in the bridal party. Nothing had been said but from the level of distance I perceived, it felt like that was the case.

So like ogres and onions, I have layers and so do my feelings, many layers, which is why I should really only communicate significant feelings and thoughts in writing because, between my anxiety, insecurity, humility, and awkwardness, I almost always overrepresent them and create more problems than my genuine thoughts would have. I was anxious about the white elephant in the room, eh since brides dress in white let’s change it this time to pink, glass elephant in the room. A disgustingly pepto bismol pink that I have only ever seen outside of the medicine when my mom painted it on my walls when I was nine. I am still a little angry with my former friend but also sad because she was/is somebody I genuinely cared/care about and somebody I miss, all dysfunction and awkwardness aside. Being around her and the whole group with how different things are definitely is hard for me because it makes me confront sad feelings I bury under anger the majority of the time. (For better or for worse, I’m like a blow fish; me throwing out tons of sharp spikes can be misinterpreted as a threat but I’m really trying to protect myself because I’ve been hurt in my life, a lot, and by people who were supposed to be caregivers so I keep almost everybody at a distance even if I don’t want to). It makes me sad, angry, and confused about how I treated her. At the time everything was moving so incredibly fast and I had things going on nobody else knew about and it just swirled. Before I knew it, I had committed so strongly to this narrative of her I had in my head, to my anger, and my self-righteousness that it seemed there was no going back.

This post is broken up into multiple to keep them shorter. You can read the next part here.

Zero and a thousand pounds of gravity.

Have you ever been on one of those zero gravity rides at the fair? They’re usually open circles you step into and everybody faces the center while the forces of it spinning hold them to the walls. When I was really young, I remember riding that with my aunt, who loves heavy metal and they would play heavy metal songs, including what remains to this day to be one of my favorite songs (in spite of the fact that heavy metal isn’t my preferred genre): Enter Sandman by Metallica.

I remember that it was enclosed back then and looked like a space ship. Every year, I was always terrified but it was my second favorite ride. I would stand in the line, feeling the forces of the overwhelmingly loud base beating against my throat and pushing against my chest. It felt like somebody took a subwoofer, slipped it into my head through my ear, turned it all the way up and hit play. Although I would stand there waiting for extended periods, the loud, in-your-face noise continued to feel sudden and abrupt. I would try to mask my fear so my cousins and brother didn’t tease me, so that I didn’t handle it worse than my next youngest cousin while debating whether or not I could physically force myself to step on the ride. When the operator would open the gate for us to enter, I’d feel the base pressure lodge in my throat and my heart would jump to meet it. It felt like an inevitable sentence I accepted as I stepped through the door, all the while knowing I had ridden it many times before and should be fine. That’s what makes it fun and that’s what also makes it scary. Adrenaline can be a drug or it can be a lifeline but the scary thing is in the moment, we can’t always separate our fear and perceptions from actual dangers.

That’s what PSTD feels like for me, minus the fun part. I feel eight or nine years old again, shifting my weight from foot to foot and trying not to shutter or wince from the loud noise that overpowers me and obscures my other senses, senses I have relied upon my whole life to keep me safe. I carry that ride in me everywhere and the main difference is that, unlike knowing the fair comes in October each year, it makes itself known on its own schedule, usually when I am already uneasy, haven’t eaten or slept much, or it’s simply a day that ends in d-a-y. It’s what has me on the fence about attending events or spending time with people, just like I stood in the line playing chicken with myself, waiting to see if my thrill-seeking side would run over my fearful side to get into the space ship or if the fearful kid in me will give in to instinct.

Because this post was longer than anticipated, you can find the next part here.

 

 

This awesome image of the zero gravity ride is from psychedelicfivecats on Flickr. You can find the account here.

When people think it’s a quick fix but it’s actually the Imitation Game.

I think the reason people often make simple suggestions to how to just miraculously heal from this imaginary condition depressed people tell them about is because they think a simple answer will address something they can’t imagine is more complicated than it is. People with depression or mental illness can have it their entire lives without understanding it. I feel like trying to manage mine is like shooting moving targets with only half a round of ammunition. Sometimes I get lucky and most times I just get frazzled. It’s not a science and the more you fail, the more fatigued you become with every episodic wave that hits you.

Try imagining the frustration the decoders had in The Imitation Game as they dealt with constantly changing rules and codes of an evasive enemy while racing a clock to solve a problem you can’t see. It’s like that scene in Catching Fire where the tributes figure out the logic and sequence of the arena only for it to be turned on its side as soon as they get it, forcing them to start over. That’s what it is like navigating having a mental illness. You constantly feel pressed to the clock to figure a solution to this problem that affects your finances, your happiness, your well-being and the needs of those affected by your mental illness as the problem morphs at random. You don’t have any reason to believe you are going to figure it out because you have failed the last one hundred times, all for reasons you don’t understand, but you keep throwing Hail Mary passes every time because there is nothing else to do.

I get that it is frustrating if you love somebody with mental illness and just want them to get better so you can do all of the things you know deep down they want to do, if only they would, because maybe if they faked it until they made it, they could have the life that is just beyond what they’re able to have right now. But here is the thing: they want it too and chances are, they want it much worse than you want it for them because you can always choose to walk away from them, they can’t walk away from their own minds. I would give ten years of my life, without a moment’s hesitation, if I knew I could live even eighty percent of the rest of it without being caught in this muck. Hell, I would be an easy sell to see coming because I’d be eager even to haggle far below that because living at eighty percent for ten years is a whole lot more life than living at twenty percent for an entire lifetime.

We don’t get a manual that tells us if x happens, then troubleshoot with y. I speak one language and my depression speaks another, not to mention it has logic and rules and reasoning that go far beyond my comprehension, making me simultaneously both a stranger to myself and the only person who can possibly know me. It isn’t a “sexy” topic that brings a lot of respect in many fields so it isn’t as if cutting edge researchers necessarily want to look into mental health. There is such a limited body of knowledge on mental illnesses in general before we even begin to address the fact that each mental illness is its own mirage and maze all in one, let alone tailored to each individual experiencing it.

With that being said, I have had a lot of people suggest simple things to me that believe me, were the first things I have tried. And the thing is, as frustrating as it can be, I totally get it and appreciate them saying anything at all. How can I expect them to understand something that  can’t? Truthfully, I just want them to get comfortable with the uncomfortable realization that there is no quick fix and no perfect ending to this. This isn’t the Pursuit of Happiness, as much as I wish it was. So I think my next entry is going to be me making an exhaustive list of the exhausting amount of things  have tried, sort of like a field notes sort of thing, because maybe if people knew the length to which depressed people go to fix themselves, they might be able to grasp just the tip of the iceberg.

Take your hand from around my throat.

I can’t breathe. And it might have something to do with you pinning me to the floor, my shoulder blades digging into the wood as you hold my arms down with your body, pressing your knees into my forearms like a rolling pin into dough, kneading it into the flat object it never asked you to be. You hold one finger in front of your mouth, slightly pulling down the bottom lip as you press it, demanding I be quiet. You press your forearm into my throat, not hard enough to cut off oxygen, not even enough to make me worry for my survival, but just enough to tell me you’re serious. But we’ve been here before and I know the routine.

My heart skips a beat, desperate to escape, an otherwise healthy animal caught in a live trap, not knowing if this trap is meant to bring her to needed care or a taxidermist’s knife. It accelerates, zero to sixty. When it stops at sixty, it presses the breaks to the floor, stopping so fast my momentum hasn’t gotten the memo in time and nearly flips me over into a damaging crash. I feel the pulse in your wrist on my neck, mirroring mine. Your eyes screaming with fear and their own sense of desperation, praying I don’t scream but knowing it would only be natural. You hope I fight my natural urges and do the smart thing.

I calm down. You look at me with sorrow and guilt, like an adult who just broke the hopes of the child most dear to her. I can see your grief and your remorse. You’re far less physically comfortable than I am but the weights of the chains around your extremities aren’t enough to root you to the ground so here you are, desperately trying to save me from myself. I can see the finger you press to your lips in hopes I stay silent is more of a trapped prayer than anything, one you hold back because you pray for me to resist the urge to call out for help only to find danger. And at the same time, you pray for yourself, to be free from the prison that is your role of living a half-life as a sentry, merely to stand guard over me and save me from myself and everything beyond me. You pray for yourself to be released from the emotional wounds pressed into my body in the same places you restrain me, restraining yourself at far greater cost. You pray to be deserving of the forgiveness you won’t grant yourself for holding me with such force in spite of the fact that you choose it as a necessary evil, the necessary evil you’ve always chosen like a parent who grabs her small child by the wrist much too tightly just after she before steps off the curb of a busy street.

But most of all, you pray for yourself because of the agonizing fear validated by your constant level of alert, scanning my world for a clenched fist, an impatient push of an elevator button, a book dropped with a little too much of a toss, a disappointed exhale, or a tense and restricted drawing of breath. And I pray for you too, for you to be free from the barbed wire, electrically charged cuffs I know will never dissolve, for you to hear somebody shut a door and not need to intuitively calculate how hard it hit the frame with whether there was an open window, if it was a heavy door, or if the air pressure was unexpected.

I am sorry. And I am grateful. I’m grateful for you. That you pin me to the ground and fight the urge to close your eyes in the expectation of pain because you know if you keep them open, you might be able to block the right strike from the wrong angle, the worst word from the most bitingly lethal tongue. But most of all, I pray for you because I know you are hopelessly imprisoned to the task of standing guard against attacks that almost never come, always raising the hyper-alert to feel like a fool when a shadow in the concrete turns out to be a cloud crossing the sun. Worst of all, I pray for you because I feel guilty, cruel even, that if I weren’t here, praying for you to not have to think like a predator to protect me from being prey, I would be praying for something like you to come along and shelter me from the rocks and rows of storms I know would destroy the barriers of my skin at their first assault, flooding my lungs with water and entangling my ankle in titanium vines that anchor me in the center of nothing and drag me down much further than even any fatal resurfacing could ever be possible.

What I was waiting for.

Fine, then leave.

It’s funny how you wince at the expectation of words only to remember how familiar they are once they come, like they have been grafted onto your skin.

There’s a reason I don’t like unpacking, ever. Rephrase that. I love unpacking. It makes me feel safe and comfortable and whole. I don’t let myself unpack or I push it away as much as possible because I know unpacking is ineffective when everything is only temporary. And everything has been only temporary my whole life. Love. Family. Parents. Home. All of it.

The only thing I’ve learned to depend on is the realization that I need to hurriedly shove my things into a duffle bag and shuffle somewhere else. I’ve been doing it since I was younger than I can remember. I just always know it’s coming like some kids always know to expect their parents to pick them up from school. It’s empirical.

So when you say those words to me, you think you’re just being grouchy, voicing annoyance with me that will wash away in the night. But I know what those words mean, what they always mean no matter who says them. They mean that I’m not a permanent fixture here. They mean that I am a guest, a visitor whose pass may be revoked at any time. As a kid, that meant one family member drove me across town to the doorstep of another family member. As an adult, it means I’m already a ghost in my environment and my occupation of it is an accepted annoyance.

You think you want me around. Sure. You say it. You’re kind most of the time. We get along. But you can’t erase twenty-nine years of meaning. It’d be like you saying my name and not expecting me to turn my head. As soon as you said that, sure my feet stayed rooted for a few seconds before I let the hurt sink in and I left the room, but as soon as you said it, I was already gone, even from myself. Because that’s what happens. As soon as somebody says something that cuts into a scar they didn’t even make, the eight year old inside of me, the real me, is flooded with fear and she dissolves. All it takes is the reminder that this isn’t necessarily a fixed part of my life to take me back to how fleeting and fragile everything is. It reminds me that I’m standing on nothing that is my own and that if I don’t bend every which way to make things convenient for others, I’ll be packing sooner than I’m ready.

I have lived a life of wearing out my welcome like that, watching the sands fall from the broken hourglass, reminding me not to get too comfortable, not to enjoy anything too much because things would take a turn for the worse and there would be nothing for me to say. So I just learned to bandaid through life, keeping my head out of the rain until I couldn’t and then being ready to dart under the nearest cover as soon as I was left vulnerable.

As a kid, I did it by staying with family members to avoid going home because I was tired of wincing until bed time every time I heard an angry tone. The hope that got me through it and gave me the courage to unpack at least part of my bag in each new place was the belief that one day, I’d have my own. I’d make my own stability and nobody would be able to tell me that this just wasn’t working out and they couldn’t raise me.

Now I’m an adult. And when you say, fine then leave, you mean fine then leave the room. I hear, this just isn’t working out so you should leave as if it is routine so that I don’t feel bad for abandoning all my promises. Humans are fickle things and I don’t care how much you say you care about me. You’ll turn out to be fickle too.

A Bull in a China Shop. A short vignette.

Mother never liked Daddy and I never understood why she didn’t. Every night after he worked outside all day, Daddy’d stretch out on the lazy boy, dirty and tired, smelling like a mix between oil and stale beer. He’d try to hug her first but she’d squirm out of it, saying to shower, that it made her sick. She went to college. He didn’t. But he was the one paying the bills and she was the one washing our socks. I felt sorry for him.

She hated his calloused hands. I loved them. They felt like sandpaper. I’d crawl into his lap at night and trace my fingers along his, twigs on tree stumps. It was quiet and calm, like the naps Mother made me take after school when she wouldn’t let me outside to “roll in the mud like some pig.” But Daddy wasn’t like that. He didn’t pay me much mind and just let me sit there. Every once in a while he’d ruffle the curls on my head, like he sometimes did with our mutt Burt’s ears. I liked Burt. Mom said he smelled but he wagged his tail a lot and sometimes when he was close enough it would sweep picture frames off the coffee table, sending them clattering to the floor. Mom complained that Burt was a “bull in a China shop,” just like me. Daddy and I would laugh on rainy days when Burt would dart in between Mother’s legs and leave Burt-sized paw prints all over the floor. She’d chase after him like an angry babysitter or the cat from Tom and Jerry.

Sometimes Burt and I used to go hunting for an invisible squirrel. He was invisible because that made him harder to catch so I got to be outside longer-and because I was too afraid to have to kill something. You can’t kill a squirrel you can’t see. Once Daddy brought home a deer–Daddy brought home lots of deer actually and I would usually hide somewhere and try to pretend it was just another stuffed animal and the last look of fear on its face was just a trick. Daddy’d be proud of his catch and would want us to have dinner of deer steak and noodles and sit together as a family. Last time though Mommy said it was out of season and left the room. I always thought Daddy was much braver than both of us.

I stopped hunting after that though and Daddy did too because he went away for work for a few weeks. That was the same week Mom broke her wrist, fell down the steps Dad said, and I had to be extra good and help her carry things into the house. I also couldn’t be knocking all my toys to the floor and forget about them. I did a good job, at first, until once when Mom called me away from an epic game of checkers I was playing against myself. I groaned and asked why she couldn’t have picked up her feet going down the stairs like she tells me to, then she wouldn’t have broken her wrist. Mom said she did it carrying groceries–I asked if there was Rocky Road ice cream in the bag and did we have any more. She itched a spot in the corner of her eye and went into the other room, breathing strangely like a wounded monster after it’s been caught. She had never really tolerated my questioning but Daddy always had on account of I played in the woods and not in jumpers and pig-tails like a “sissy.”

One day though, at the end of summer, I went to the elementary school instead of my old church one. We had recess there instead of naptime because that’s first-graders are much too old for naps. There were girls everywhere in pink jumpers and purple ones and blue ones. The first day I went over to the soccer field to play touch football. I shoved one boy down and he got a rock in his knee. I spit on the ground next to him–just like Daddy taught me- and told him to get up, hooking my thumbs in my belt loops and puffing my chest out. The teacher saw and called my mom on me. Mother brought me home jumpers and a brand new brush. There was a gleam in her eyes and she smiled a broad, pretty smile. I liked her until she threw out my muddy hunting boots and my jeans with the pockets ripped out. That night I told Daddy on her. Later when it was dark and I was in my bed I heard him call her a “snotty bitch” and made her go outside in the trash and dig them out. I didn’t know what a bitch was but I hoped he was going to give her a timeout. He loved me.

The next morning Mom sat on her bony knees and raked the turquoise brush through my ratty hair–I knew it was turquoise because that was the crayon in the teacher’s box that I had accidentally broken the day before. She tried to kiss my cheek. I leaned away and wiped it off just in case, glaring at her in the mirror. She pulled a curl behind my ear, looking at it and sighed like she had just lost at Red Rover.

“Be good at school today, please.”

“I’m always good.”

“I know. But just maybe try to play a new game today, just to see.”

I didn’t answer her and I didn’t do it. But I wore the jumper and didn’t try to tear the buttons off.

The next day on my way over to the kickball game this girl named Lane stopped me. She told me she needed somebody else for Four Square. She wore a green jumper with cream-colored shoes. A black barrette held back a chocolate curl. I decided I liked her. I played with her that day and the one after that. She was nice to everyone and never spat.

We were best friends by the time we got through the times tables in class and one Friday after school Lane road the bus home with me. We stepped off the asphalt and into the dusty, gravel road that ran like a snake through the neighborhood. I got the urge to spit, and then, embarrassed by Lane’s reaction, wiped it out with my shoe. She just shook her head and giggled, walking with skinny arms that matched her skinny legs. Mine were scraped and had mosquito bites, my arms bobbed at my sides.

We walked side by side and I tried to be graceful like her. Once we rounded the corner my dad’s red truck was there, one of the headlights out from where he swerved to hit a deer. I tried to shrug it off like it was no big thing, like he would, but I couldn’t wait to tell him how I had climbed to the big Oak tree on the playground to the highest branch I could–I would have gotten higher if Miss Crabtree hadn’t raised her pointy nose and snapped her fingers at me. At least he would appreciate it.

I bounded up the steps onto the wooden porch, stomping in a way that would have shamed thunder as I tried to dance across, tripping halfway. Swinging open the screen door, I welcomed at least three moths into our home. Daddy came towering through the living room, looking like he had just eaten cabbage. Continue reading A Bull in a China Shop. A short vignette.

A Waking Dream.

I can see his heartbeat through the hole in his face.

Please don’t be real, please please. Please don’t be standing there. I close my eyes so tight I think they are about to explode in their sockets. I cannot wrench my fingers from my hairline to cover them. Just please don’t be there. Please go away. My heart bleeds with a terrible anxiety that burns its way to every corner of my body.

External silence butts against internal screams. I listen to it and it sinks into me. I breathe and open my eyes, forcing their gaze to the corner of the room.

He is still standing there, looking at nothing, holding nothing. His cargoes are dirty, torn at the knees. His shirt untucked and a button hanging from its string. Yet, his chest does not move. It does not heave, it does not rise. His fingers do not twitch. There is a red dot on his shirt, then another, then another, as if red rain is falling from the ceiling. His adam’s apple is paralyzed, his pouty lips pressed impassionately together, his pupils stones with blue water running over them. The only turmoil, the only interruptance of his compusure is his cheek.  A wound. A bullet hole. The bullet is nowhere to be seen, lodged in some part of his head. But the wound. It’s just red, strings of blood running down his cheek and dripping off his chin, pitter pattering against his forest green shoulder. More and more blood comes, like a steady beat, pulsating. Bum, bum. Bum, bum. Bum, bum. Blood, blood. Blood, blood. Red, blood. Swelling in and out, in and out.

My concentration sinks into the sight. I can smell the salt in the wound, the sulfur shot from the gun. I zero in and can’t turn my head. The wound is not clean. It’s jagged, skin hangs down over part of the wound, specks of white bone break up the beating pool.

I can’t stand to not look at him but I can’t stand to look at him. The smell overwhelms me and I start to get nauseated. My stomach contracts over and over again until I am ready to heave but I remain frozen and so does he. He is the worst living nightmare I can consciously imagine and all he does is stand.

 

 

This is a throwback of a journal entry I wrote seven years ago of a nightmare or mental trigger I had because of PTSD at the time. When I get especially stressed out, this is something I see fairly vividly in my dreams.

Credit for the photograph goes to Alexander Krivitskiy on Pexels.com.