Phantom

Where are you tonight?
I see you sitting on the low-backed sofa
only a cat could love
discussing Jung and astrology in
the same breath.
I see you you are so unknowable
I hate one person more and that is
myself.

To Bleed

suffering is noisy is deformed

it spits on the sidewalk in front of innocent

bystanders it makes no apologies

it wipes its nose on its sleeve it whines

for sympathy it licks the hands of the compassionate

it howls over a broken fingernail

everything reminds it that it exists everything

mocks its existence everything shouts it

is ugly it is a freak at a freak show it is

the rotting leftover shoved in the back of

the refrigerator it makes everything smell

as its final biting and weeping vengeance that

it exists at all

Survival

She has a memory.  One beautiful memory.  Carefully held in the palm of her hands, so that no one else might find it and steal it from her.  Of that one summer morning, while the others still slept.  The driveway pavement cool on her bare feet as she stepped into the shadow cast by the huge Mountain Ash, the sun burning golden at the edges.  No one must have this moment.  No one must know it exists.  This moment must live inside of her forever.

Joy, Unexpected

I woke up as a fairy in the empty restaurant next to the woods.  From the time I was a girl I'd longed to live in the dollhouse in the attic.  But not until I opened my eyes and found myself crouching in the furthest corner of the kitchen pantry did I know that my hopes and dreams beat inside of a tiny heart.

Empty

Where is                                  here I am        

gone home without you

when I would rocket from the world

out of an ocean so impossibly asleep                                     

is the rain your final call

because I am wondering what this was for

           

why you ever loved me

why you do not anymore

there is no witness here

only ghosts of words that nudged into breath

  

the shape of a fool      shivering and wet       

your blanket thrown over the bed one cold night too late

 my eyes, heavy with dreams 

but you—                  

very much awake

how I welcomed the chance to be wrong

to never ask why you had to leave

why you had to come at all

was it to drift away from this eroding shore

or was it

not wanting to be sorry

not wanting to be felt sorry for

  

one last secret for memory to keep

Now our half-truths ship out

under cover of a cloud-filled sky

the sun you once spoke of

never any friend of mine

                                   

can you feel it rain

can you?         

Hand Over the Scissors

The girls sat at the table nearest ours.  Actually, they were women, or almost women, but that was something I discovered only after I got to know one of them.  Until then I had no idea that their illness had trapped their adult selves inside the bodies of lost little girls.

At 21 years old I didn’t understand my own issues, let alone anyone else’s.  The various groups in residence never mixed, except during the odd sanctioned event designed to cheer us up.  Three times a day we just shuffled past each other into the cafeteria, our eyes fixed firmly ahead of us.  No one suddenly leapt from their group’s designated table and dashed across the room, shouting, “FREEDOM!” as they crashed through the invisible barriers separating us.  We didn’t want to know each other.  We didn’t even want to know ourselves.

The cafeteria still managed to be a somewhat cheerful place despite the palpable misery its diners inflicted upon each other.  Light streamed in through large windows, and someone had thought to paint the walls in bright spring colors, providing a kind of warmth we could no longer generate on our own.  Considerable effort had gone into the food as well.  It was nothing fancy, but we got enough and it tasted good.  I actually sort of enjoyed mealtime.  It provided a fleeting break from the non-stop horror show taking place upstairs in our designated corner of the building.

For the girls at the table nearest ours, though, each confrontation with food took on the aspect of death .  The rules of their unit required that they eat a certain amount.  Given that I gladly and willingly polished off every morsel on my tray it never occurred to me that for the thin girls sitting a few feet away, eating constituted a kind of mental violence imposed on them for their own good.  This was partly because the girls currently in residence were hardened combat veterans; they’d reached a grim detente with their food.  None of them seemed exactly happy at mealtime, but neither did they let on just how difficult chewing and swallowing could be.

And then the new girl showed up.

Like the others, she looked young.  Too young.   Ghost-white, swimming in her clothes, and with limp black hair scraped back into a high ponytail, she viewed the cafeteria scene with dark terrified eyes that were too large for her gaunt face.  A woman wearing a sympathetic smile set a tray in front of her.  As the new girl gazed down at the food, teardrops began rolling down her cheeks.  The woman took her hand and held it.  I watched the girl wrestle with something terrible inside of her before I lowered my eyes, embarrassed by my interest. 

Everyone in the cafeteria had problems that felt like a knife against the jugular.  The alcoholics, the drug addicts, the women in my group who recoiled from our own histories—we all bled.  And yet watching the skeletal girl struggle to bring even a forkful of food to her mouth, I experienced a kind of grief for her that I could never quite manage for myself.  The most basic of requirements had become her enemy.  During a joint outing one of the viciously skinny girls who turned out to be 23 years old told me she’d stopped eating to wrest back control of her life.  Except that in the end, the cure for a lifetime of pain had become a potentially fatal condition in its own right.  Irony could feel like the worst kind of practical joke sometimes.

I understood this because I, too, had just declared war on my own “coping mechanism.”  Which was why I found myself somewhere with pristine green lawns and a so-called trust course and the rule that no one could have any sharp objects in their room.   We had all come to this place technically out of choice, but the distinction between us and those in a psych ward was a fine one.   If you wanted to shave your armpits, you still had to go to the nurse’s station, ask for your razor, and proceed under the nurse’s watchful eye.  Just like how a nurse had to check on you every 15 minutes all day long, to make sure you hadn’t hanged yourself with a bed sheet, or god knows what.  Suicide threats had that effect on the staff.

It was the last chance saloon for those of us on the verge of giving up.   We did our time and went home again, a few of the massive holes in our internal fabric partially mended, most of the others still gaping.  The trick was to either learn how to live with these holes, or to find a way to stitch them up ourselves.   To hope we could pull that off sometimes seemed absurd when we were surrounded by so much agony, but every small breakthrough personally experienced or witnessed in another extended the possibility. 

By the time I checked out of the treatment center, the girl with the high ponytail could eat without the nurse holding her hand.  But these types of wars are never really won.  The best one can hope for is fewer engagements of a less brutal kind.  Although I never knew what happened to her I have to believe the girl is still fighting—that 25 years later she is somewhere eating her dinner, and smiling.

A Conversation With Her

You want to forget about me, she says.

Yes, I answer.  I do.

You talk to the others.

I know.

I thought you said it wasn’t my fault.

It wasn’t.  Not really.

Then why do you want to forget about me?

Because it’s hard, I tell her.  Very, very hard.

How do you think it feels for me? she returns. 

Worse.

That’s right.  Worse.  You get to be somewhere else, where someone loves you.  You get to see flowers and smell things that are nice.  Everything I ever wanted you have, but you won’t let me share it with you.  I survived.  Why doesn’t that count?

It does.

You think I’m ugly.  That in a way I am as bad as they are, because I make you feel just as bad.  That isn’t fair.

No, it’s not.  I’m sorry.

Thank you.  Now what are you going to do about it?