Wunderkammen

Relief can be almost instantaneous— a puff of breath sending dust skittering across the palm into the open air. Eyelids falling closed to hide the tears just beginning to gather underneath. It’s fragile and breathtakingly new. The message doesn’t hit the muscles right away. Time passes and there the knots remain deep in sinew connected to bone; the news has been slow to delivery just like a sleeping child realizing they’ve been carried to bed.

My own terrifying memories have not left me; we still share the same bed with a loving man but my skin aches less. The ache I feel today from a goodbye I wasn’t entirely prepared to say is a far cry from the woman who flinched at every shadow. I’m sad, alive, aware that I am going to wake up tomorrow and I’m glad.

All that said, this won’t get easier. I’d better pace myself.

Posted by Kisha at 03:30 PM ∗ Comments (0)

And there it is. Words printed across the teletype of my brain, pushing forward, trying to prove that I haven’t forgotten how to do this; how to write. I remember. Every line, every paragraph, every phrase, every word— it’s all here. Somewhere. Locked up in a sea of shattered fables, torn from my childhood, locked away while I heal and find words that aren’t just a cacophony of screams trapped in fragile bubbles on their way to the surface of my water, I know I haven’t lost anything. It’s just quiet. Gathering steam. Coming together. I’m on my way somewhere. Perhaps beyond this strange place where memories compete with the present as though they belong and the heat pulls me backward. I’m coming together. Carefully. Barely dried popsicle sticks and Elmer’s Glue. I’m a project without a plan.

Nobody chronicles what happens to the person born, love all but forgotten, who disappears into the stream of caked blood and violated orifices and survives long enough to try to find their way back. Back to a place where your skin doesn’t ache and you aren’t always nauseated, the vomit just begging to find a way forward. Up and out. Willing to pour out of your pores and saturate the sheets, willing to spill into relationships that did nothing wrong except exist, permeating even the dull and mundane— oh, the bus rides. I’m doing it and I’m speechless at the thought. Speechless at the idea of dropping anecdotes into sentences like perfectly round pebbles and disturb the water. When it’s quiet… and how I dream about the quiet… what I want is to leave it alone, let it fall and settle until I find myself back in a room with kind eyes paid to listen or a group of women who have been there and know that you never just pick yourself back up and the longer the pain went on, the more you have to struggle forth knowing that taking a trip into oblivion might be an option but not one you’ll allow yourself to ever consider for longer than it takes the sun to rise on an endless night.

I have so completely embraced the idea that the world belongs to me, that I control it, that I make people love or hate me, it’ll take years to undo. It must have been me. Me, when that flesh was pressed too close and I couldn’t breathe. Me, that was saying the wrong prayer because no one came. The abandoned me. The broken me. How can love be so imperfect that my feelings weren’t part of the equation when I was tied down and exposed for the neighborhood kids to see? I was bad. I wasn’t trying hard enough when it was the sixth night in a row that I had to scoop up vomit with a washrag, carrying it to the bathroom basin to rinse and returned to start over, just before I made sure that my parent made it to bed. It was something I lacked, some mark just under the skin that never fully emerged, that encouraged my first memories to be a mouth full of hot, salty skin— my tiny feet somewhere beyond. My responsibility stretched like a balloon, a hungry spirit cramming its gaping maw with fear and growing, until every space was filled. There it burst, out of my apartment, down the block, into other people’s houses until I was the universe. Just so I could think that the world hadn’t failed me. Just so I could believe that I hadn’t been abandoned in the lost and found box near the museum, the artifacts of my debasement pinned to the walls behind lucite.

Now those thoughts have to shift. I have to train myself to believe that my beloved isn’t here out of some crazy, random luck but that I deserve him. I have to learn that there is nothing so wrong with me that it eclipses the right. I did not die. I was lost.

Have you seen me lately?

Posted by Kisha at 06:05 PM ∗ Comments (0)

My extended history of abuse started before I had linear thought. A jumble of memories, stills and disjointed sounds crowd me every now and again; the only commonality is my hope that someone would come for me, that I could be saved. No one came. It’s a truth I’m learning to swallow slowly like choked sobs or cod liver oil. It’s a long way from children who imagine what it would be like if the parents they imagine didn’t care about them burst into their room to find their drawers empty, “I’ll show them!”, to realizing that if my flesh and blood parents came in they’d cry for themselves or head for the next drink and no one would really think about little girl me lonely and afraid on my own. I’ve learned too well not to trust or rely or cry. I’ve learned so well that, now, when I’m overwhelmed I tell no one at all. It’s just mine to deal with, to drown with; I’ll sink inexorably toward silt covered muddy bottoms and barely make a sound when it happens.

I’ve been doing well taking my antidepressants everyday and something to help me sleep at night. I’ve been resting for the first time in months. Life steps in with challenges that I can’t seem to solve and the next thing I know, the room is covered in clothes, there are messes everywhere, I’m chewing my lip when no one’s watching and my stomach is reaching back inside me to gnaw on my spine. Now the chaos is too large for me to right by myself and yet, I’m the only one here. Other people have lives. Other people have jobs. Me? I have a mouth that holds my tongue prisoner. There it is, quiet and unmoving, pressed against my lower set of teeth, locked up by my lips.

Even when I work up the strength to say something about the trouble I’m having: “Listen, I can’t figure out a way to pick up Talkmonster to summer school. I can’t walk that far and the transit won’t work as an option.” I undermine my confession by immediately that it’s fine and I’ll figure it all out one way or the other. This is how I get in over my head. This is how I start self-destructing. Whatever my goal, whatever started the habit, this is not working.

I may not be ready to ask perfect strangers for help but allowing myself to be pinned by circumstance isn’t viable, either.

Posted by Kisha at 12:21 PM ∗ Comments (0)

Sitting here thinking about my upcoming change in therapist and how much she helped me grow over the last some odd months admittedly has me a little sentimental. Still, this sweet story by miss lynster at metafilter about Scatman Crothers and his kindness toward the seven-year-old her on a plane ride made me especially warm.

It deserves to be collected like those elaborate, sugared panorama eggs I fell in love with as a child that I imagined came to life when no one was looking. Pocket worlds, just like in the book I didn’t read until much later, The Panorama Egg by A.E. Silas.

Posted by Kisha at 06:28 PM ∗ Comments (0)