6:25 p.m. - 10/22/03
someone's heart can't mend.
Foiled again by the evilest of ironies: Homesickness is not the sort of sickness that can send me home. I'm trying not to be overly dramatic about the situation, which journaling does not encourage. I don't think the shrine in my room (for Godd's sake, who has half a wall filled with photos and posters and notes and anything remotely related to ... something like this?) helps discourage drama either. And although I keep looking at the phone, I haven't managed to dial or answer it, with the exceptions of once this morning, when I tried Rogers (action against sucky homesickness) but caught no one, and once this evening, when I called my mom to check on her return time. I did try Rogers. I should get points for that, right, if I was a point-keeping sort of person. Yesterday, when I was sitting on my bed holding the first (of my) Tracy dog(s) and crying my eyes out, I said I would call today, and today came, and I didn't feel calm about calling, so I told myself it was simply making contact, I needn't worry about it so dearly. And I called and the phone rang, and I didn't leave a message, though I thought about it for the first time. I don't know what to do with myself. I feel like a complete and utter freak, trapped like a trap in a trap^. How do I go about life, exactly, when the one thing I know for certain, the object of my most enormous feelings, is something I can never again have? I feel crazy. I try to think about it realistically, play down the "they breathed life back into me" aspect and play up the monotonous routine, the humanity of each seemingly-angelic being, the actual existence of a unit that has come to be entirely utopian. But will that help me? No. Because at the slightest hint that the reality-of-what-happened is being undermined by the less-glittering-reality, the reality-of-what-happened begins to pout, and mope, and scream. The reality-of-what-happened doesn't even have to throw her own tantrums. She has people - many people - who throw them for her. And she just stands amid them all, glistening, so that it's hard to look at her. She tosses her hair in a way that makes me want to avoid crossing her, but then I look into her eyes and I see my eyes. I see the sadness in them, the strain to treat injury with love, to heal instead of howl, and I start to cry. Because the reality-of-what-happened always wins. The reality-of-what-happened can argue so well that even the less-glittering-reality becomes the meat and grit and soil (detail) of what happened. The details are made relics. And that leaves me back in love with something so unfathomably incapable of reciprocating, I'm at a loss. (ah, understatement.)
It's the wrong love. It's everything to me, and I'd die before I'd give it up, even if I knew how or believed it possible, both of which I don't. But it's the wrong love. Maybe there's no such thing. There was no such thing when I was there; there is no such thing in terms of what that love continues to do for me on a daily basis, but what do I do with it? I tell myself I'll train, go back and work there, but I don't think I can. I couldn't work with eating disorders, with that same despairing sickness from which I need such space...and although I have a passion for offering to others the gifts that were offered to me, could I ever really do it in the same hallways where I received those gifts? Could I ever really do it as part of a staff that no longer includes everyone I so desperately wanted to include me? It's not the right motivation to take that job, and that's unfair to the residents. So what do I do with my life? And how do I ever believe it's worthwhile, truly, when the entire time I'm thinking relentlessly hopeful thoughts? Knowing that if the phone rang and those voices said, "Mary, we need you here. We want to be able to lean on your abilities, and we want to be the people you lean on," I'd abandon everything, everything, and run to them. Impossible on so many levels. So long as they love me, they'll never want me to need to be there. There is no being "there" - as "they" have scattered and "there" is toxic with sickness I no longer wish to face.
I think of Dave, who maybe has my letter now. I think of him sending me to my parents, to D!@#$%^, which we knew would be toxic, strained, necessary to leave. And I can't say, I really can't, whether this 'home' is worse than the one I had then, whether divorce pain trumps marriage pain - I don't know, but I just think, Dave...Dave, come on. You have to understand now. I'm not supposed to be here. I'm not supposed to be here! You know, I don't believe everything happens for a reason. I don't believe that, no matter how en vogue it is. I believe you can find reason, lessons, gifts in everything, but not everything is meant to be, not to me. And I am not supposed to be here, walking down the stairwell, feeling the cool air, getting mail that's not to me, walking back up the stairs into the dark apartment, turning on a light not because I want it but because I don't want Mom to think I've been depressed or sleeping all day. I feel more like a person when I get the mail. I feel more real. I feel capable of laughing at myself a little, of saying, it's just a feeling; it's not the end of the world. Not the end, but not the beginning either. What happened? What will happen? Was Rogers a false start? What am I supposed to do with this? This impossible love? What keeps me alive keeps me from living. Doesn't that sound familiar? Doesn't that sound sick? What keeps me alive leaves me entirely unsure how to continue. How can anything matter the way they matter? How long can I go on, their advertisement, their posterchild, their embodied achievement, living the way they taught me because I love them and I love their ways...in unbelievable pain because that same motivating love is entirely defeating. It will defeat me, won't it? It will defeat me. I don't see any way out, and that doesn't have to mean there isn't one, but still, still, still, I'm searching, and there's no plan to make.
I can't go to college. I can't study. I can't live in the city. I can't do cultural things. I can't have friends. I can't go about life everyday as if it were normal, when it's not. I can't live as if they don't exist, when the only reason I'm alive is because they do. And yes, I have a fucking shrine to them, a memorial, a corner that can't compensate. I think of them everyday. Two years later, I still cry as hard as I cried when I left. Two years later, I know that if I stepped onto that property and walked into that building, I would weep harder than I did the day I was admitted. You want me to give a rap speak? Me? What will I tell them? They have it the best they will ever get, and they'd better recognize that before they go, or it will only be harder? Would that motivate them? I can tell them how much better life in recovery is, how my life was jumpstarted by the kindnesses and attachments at Rogers, and then I can add how I never get to see or touch or interact with you now, and no one will be inspired. It doesn't sound healthy, this talk. It doesn't sound healthy. I'm sick, but it's the wrong sickness. It's the wrong sickness to love you. Everyday, people sleep in that home, and they scream and cry and count the days until they can leave; I, who love you, will never sleep in your bed again. I, who love you, cannot come back. Cannot come back to talk about my life in recovery. Cannot come back in the sickness which necessitated it. Cannot come back to give what I want so badly for myself. Cannot come back.
What will you have me do? Where will you have me study? What life am I supposed to live? You're worse than a lost lover because I can't move on from you. Because it's not codependency that makes me say you're the reason I live. It's reality. Because you're my gift. You're what I have that's worth sharing, you're the reason I am who I am, and without that, I have nothing truly noble. But. With that, I have no way to share it. No way to feel satisfied. You're the last place I'd expect to starve me so. Do you disapprove? Do you not understand? You've seen these tears; you can imagine them on me again now...What don't you get? That plays are worth shit compared to home? That writing is nothing to someone who's really *talked*, that fame is entirely irrelevent to someone who knows family? Why would I work my life away to have a billion people I've never met know my name, when it will never feed me the way it did to hear you say it? It's funny how much I can love my own name, when you wrap your voice around it.
I want to go home. I want to go home. I want to go home.
He's not going to write back. Stacy and Brea take months to answer e-mail. I wrote the-manager-Sarah today to ask her to pass my contact info along to the-former-rc-Sara, and the-manager-Sarah remembered me and said she'd do so. But. She left off the p.s. we miss you; please come home. But Karen's gone forever. But Dave can't write one line and drop it in the mail. But it could always be me needing them, never the other way around. I need to hear from the other girls and from the staff. I need you in my life in order to live it; please. Dave, I want to be the resident you write your book with; Stacy, Brea, Sara, Steph, Leah, I want to be the friend that thirty years from now, you laugh at how you met. Karen, I want you to come back. Sarah, I remember the day that I was crying my eyes out over leaving and you appeared on our floor with those glittering blue eyes of yours, and you hugged me and told me I'd still be there after I left. Told me it was ok to stick so ridiculously to what everyone else wanted out of...
I wanted out, too. Out of sickness, my own and everyone else's. Out of the stupid hoops and fences created through the staff/ resident dynamic. I wanted out of everything, save you. Save love. I wanted to stay in love, I wanted to stay with you, I wanted to be remembered, I wanted to be missed, I wanted to be needed. I want you to call me. Let me show you why you want me in your life. Let me show you what I'm doing with myself. I'm not sure I can do anything otherwise.
Call me and tell me it's homesick, not homeless. Call me and tell me my name again. I'm forgetting, in the pain of what I won't forget.
chord
^Dorothy Parker
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