5:31 p.m. - 08/14/03
there I'll find me.
It�s nearly impossible to explain, other than to say simply that something is about to happen. Actually, some things are about to happen, and I don�t quite understand what or how or when, but I know - and I don�t feel all that steady, but I trust the knowing anyway. Part of me feels such anticipation, such enthusiasm, the time writers know - when you know your characters almost well enough to risk writing them - and the other part feels like going to sleep and staying asleep for at least four days. The second part is convinced that there have never been quite this many pesky pink blotches all over her face and her hair is usually not this frizzy, and she doesn�t want to do anything that involves risking. She doesn�t want to do anything where she might find herself suddenly tired and not be able to close her eyes, pull a blanket over herself, and rest. She�s having to fight shame that rewords old lies until she starts to believe them again. It�s still the same story, no matter how the phrases shape. Other people have it harder than you did; you�re ok because you didn�t have to face anything that severe. Look at your recovery. It�s like you didn�t even have an eating disorder. You didn�t even have one. You weren�t even sick.. And I�m sorry, I�ve forgotten since the last time we went through this, what my payoff for believing that is. My head is too scrambled to decipher origins again; in three days, it�ll come to me and I won�t believe I managed to forget. Right now, I�m busy reading the week or so of journal entries from before I went to Rogers, noting the parallel season, the house on the brink of selling, the beliefs I called truth that weren�t, and the hopes for a new truth that would be...
I�m thinking there�s something missing in this pattern, this time. This season isn�t working out the way it�s supposed to be. Yes, I�ve started studying my own subjects, shadowing my own instructors, and - just like junior year - I�m not going to be in school in the fall. I�ve crossed over excitement and hope that I might escape this house into pure desperation to do so (again), my parents are falling apart, my thoughts are sketchy at best, I�m on the brink of a thousand new writing voyages, and I swear I�m going to read every book I keep putting aside and swearing to read later. I�m scared. I�m scared to go through this pattern again, even more significant than going through this time again, this time with divorcing parents, this time without Rogers. Can I even gather the stamina necessary to imagine what that fall would have looked like with Rogers extracted? What I would be? No. I switch off and let the questions type themselves. I won�t answer them; I won�t. I don�t want to go through an answer. It�s more than enough (so. much. more.) to get through the grief of knowing I was there one week less than two years ago, that my discharge anniversary will speed around far too fast - another reminder of how this world is different from that world, how differently time passes in those halls. And I want to go home. That is my impossible-to-avoid declaration, the one that shows up roughly as often as �the.� I want to go home, and I can�t go home. I can�t go home because I�m not sick. I�m not sick because I got better. And how did I get better? I have no idea, so it must be that I was never sick in the first place. And if I was never sick in the first place, I had better be ashamed of all these expensive (on so many levels) lies I�ve told, and I had better punish myself, and then maybe I will achieve something that looks enough like illness that I will be allowed to go somewhere that looks like home.
One of the reasons I want Rogers-people to tell me that it�s ok to call them home is because I want to hear I had a right to be there. You know, outside of the RCs who had a history, I�ve never really met anyone �recovered.� I have my peers from Rogers, the people I�m recovering with, and I know people who are at different stages of the process, but I don�t have anyone in my life who has completely left their eating disorder behind. I don�t know anyone who went into a hospital one time, spent under three months there, and didn�t purge for (at least one week less than) two years. I don�t know anyone. Except me. So I must be phony; I must be a mistake. How can anyone say that Rogers is not where I was supposed to be considering the good it did for me? How can my mind (even) decide that because it saved my life, I wasn�t in enough danger to deserve being there? Why add this extra injury? I hurt enough. I hurt enough. I hurt enough to be there. I deserved help for who I was as much as for my sickness.
Something�s wrong or something�s coming. Memories are going to start crashing in like tides. How much I�ve changed must try and stand up against how much I feel like I did that summer. Something�s coming and I don�t know if it�s good or bad or hopeless; I don�t know if I should stop it or how I could. It�s coming and it means leaving D!@#$%^, partly, but it also means the time when I came here, and the time when I left Neverland. It means the parallels and memories and also the idea that, this time when the move happens, I�m here. No sabbatical to paradise. Just me, some moving boxes, a new room.
No respite. No home.
chord
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