10:10 p.m. - 02/25/03
::you said it was ok to be between reality and a dream. ** find me:
I've been brought near tears twice tonight, with only the provocation of prime time television. This is not something I'm accustomed to; I tend to discriminate more opportune moments for my tears, such as when my parents are at work, or when Dr. R is near enough to feed me kleenex and tell me it's not weak to feel (even what I feel.) I'm not sure what's going on exactly; I remember being like this in the past. There was a time, after all, when fiction was everything. When Sara died on LA Doctors, I shut down entirely and wrote poems about her for three days. I daydreamed weekly that Monica, or Tess, or Andrew (in that order) would come and rescue me. I tried, in their absence, to create a faith that would impress them. I wanted Claire on Promised Land to whisk into my life and take me away into hers. I watched after-school specials and tv movies and wanted to be in them. Because on the shows I watched, people were always saved. And for that sort of resolution, reality didn't seem like much of a compromise. Is it too much, sometimes, to just want a happy ending? I know that really, truly Eric Blacke on Judging Amy never breathed or loved or murdered anyone, and I know that Maxine never shouted after him as he disappeared into the dark. I know these things and they don't matter. Right now fiction is reality, and I can't change that. Fiction turns into reality when your emotional meters and barometers are stuck on high, when somehow your skin invisibly opens and gives the world full access to your neurons. I've spent too many years like that, looking for salvation, finding pain. I've spent too many years saying, "I want to go home," when I'm supposedly there. And for the first time in my life, I have the joy, the peace, of knowing better. I know that there is a place for me better than the place I'm at. I found one. And no matter what I do, I can't make them validate it. I can't make it requited (if familial) love. I may never be told by Rogers-folk themselves that what I feel is ok. And keeping that from them, feeling like I have to keep that from them, keeps me from sharing every single detail of my life as it unfolds. I want to tell them who I love each time I do, and how far I fly between each morning and each night. I want to chart it in poems and scribbles and mix-tapes, and I can't even call them now. Because I love what I can't love, what I know better than to love. So what do I do? I'm not a character. I don't turn off for the weeks in between episodes. I write my own story on a clock that ticks faster than any hour-drama can. How do I walk away from the best thing that ever happened to me when I don't want to do that? I can't stay here, being this vulnerable. I can't keep myself this open when I'm considering opening up huge topics, opening up What It Means That I've Been Sick and Maybe I'm Not Asexual. I can't poke more holes when there's already this gaping wound.
Is it a poor excuse? I'm sorry I can't love, or even prepare myself to love, in face of this. I'm sorry to take something entirely miraculous and transform it into callousness and static being. But maybe it isn't my fault. Maybe it isn't my fault. Maybe those in power simply don't understand what it means. To put a child in a home. I don't care if it has time-clocks and sterile white walls, scales and med baskets and stethoscopes; it's still a home. To put a child, who has never felt family so intensely, and who needs it as much as she possibly can, into something that is a family, no matter how little they want to believe it. In the days when fiction was reality, I watched a tv movie called Deep In My Heart, where a foster child was taken from one mother and adopted by another one. She'd been the foster mother's daughter for years, and then a social worker walks in, and takes this girl by the arm and pulls her away from her mother, from her home, from her family. And I have witnesses. I have people who see the way I see. Dr. R remembers; he remembers how I looked when I came home. And in those days, I would have promised myself to never, ever love someone again, if I weren't still trying to figure out a way to go back.
I think, fifteen months later, I'm still trying to think of a way back. Today, I considered calling Jenna. I wondered about people who... I can't finish that sentence. That's the sentence that's supposed to read "I'll likely never see again" and no one understands how wrong that is. No one understands how unfair. Over 50% of couples divorce; there are billions of familes that can't even semi-function, and they create one for me and take it away. Just kidding; this isn't real. But it was real. The way that television was real at the time. Because I needed it so badly. Because I'd been lied to, in word and in action, and I was never healed by lies. I was never healed until the moment, the absolute moment, that lasted three months. How do I forget that, move on? How do I hold it with me without bearing the brunt of their disclaimers? My last (week)day, Dave grabbed a chair by the table at dinner, talked fast and businessy and disappeared. And I can't heal that by thinking that he never cared, and I can't heal that by thinking that it was too hard for him to say he did, so how do I hold it? How do I hold Steph's line "we will forever remember you" on the poster I drew against "I can't tell them I love them more than anything?" I'm a girl who's had dichotomy defined to her by more than a handful of therapists. I don't do gray areas well; I can't. I can't keep saying, "Love you, too" to my parents every night, when in my heart I'm screaming, "I do. I really do. But it's not like I loved them. It's not that safe, that important, that far away." I know I should love my parents more. I know this kills them. Does it matter that it's killing me, too? Talk about a gray area: my greatest strength, my darkest demon- I knew Red. And the doctor is right. God help me to never need that sort of love again. I needed love that could breathe the life-breath back into me, and I found it, and thank whatever in this universe is still good that I haven't needed it since. Thank whatever in this universe is loving that I found it when I did, and that it didn't matter the extent to which I had an eating disorder, or that my parents did not have 400 dollars to throw toward each day of my healing. Thank my dad for not conceding when I begged him to take me out of there, and my mom for saying I needed residential, and the fucking brochure that I found Rogers in. Thank all that is good and pure and wonderful and creates families out of devastated, wounded lives. Now why the hell do they take it away?
They have to understand this. You send soldiers off to war; they become family. Victims of the same tragic crime- family. People who catch each other's tears and braid each other's hair and rub shoulders with turtles of girls who will die before the year has changed...or was that Chelsie's massaging turtle that Tracy just loved? Girls who get confused in their cloeseness because everyone is everyone and you need them all. And one of our sisters died, on top of this, and now of all times, we can't lose each other. Now of all times, we need each other to be strong. I don't believe in romance. I don't believe in you plus me equals whole; I don't believe it. You plus me equals, you, me, and us, and I've never been anywhere near safe enough to know that, but I knew family. And damnit you can't take that away. You can't. And how is it that 15 months later, I'm still sitting here bawling the same words I said the first day? I haven't refused to move forward. I haven't refused to try. But it never changes. I still love them; it's still agony. It's like waking up in a world that has quit rotating. It's like knowing there will never be another fall...
And it's longer than fifteen months, I've spent crying over them. I spent so many grade school afternoons on my bed, crying, saying, "Take me home." I went to school nurses and begged to be set free, to be picked up, and driven home. That beautiful log house with its thousands of imperfections was never, ever home. Not now. Not having known home as deeply as I did. And what if I can never find it again? What if I'm honest and say again doesn't matter now? Say I'm not interested in "someone like her" or "a place like that" or any other replacement life. I'm not interested. I want home as it was home. I want home as it was, and it can't be because people are gone, and I don't have an eating disorder the way you have to have an eating disorder, and Tracy will never again walk down a hall in the way where I can see her. I want to go back. I want to go back. I want to go back in time and space and change it all; I'm sorry. I know this life is better; I know this is what I'm supposed to want. I'm supposed to pay society off now, achieve sheer brilliance by route of my potential, but you know what? I don't want it. I don't want to write, even if somehow, I'm Hawthorne reincarnated. I don't want to write the next great book. I just want to wake up with someone to hug every morning, someone who laughs at my silly dreams, and someone who sleeps in my room. I just want every important reference I make to make sense to someone. So that you don't even have to say you remember. So that there's no possibility you could have forgotten. I want to live in those three months forever, and that doesn't change.
So what do I do with this? With new issues, things I've never told them? With letting myself not relapse? What do I do with this when they're all I want again. Fuck playwriting. Fuck New York. Fuck Hampshire and adulthood and eighteen years old. I know what I'm supposed to want. I know experience trained me to hate small, rural towns, but it's different somehow. It's not the town; it's the world within those walls.
It was never too little for me. Except when they found my copy of A Girl's Guide To Taking Over The World, and even then, it wasn't long until Jenna came and saved me from that, too. So, yes. I don't want to know right now. I don't want to know because I want to be closer to them, not farther away. I don't want new experiences and achievements and doings that blow the minds of my admirers.
I just want the simple life I never have. I just want the wake up loving someone, spend the day in and out of their presence, say goodnight to them. I just want the gentle exchange of silly jokes and heartbreaking seriousness that seems so rhythmic and so real. I want the reality of people who must stand tight in order to survive. Who take comfort in that necessity.
I can't help it. I can't help what I didn't know, what I didn't understand fully, what I didn't express. I can't help where I am, what I feel, that I don't know what to do. This is it. This is me. This is Mary.
Still crying at fifteen months, when she tried to keep it at bay. Still trying to move on, and still not able to. And I don't want to. I won't move on from you; I won't. I need you to tell me it's ok to have named myself in your honor, in my honor. I need to tell you how grateful I am that you cared for me before I knew who I was. I need to see in your eyes that you hear me. I need to know you were genuine. I need to know you miss me. I need to know I'm not a freak, and you won't disown me simply because I can't get over you. Too clingy, too needy, too irr transrational. Come home to me, someone.
Before I'm a wreck, triggered by bloody soap opears. In time to help me love again.
chord, who was their Mary
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