10:42 p.m. - 06/12/03
.sand and water [and a million years gone by].
One day, I will be stronger for this. I might be already, but someday I will see the strength and say, this is where it came from; this is where I grew, and why, and how, and why again. I beg that belief on my knees. Sometimes, in my sessions, I start crying, stop talking, and close my hands. I always end up covering my face with my hands, but sometimes they end up linked in traditional "here-is-the-church" fashion, and I wonder if he thinks I'm praying while we wait for the silence to balance out our words.
There was a moment today when I wanted to move to the furthest cushion of the couch, curl up into a ball, and refuse to see him ever again. There was a moment when I started to remember every other time that I've wanted to run out of him, justified or not... Mood congruent memory. Not helpful when you're trying with everything in you to hold onto the one person in your week-to-week life who will listen to you. There are times when I feel like I can't talk about anything except This One Thing, and it's those times when I most need to know I have someone who will listen and help. So I didn't curl up or walk out or shut down. I didn't even wait until I got home to re-contact him, say it had gone wrong... I just cried until my voice came back and I could push out, "Just. Stop." I wanted to say, "Please," but couldn't find the strength for another syllable, so I left it at that. Thankfully, he heard me. And he did the unspeakable, impossible thing. He stopped. That quickly. I said stop, and he did.
Want to know why I don't run away? ...I already told you.
Backing up a bit, I made a decision after my uncertainty last night that I was going to let the political interpretations my parents make regarding my behavior rattle me as little as possible. i.e. I was going to make my decision as if going to a movie with my dad instead of my mom would not be seen as allying with the enemy and making a joke about a situation with my mom during the week would not be seen as conspiring with the (opposite) enemy. I'm not even attempting to convince myself that these forces don't exist, or don't affect me, but I decided that - as far as my plans for the day were concerned I would do something entirely radical, downright revolutionary: I would agree to do what I wanted to do. Earth-shattering, isn't it?
By the time my dad arrived, I was feeling pretty revved up and leaning toward an active (by which I mean, lazy, but in the outside world, not in D!@#$%^) afternoon. I felt like I could use a bit of comedy, so I figured I might suggest the movie even after the fiasco I'd endured. I'd started to feel like the day was mine to decide about. I didn't feel responsible for my dad, after re-living some of his bullshit Sunday, and I didn't feel responsible for my mom, whose bullshit (however tempered) I deal with daily. I just wanted to make it about me, something I've had trouble doing, or at least recognizing that I'm doing, lately. Then, when my dad came through the door and was actually present and talking and tangible again, the I-want-to-spend-time-with-you-and-I-love-you-and-forgive-you meter started to perk up again, leaving me a little less withdrawn that I might have been otherwise. It's amazing how much easier it is to remember you love people who treat you poorly when they aren't around to do so.
We drove to the appointment; I dropped him off in a (more lavish, comfortable) waiting room and went into the doctor's myself. It feels best that way, and my dad likes it, too, so it's a nice match. I didn't have to wait long; we got a late start leaving which meant we were actually on time (or perhaps a minute late), and the doctor was also surprisingly close to schedule so it ended up working well. He inivited me into his office and (after long deliberation, mind you) I accepted. I sat down, playing with the ring on my right hand, looking (as always) to the right, past the frames of my glasses, into the world that stays blurred and, in vulnerable situations, allows me to stay well-defined, distinct.
He said we needed to do some debriefing about the call on Saturday and the conversation on Sunday, about the past few days in general. Feeling validated in my suspicions about Mom reporting my behavior the past few days (a lot of "lying down" when I'm not sleepy, and crying when she doesn't know why) - especially since Dad had said something about how I was feeling, he seemed to think I'd been having trouble with "headaches" - I tried to scrape togeter the words to describe it myself. I told him that Sara's hospitalization had been harder on me than I first expected it would, or at least, difficult in a different way. I'd expected to obsess over whether or not she was ok, but I hadn't expected (I'm not sure why I was so blind to this) how much I'd miss her. I told him that Sar and I had been talking more often lately, and we'd both stated that we needed that; we especially needed someone who could understand about the whole Rogers experience. I've said it a million times, that I need that person who remembers the spirits only having heard the names, and can bat back and forth the endless exchange of, "Remember the time..." I told him the Rogers-remembering and the Rogers-loss and the Rogers-pain had all been especially intense lately, and that I was having an even harder time without that person who, as he reiterated it, was a witness. Was with me. Experienced it herself. I told him that lately it's hard to make myself do anything, even things I want to do, things that do seem fun - because it seems like nothing's important. All that matters is Rogers and Rogers is an impossible problem, a trap I don't know how to solve.
He said (or more accurately I heard him say) that the solution (and that word planted itself in my ears and intensified everything to follow; understand I've been agonizing over the lack of a solution since approximately the middle of October 2001) to Rogers was to let it fade into the background. I broke down entirely upon hearing that. I let him talk and talk and talk and every word made me feel I was sinking further into the mud, but I couldn't make myself talk. Finally, I managed those two words, and he promptly quit his course. I cried harder, and finally mustered something along the lines of, "I feel like...Rogers is my one best thing. It's the one good thing I have. And to hear you say that the solution now is to let that go..."
Quickly, "Is that what I said?" More gently, "Is that what you heard me say?"
"Let it fade into the background," I quoted.
"That's not the solution," he said. "That's the reality." I started sobbing, or rather rejoined the program already-in-progress. I told him I know that I'm losing them, but I can't lose them. I told him that I hate to judge love by sacrifice but I would give anything, everything to have them back in even the slightest way - a two line e-mail every three months ... and then I took it back because there was a time I thought I had that, a time when I thought I'd hear from Stacy and Brea regularly, and I do have that with the residents, I have phone calls from Sara, and letters from Silje (though that has been far less during this killer academic crunch-time she's enduring), letters from Dixie and Katia, even though they're few and far between. I do have connections to it, and it's not enough. I still agonize over all the people I don't, won't, can't have. It's still not ok.
"There's no such thing as an acceptable loss," he said, and I nodded, agreed. "It's universal," he said.
"I just wish one of them - someone - felt that way about me."
"Felt...?"
"Like I'm not an ... acceptable loss." I could barely force forth the last two words. What would happen if I said it out loud? If I said aloud that I wanted to be as important to them as they continue to be for me? (Thankfully, nothing soul-shattering. Blessed honesty. He told me that it's possible they can't reach back, and I need to understand that, even as I claim my right to feel the pain and disappointment and hurt of "they won't." The counterpart to my earlier comment about how I'd do anything, bend over backwards, stretch myself across states, push and pull and contort myself toward them haunted me. If I was willing to do everything, "unhealthy" as that is, and all they had to do was turn their hand to put mine it, or move their eyes a degree to the left to see me in their world...and they wouldn't do that...what could I possibly do? What possible defense did I have?
We'd talked also about this so-called "health." The way that my continued behavioral progress, or more accurately - my behavioral consistency, keeps everyone saying that I'm (at the very least, so much more) "healthy" - and more and more that means, I'm on my own. As he put it, I'm getting closer and closer to the edge of the woods, and as I do, I have less and less people helping me. I'm fighting off constant earthquakes, and the stronger I become, the harder the ground shakes. "One wonders how a person would be able to keep going. How do you keep going? I'm not sure it's a question I could answer. I'm not sure you could answer it at this point."
He had good reason to be wondering; I've heard again and again the past year that my progress makes no logical sense, as if it's not possible to grow better under these circumstances, like I'm a bumblebee flying and it seems inexplicable, but it's not. On top of that, I had said during his earlier monologue about letting them fade, that I wouldn't do it. It's painfully bizarre: I can know with every atom in me that there is no way to get it back, and I will still fight tooth and nail against the idea posed on someone else's lips. I told him The Unspeakable, that I wouldn't do it (continue recovery) if it meant giving them up. I told him that I'd get sick again, I'd go back. As if it doesn't matter that I want absolutely nothing to do with my eating disorder ever again. (I want even less to do with it than I have now.) As if it doesn't matter that half the staff from my days are gone, as are (to my knowledge, anyway) all the residents. He said I've grown up in a house which has taught me over and over again that the way to stop the earth from quaking was to be sick. He said he wished there were a way to get them back, and then he retracted it (wonderful mind-reading doctor), said, "I wish I knew of a way." Because who knows, maybe there is... And if there isn't, I'm not ready to hear that now. I was fighting him so hard about everything; nothing seems like enough. He told me I have genuine connections that cross the boundaries between life and death, that are untouchable. I have them with staff, with my friends among the residents, even with "my therapist there" whose name escaped him. Dave. He said we're bonded forever, evidenced by the intensity of my feelings and the reality of my recovery ... and as grateful as I was to hear it - especially that part about Dave because it means that even if I didn't understand it while I was there, the connection is no less. I told him I didn't know how to say this (felt awful for having to) but it's simply not enough. I know I carry them with me. "It's like," I said, "...it's like with Tracy, during the best times, when I can feel she's with me, and I really believe she's ok. I feel connected to her; I know I am. But I still can't hear her or touch her... It's that way with them, too. I know I carry them with me; I don't have a choice and wouldn't want one, but it's not enough. I can't feel them breathing. I can't see their face and touch its edges.
Nevertheless, I could answer the question (how I continue) for him, the same way I could answer Dave, a few weeks into Rogers' treatment when he asked me how I was eating. "I don't want to fail them," I said. "I don't want to disappoint them."
"If you had to go back, sick, you'd have disappointed them..."
"I know that, if I went back, they wouldn't treat me like I'd failed them-"
"But it's not about how they would treat you. It's about how you would feel."
"Right. And. This is the best thing I have. This is everything, and I want them to know that. I feel like, if I got sick again now, I'd just be throwing it back in their faces, like it didn't mean anything...and it meant so much..."
By this point, I had given up on hiding my face (as if the tears weren't obvious; I haven't cried quite *that* hard in awhile) and used two kleenex. I gave in and grabbed one when my nose started to run, and he took another and handed it to me, saying, "You missed a spot. On your chin" in a way significant as "As you wish."^ He told me that I had officially begun my "graduate work", and the thesis questions (if I remember right) were, "What is the role of suffering in treating myself with kindness?" We'd talked a lot (also...do you really expect me to transcribe the whole session without a tape-recording?) about my right to suffer, to feel pain, loss, anger, et cetera. And I started to realize that up until now I've viewed suffering only as a method of determining what in my life needs to change, but this question prods at other uses. There was a second question, too, that I cannot for the life of me remember now, but I'm sure it's ingrained in my cellular structure, and- since it came out of all I'm feeling/ experiencing- will continued to be mulled over, even if I don't remember it. I felt a great deal of relief for having talked to him, and for hearing that the graduate work was not after all, to "let Rogers fade." He said that I have them around the neck, and they have me. It was a peculiarly perfect statement, considering the meaning of the one necklace I've worn these past nine months. It made me think more seriously about my need for a suitable replacement come August. I'm thinking of something simple that says Brave, but I don't think I'd like that in alpha-beads. They may as well have had a tribal naming ceremony for how dearly I associate that name to them, so I think it would be a good reminder. I don't really feel up to having "two" around my neck (it seems a great deal less significant, despite the fact that it's a longer time. I suppose "one" had more than one meaning, and two doesn't exactly. It makes my neck feel like an abacus or something equally invalid. This is important. The hard part of that is it needs to be something so subtle that I can wear it every single day and never mind it. So it needs to be significant and (somewhat) inconspicuous, a not altogether easy combination.
After the session (shaking his hand, clearing the tears from my face, dusting the marks of my glasses) I didn't feel so up for the movie. I could still use a good laugh, but at that point, I'd have had to force it in a way I didn't like. So instead, I directed my papa to a bookstore, where I found a present I'm not sure I can wait until my sister's birthday to give her (that would be December 8th), and a cheap copy of a book I absolutely detest. (Ok, I've never read it, but I tried to read it for school, and couldn't. It's the only book I've ever been assigned that was so bad I couldn't read it. And it's not even by Gary Paulsen! It is, for those curious audience members, The Swiss Family Robinson, and I bought it to try out this fabulous "find the good book within the awful one" experiment proposed in the latest issue of Venus. (It's a great article. Check it out if you can. It's called "Doing w/o" ... Anyway, we wandered around; I was enticed by several things but only bought the two, and I insisted on buying them myself, in part because one is a present, and in part because I don't want my dad thinking he has to buy me a gift every time we hang out. He has my love. He doesn't need to run into debt attempting to secure that.
...Though I did tell him that the CD he bought me the other week- "Birds of Pray" by Live, starts out with a song that says, "I don't need no one/ to tell me about heaven/ I look at my daughter/ and I believe" which choked us both up a bit. I'm actually really glad "my daddy" (as I put it in the moment) bought me that CD. I like to think of Dave listening to it, also. (He's the one who got me hooked on Live, and he has- if I'm not mistaken- three daughters of his own, who I suspect he is a very good father to, despite all the evidence he's planted stating otherwise.)
Back in D!@#$%^, the awkwardness was strangling. I wanted to ask my mom if I could invite Dad over for Sunday (Father's Day) but felt I shouldn't do it with him there. I wanted to make plans with Dad for Father's Day, but felt I shouldn't do it without asking Mom. Finally, I decided I'll contact John, see if he's busy Sunday, and then (hoping he's not) ask Mom if it's ok to have Dad over. If she's all weird about it (they stood in the same room for fifteen minutes and didn't speak to each other. Dad tried a few words, but Mom wasn't interested) maybe John will be up for driving to my grandma's and hanging out with my dad there. I hate how complicated everything has become; I really do...especially considering they won't even call it a separation. I saw my dad post letters today with a different return address, one that is not where I or my mom live. And it's just very, very messy. Whether that's an indication of what's really going to happen in the future or not, it's very messy, and although their security would certainly not diminish my need for home, (for Rogers), it doesn't exactly help to be about as far to the other end of the spectrum as one can imagine.
Just a week and two days until Harry Potter V, though. That has to help somehow.
chord
^In the Princess Bride, Wesley says "As you wish" to Buttercup whenever he means "I love you" - so basically the significance of the words is greater than the actual meaning of them. The gesture as a whole, the sentiment inside of it, was simple and so good.
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