10:25 a.m. - 09/21/03
((we're just waking up.*))
depression continuing into the weekend, with scattered thunderstorms arranged to balance the sunlight. thoughts like: there's such a thing as too poetic and that's her. & no matter how many memoirs I read, or very special episodes, or Sunday night movies I watch, it's always going to surprise me. that I know things in my body, in my fear, I try to forget I know. I finished the book of 400 pages with, maybe, four scenes in which adults act like adults, and that's when I remembered Before - when the doctor would worry that I was being abused, and I would say it wasn't like that, and he would ask what it was like, and I'd go quiet and feel like a liar for what my silence implied. thinking of him now and the way he says he understands what he couldn't then, what I said then that he couldn't understand. thinking of how he takes my words and my quiet and manages to turn them into something worth hearing. in such a way that even I believe it. he says, it doesn't mean they're villains, and it doesn't mean you don't love them, but it might as well have been what you call "the worst." and I gag and choke and go numb, but it's a good thing to hear in the back of my memory, in a book where children don't even know they aren't supposed to be grown. like I didn't know. and all that fear.
I had a dream where I was acting or maybe it was real (those ones), but I had a part I really liked, and it came with the stiffness in my body (that comes sometimes with migraine or maybe the anti-migraine med, it's hard to tell) so that sometimes I couldn't quite move the way I was supposed to, and so I tried to give the part away (but this was all part of the role), and I kept falling asleep waiting for the guy who played opposite me and had hard, kind eyes to understand what was really happening to me when I tried to lift my limbs and couldn't and say that, the very reason I thought I couldn't have this part, was the very reason I had to take it.
and aunts or people like them were staring at my shoes and saying how awful they were, and I said, oh, they're comfortable and that's all I care about. comfortable and that's all that matters to me. (and in my head: oh, well, it's almost true.) as they talked, I noticed that the shoes really weren't cute, and they were brown, not black, like I had thought they were. you don't where brown shoes with black; that much I remembered, and I woke thinking, my god, a few judgments and even the colors of the world shift to shame me.
I remembered a girl we'll call Bennett, who used to come home with me once a week to take an art class from my mom. before the class, we'd play, and I'd always want to play school or house or something where I could be a child, and I'd always want to be bad or eerily quiet or run off at the wrong time. in the game, I'd get the wrong answers to the problems, but she'd get bored instead of staying to help me learn them - easy problems. addition. subtraction. I could multiply fractions, but this was different, this was playing, but Bennett (as we'll call her) would get bored. and no matter how many times I left my seat and ran into the next room, when she finally came after, she'd always be herself, weary-looking, saying, "let's do something else. I don't want to play that way." she was supposed to come like a teacher, early twenties, bright-eyed, brow-bent, worried. she was supposed to bend down to me and win me over like a stray cat, so I would talk to her, and then, when I was tame, she was supposed to pet and feed me.
Bennett didn't understand any of that. and I didn't understand why it mattered so much. I didn't understand that the adults didn't understand either, in the world where it wasn't a game, and that was why, I kept going through the same routine: sit down, wrong answer, run away, wrong answer, run away, wrong answer, run away, waiting for them to learn.
there's such a thing as too poetic and that's not having room for hope. that's using every metaphor to build the ceiling lower, so there's nothing to see when you look up. but I could live in a box now (for awhile) with a piece of Saran wrap over the top to keep out the rain. I could call it a skylight and look up all day, holding close the words that say there's a reason you feel what you do when you read (or don't read) those scenes, and there's a reason you weren't ok, and someone should have run after you, brought you inside, helped you talk. I could nestle up against that and survive the 30 or so hours between now and an appointment.
thinking, this time reading about her savior was different. this time I thought, yes, that's how it's supposed to be (not, why can't it ever be that way?), that sounds just like [what I got the chance to know], and I know she won't stay there, that's not the sort of home they make for staying. but it's good she's there for now; she's safe. and when the book ends, I don't envy the girl who survived off scraps because she survived at all. I cuddle in my blankets, eat from a private store with all the exchanges, and whether it's from Dr. R or Rogers or way-back-before, nothing's spoiled and nothing's stale. and the forecast is gloomy despite the sunshine, but I know, I know, I'll make it to tomorrow, 1:00.
chord
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