Saturday, September 29, 2012

Gravity, God, and Skin: Parable and Interview

They say the only thing tethering us to the ground is the strength of Earth's gravitational pull.  They say we're all falling towards the sun, and if not for the Earth's incredible speed, we'd sink into that old star.  What would happen if God sneezed in the midst of this balancing act?  Maybe he does, and when he blinks we lose our footing and slip a fraction of an inch towards the sun.

God must have given us skin for friction, to keep the air from overtaking us, to keep gravity on our side.  If not for our skin, the g-force might come tearing through the marrow of our bones and cast us into a darkness so vast not even God could find us.  Yet there are times when not even skin is enough to keep out the forces that have no name.

* * * * *

When the girl was eight or nine years old and knew just enough about gravity and acceleration to swing an axe, she got it into her head to play Russian Roulette with a green lizard as it ran in dizzying circles up a palm tree in her backyard.  She swung at the trunk carelessly, wondering--the way one might wonder as she tosses a wad of paper in the general direction of a trash can--if she'd hit the lizard.

Hold on.

Yes?

What were you doing with an axe?

You mean why did I, a young child, have access to an axe?   Or do you mean where were my parents? Or why did I select an axe as opposed to a net or something more benign?

Yes.

Because of gravity.  I was falling away from my mother, and my life was hurtling towards me.  I grabbed what was nearby; I held on to whatever couldn't escape.

The blade bit into the soft wood, once at her hips, again at her elbows, and then a final time at her shoulders, where the silver edge sunk through cool green skin, the lizard's head easily bisected, the ripe red jelly of its blood inching up both sides of the blade as its pinprick black eyes bulged and its tail twitched like a hamster's pulse.  

Jesus!

Wasn't there.  But to his credit, neither was the devil.

Her mouth fell open first, her jaw muscles sacrificing their strength to gravity.  Her hands and arms followed, but the axe remained stuck in the tree, nearly parallel with the Earth's curve.  And for a few minutes, she swayed beside the dying, now dead, lizard and the seemingly oblivious palm tree and the innocent axe, and she tried to rewind time, but she was falling too fast, and there was nothing left to hold onto.

That's a bit dramatic.

Is it?

What did you do with the lizard?

I buried it.  I hope.

You don't remember?

Isn't that sad?  How memory, too, is victim to the forces that push and pull?  Perhaps feeling is the only force with enough constancy to matter.

Sunday, September 23, 2012

CoDA Files: Good Girl

I wanted to be good.  So I never told lies, and I did, or tried to do, what I was asked.  I even tried to keep order for my parents, tattling on my twin sister whenever I heard her telling a story or I noticed she was omitting key pieces of information I knew my parents would need to bring a situation to justice.  Because of my own inability to lie or to let a known untruth live, my parents came to trust me.  It is perhaps for that reason my father never said, "Let's keep this between us," the morning he told me what he'd done during the night while I slept beside him in his bed.

Put together my abhorrence for untruths and my pride in being a good daughter, and my predicament should be immediately apparent: if I told on my father, I could uphold truth, but I would no longer be a good girl in his eyes; if I did not tell on him, his secret would have to live inside me, and my life would be tainted by this thing I could not share, but I could still be his favorite.

In many ways, this difficult decision--to tell or not to tell--bothered me more than what my father did in that bed.  When I look back now, I see the real travesty of my father's actions: he put me in a position in which I could not win, in which I would have to make a sacrifice because of him.  He had committed a great injustice against me, and we would both pay for it.  This was beyond unfair, but I was helpless to change it.

That morning, I told my sister, who put me on the phone with our mother who was staying with a boyfriend somewhere in town while my brother, sister, and I spent the Christmas holiday at Dad's.  For those of you who think the worst part of incest is the trespass, I will tell you that for me, this was not so.  Here is the real crime of incest: as I told my mother what had happened, I felt the weight of my father's betrayal in my heart, and I matched it with my own, word for word, tear for tear; I betrayed my own father.  I was sorry every second I was on that phone.

What happened after I told: my mother called the police and came to meet us at my father's apartment.  The cops talked to all of us in separate quadrants of the apartment complex's parking lot, and a woman with a yellow legal pad stood before me as red and blue lights swirled alarmingly quick beneath a patient California sky.  She asked me if I wanted to press charges.  I was eight years old.  I will repeat this: I was eight years old.  I didn't know what she meant.  She asked me if I wanted my father to go to jail for what he'd done.  I could see him wildly gesticulating in front of a couple of officers across the lot.  His brow was furrowed the way it got when things weren't going according to plan.  I cried.  I had told the truth, and now I would be punished no matter what I did.  If I said no, he might not learn his lesson.  If I said yes, I'd surely lose what little left I had of my father, whom my mother had divorced earlier that year.

I told the officer I did not want my father to go to jail.  So I got to have the truth, and he got to have his freedom, but despite all of it, I was no longer a good girl.

I didn't fully recognize my situation at the time, but now I see that my father not only put me in a position where I was set to lose, but he showed me an ugly truth most children wouldn't have to suffer for at least a few more years: adults broke the rules just like kids did.  This fact devastated my worldview.  What my father did put me in a situation where I had to relinquish my childhood, where I had to be my own parent.  You may have heard other incest survivors say this before, but it's true: that was the end of my innocence.  After that, I never trusted adults to take care of me.  I saw that they couldn't even take care of themselves.

This post isn't really supposed to be about what happened with my dad.  That's just a part of the picture.  The deal is it's been twenty years since I told on my dad, and I'm still not comfortable breaking the rules.  To this day, I try to be good--not because I believe it will earn me a ticket to Heaven or out of Hell or even because it will make life easier or more pleasant, but because I like to believe that rules give the world some sense and order, that they keep people from doing things they will regret or that will cause others pain--that they will keep me from being punished.

But no matter how good I am, I fall prey to the injustice of this world just as everyone else does.

One day when I was six or seven years old, I awoke with a high fever.  Our live-in sitter was still sleeping as it wasn't yet time for us kids to be up for school, my dad was either asleep or at work, and my mom was in a hurry to go to work, but she managed to move me to the couch in the living room, pulling a blanket over me and setting the oversized, pink-and-white dappled bowl reserved for vomit beside the couch before kissing my cheek and rushing out the door.  But she didn't leave a note for our sitter, who was a severe woman with a sturdy hand and a strong work ethic.

I was awakened by a gruff shouting that I sensed had been going on for a while.  With great effort, I lifted my heavy lids to see the fierce, red face hovering over me.  Through grainy eyes, I watched her lips open and close rapidly, like my goldfish's mouth when I'd pour flakes into its bowl.  She said something, but I didn't know what.  I was delirious with fever and fatigue and began to fall asleep again even as she raised her voice.  Suddenly, a cold rush of air hit my legs as she yanked the blankets off me.  "Get up!" she yelled, the words muffled by the cotton ball of my head.  I tried to tell her I was sick, but my throat hurt, and I could hardly get the words out, and she was not a patient woman.  The next thing I knew, my long, blond hair was in her fist, and my scalp was screaming as my body hit the floor.  Her thin, yellow teeth nearly poked me in the eyes as her smokey breath engulfed me.  I raised my hands up to protect myself as she began swatting my body and through the tears now spilling down my cheeks managed to croak, "I'm sick!" at which point she thrust a cool palm atop my forehead before drawing it back quickly with a sharp gasp.  She picked me up gingerly, then, setting me back on the couch and covering me with the blankets.  Exhausted, I quickly fell asleep.

When I was nine years old, I attended a public school in a poor neighborhood in Florida.  The administrators had their hands full just trying to keep us all under control, let alone teach us.  The classrooms were packed with hungry, love-starved kids and racial tension, and fights broke out so frequently that teachers didn't move to stop them but instead would put their hands out in front of the rest of us like a parent might do in a car during a sudden stop and say something like, "Kids, this is an example of what you should not do."  Lunch time was particularly painful because it often served as a school-wide detention period.  When it got too loud, for instance, or when a fight broke out, we were all instructed to put our hands and heads on the tables.  Anyone caught talking during this time would have to go stand on the stage in front of everyone else for the remainder of the period.

Often the young daughter of one of the administrators was asked to walk around the tables and patrol.  I was always dead quiet during this time, but as the minutes ticked by, I'd grow more and more agitated, as most of the kids did, because I'd been drinking chocolate milk and eating tater tots and was full of fuel.  To keep myself calm, I'd read my milk carton.  One day, I was silently mouthing the ingredients when the administrator's daughter pushed her pointy finger into my shoulder blade and said loudly, "You, get up!"

I remember how my heart jumped from my chest.  "But I wasn't doing anything!" I whispered, afraid even now to speak.  "You were talking!" she shouted in my face.  She was my size but maybe a year younger, and I could tell by the dark glare in her eyes she hated me.  At this point, the adult administrator on the stage, another woman who was not this girl's mother, shouted down that I'd "better get a move on."  Tearfully, I grabbed my tray and slowly walked across the large cafeteria to the stage, where I stood amongst the other kids who had actually earned their way to the stage of shame, and cried because I was outraged but also because I wanted to show my outrage, while simultaneously feeling like I shouldn't give that little bitch the satisfaction of my tears.  I hated her, and I hated that this had happened to me, one of the only students in the school who cared about her education (the way I saw it, anyway).  After five minutes or so, my teacher walked in and noticed me crying on the stage.  She demanded that the administrator let me down immediately, claiming I was a good student and did not deserve to be up there.  I was grateful, but the damage had been done.  I would never be good enough to escape punishment.

One day when I was in eighth or ninth grade and had just braved the bathroom after finishing my lunch, I was washing my hands at the sink when one of the popular girls in my class walked in, looked straight at me, and declared with a menacing snarl, "Bitch," like it was a fact.  We'd never even said two words to each other before that day, though we'd had classes together.  I was baffled, and I wish I could say I laughed, but I didn't.  I took her words and held them in my chest like smoke, crying myself to sleep later that night, knowing I had failed to be good enough.

When I was in college, I wrote a paper about the Thematic Apperception Test for a psychology class.  I had spent a lot of time and effort on the informative essay, and I knew it was good.  Which is why when my professor accused me of plagiarizing it, I fell apart in his office.  Here I was, nineteen or twenty years old, unable to escape that telephone call with my mom, that feverish struggle with my babysitter, that elementary school stage.  I swore to him I hadn't stolen a single thing, had never, in fact, stolen anything in my life.  He just leaned back in his seat and told me the writing was too good to be mine and that nothing was cited.  I stared at him, slack-jawed, and showed him on his computer screen where I'd cited, using the required APA format, everything in-text.  And he said, "Where's your References page?"  And I said, "It's attached to the email I sent you!"  And he saw then that he had neglected to open that file.  He opened it, and there they all were.  I told him I was a creative writing major, that writing is what I did, that I was in the Honors Program, that I was a Dean's List student, that I was, in short, a good girl.  He handed me a tissue and gave me a hardly audible apology and told me I'd earned an A on the paper.

The summer between my junior and senior years of college, I took a road trip from my school in Rhode Island to California where I would spend the summer.  On my way back across the country, I was driving through Las Vegas when a cop stopped me.  It was the first time I'd ever been pulled over, and I wasn't sure what I'd done to deserve it.  When the cop came to my window, the first thing he said was, "I just want you to know you didn't do anything wrong."  I was no law student, but this seemed off to me, possibly even illegal.  He told me he'd just noticed I had out-of-state plates and that when he'd run them, they hadn't come up, but he admitted the computer system might have been slow.  In any case, he wanted to see my license and registration.  We did the whole dance, and he let me go...because I hadn't stolen the Kia I was driving.

This is all coming up for me now because I've been studying Step Two in my 12-step program, which states that we "came to believe that a power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity."  And I'm realizing that after all these years, after all these incidents that prove that being good has nothing to do with the world and its order, I'm still trying to be good.  At some level, I still worry that the rules are the only thing keeping my world from falling into complete pandemonium.  I worry about this even though I know it's a lie, even though I know there are necessary betrayals and situations ensnared in gray communications and accidents and feelings that defy logic.  There is so much in this world that does not make sense and that cannot be controlled, and if I want to stop feeling like a victim every time I open my mouth or don't open my mouth or drive or simply just exist, I have to put my faith not in rules, but in a Higher Power, who doesn't play by the rules--at least not the ones we make--because if he/she/it did, there would be no sanity!  I'm not saying that rules are made to be broken (although some are!) but that I understand now that rules won't keep me safe or enable me to trust; in a world full of imperfection, only God can do that.

Friday, September 21, 2012

On Fighting

You can learn a lot from watching the animals, especially those closest to you.

I often watch my slightly cross-eyed Siamese mutt chase my housemate's slightly overweight black feline, Bliss, around the house as she periodically turns to hiss at him, and eventually, swat at him, and then, in a fit of desperation, growl at him.  He either thinks she's kidding or, like me, has difficulty discerning or sometimes respecting boundaries because he gets right up in her thundering aura, right up in her sharp, green-eyed glare, and soon they are rolling around on the floor in a ball of black and white and buff, Fin's teeth grabbing what his impotent, declawed paws cannot, Bliss's nails glancing off my metrosexual cat's pristine coat.  At this point, I stand and yell at them.  Neither my housemate nor I needs a vet bill just because our cats got high on a catnip-filled pillow and couldn't control themselves.

When I walk into the living room less than an hour later, I find Fin blissfully licking Bliss's head like he's forgotten her fierce mountain lion roar and angry talons.  Bliss, for her part, lies on the carpet like an innocent black lamb and lets Fin put his tongue all over her.  Is this the equivalent of makeup sex?

You can also learn a lot from watching kids.  (I know that's an awkward transition from a rhetorical question about sex, but stop allowing yourself to be distracted; I have important things to say here.)

Have you ever seen kids fight?  Of course you have.  You were once a kid, and so you haven't just seen them fighting, you've been a participant.

I grew up with a fraternal twin sister who was a head taller than I was (okay, AM) and a little brother who was my size so that when strangers stopped us to tell our mom how adorable we all were and to ask our ages, which would lead our mom to explaining she had twins, these people guessed that either my brother and sister were twins because they both had brown hair or that my brother and me were twins because my sister dwarfed us.  What our sizes meant in the realm of sibling warfare was that when either one of them pissed me off, I couldn't rely on my physical strength to win the fight.  My brother, though smaller than my sister, was stronger than I was and was also a boy, so naturally he seemed more dangerous, and my sister was definitely stronger than I was.  When I explained this predicament to my mother one day when I was eight or nine years old, she laughed and told me to moon them.

"Moon?" I'd asked, confused but eager to acquire this potential weapon.

"When they say something you don't like," she explained, "pull down your pants and show them your butt."

I didn't understand how my bare bottom could beat my brother's terrifying, skin-twisting pinches or my sister's ability to sit on me until I cried, but I had nothing else in my arsenal.  So the next time they pissed me off, I dropped my drawers and waved my ass triumphantly, like I had just stuck the American flag on the moon.

Incredibly, this worked.  They were so taken aback, so dumbfounded, and dare I say it, thoroughly rebuffed, that they dropped their words and fists and stared in horror before screaming, "Mom!  Mom!!!  Carol just showed us her butt!"

Unfortunately, my new weapon's novelty wore off soon after my brother and sister began reciprocally dropping their drawers whenever we had a fight.  We exhibited so many moons, we could have opened our own planetarium.  But you know how it is; eventually, you take the moon for granted, and the weather cools down, and you grow a bit self-conscious, and you stop wanting to expose yourself to your brother and sister.  So, gradually, without discussing it, we stopped mooning each other.

After I stopped taking my clothes off to thwart my biological nemeses, I was still scrawny as ever and still under attack, so I started playing dirty.  I pulled my sister's long, brown hair.  I sunk my teeth so deep into my brother's arm forensics specialists could have made molds from the indents in his flesh.  I pinched the softest skin I could find.  I dug my nails in.  I flicked the delicate curves of an ear with machine gun speed.  I threw shoes.  I kicked my sister meaningfully in the crotch so that I could feel the unyielding wall of her pubic bones against the laces of my sneaker.

To be honest, I don't remember how most of these fights resolved.  I know some of them ended on the side of a road with my dad's hazard lights blinking and a stick rising and falling on a couple of land-locked moons.  Some of them ended in time outs and groundings.  But the fights that our parents didn't see--I'm not sure about those.  I can report, however, that none of us ever broke a bone or lost a pint of blood or an eye or more than a few fingernails' scoops of skin in one of our duals.  And I can tell you that we have more resilient, more open, happier relationships with each other than many other people have with their siblings.  And now when we fight, no one has to reveal an asshole or receive a bruise.  We just say, "Shut your hole!" and everything is solved.

I'm wondering why this is.  How can I tell my sister to "shut up" or to "quitchyerbitchin'" and then two minutes later sit beside her on a train, both of us sharing our lives and laughing like she didn't just deliberately antagonize me and I didn't just say a few unsavory things to her?  How do we let stuff go so easily?

I've been pondering this transition from crotch-kicking to mostly-civilized-sparring because I want conflict with a significant other to go as smoothly as a quick barb--"Shut your hole, Carol!"--and witty rebuttal--"Not until you do!!!!" that ends a minute later with no hard feelings.

I've read that couples should practice conflict resolution techniques to strengthen their relationship.  They should learn the art of "compromise," of "give and take."  They need to "negotiate" and focus on "common ground" and on building "win-win" situations.  They need "I-statements" and time to "cool off" and feelings and objectivity at the same time.  They need ground rules and respect for self and other and a firm feeling that they are a "team" rather than enemies.

As you and I both know, this is all bullshit.

Conflict resolution, in the way that therapists talk about it, is a myth.  Compromise is a short way of saying "lose-lose," and deep down, or maybe only as deep as our subcutaneous layers of fat, we all know that "win-win" is a fantasy, like low-fat ice cream or diet soda that doesn't give you cancer.   Don't get me started on negotiation, which is what happens just before two countries lose their shit and go to war, and let's not discuss handshakes, which are modern torture devices in which both parties can covertly express their seething resentments as they "settle things like adults."

Ah, and then there's the fighting that happens in the pregnant silences where words normally reside but have since taken flight, having sensed toxicity in the air between the parties.  Indeed, some of the worst fights live in the realm of passive-aggressive "communication," wherein one or both parties have given up on language but don't want to go to jail for domestic abuse, either.  This is a dangerous place to be because problems thrive on pent-up anger and hurt, and all that energy could eventually leak into a lashing out that is far more devastating than the silence.

If the answer isn't in language, and it isn't in silence, if it isn't in paperwork and laws and theories about feelings, where is it?  Certainly not in guns and fists, which leave people broken or dead.  No.  I argue that the solution to conflict lies in two cats scrabbling in the living room, in kids kicking each other in the junk.  To settle conflict "like adults," we must regress.  I didn't reach the point of being able to tell my brother and sister to "knock it off" without first pulling their hair.  So we must get physical, but in relatively harmless ways.  This means we either need to learn how to wrestle, which is a fairly benign contact sport, or just decide to do the makeup sex before the making up.  Then both parties will be calm enough to say, "Fuck it.  Whatever it was, doesn't matter.  We're both dehydrated now and in pain.  And we broke a lamp.  So let's just focus on getting to IKEA to replace it.  Maybe while we're there, we can fight about something else and then test out the mattresses."

Because not all conflicts can end (or be ended with premature-) makeup sex, I argue that we all take up wrestling.  Not the WWF style, but the kind high schoolers do on the gym floor.  The kind that involves contortionist Gumby moves and those soft helmets and a penis next to a face during a serious pin.  In the end, it won't matter who's on top because both parties will have sweated and grunted it out, and if they are sexually attracted to each other and have even an iota of energy left, they can have some makeup sex too and then maybe talk about the problem in a rational way.  If they have to.  Or they can just be like cats.  Who aren't going to be using bullshit I-statements to talk about their "feelings."  They'll just be licking each other's heads or crotches and calling it a day.  Now, doesn't that sound good?

Tuesday, September 18, 2012

CoDA Files: The Adult Child

When I was nine years old, I drew a picture of my mother and the man who would become my stepfather having sex.  I used Crayola crayons and a sheet of white paper.  I drew his penis large and pink and pointy, and positioned it in the center of all those peach-colored limbs, a dagger coming down on my mother with her eyes popping out of her skull, her mouth hinged open so wide her cheeks and chin never made it to the page.  I double-traced all the lines, pressing firmly into the paper so that even someone who was blind could run a hand across the back and know what it was about.

They used to lock us out of the house, leaving us to cast our lines in the canal or invite the neighbor kids over for a game of kick the can, which is what we were playing when we heard the moaning.  It sounded like how Hurricane Andrew had sounded from inside my mom's work friend's house where we'd waited out the storm the summer before.  Not lonely or even angry or upset, but deep and long and edged with the sky and ocean and all that is too big to be fully seen.  We could hear their groaning even over the noisy din of the air conditioning unit, which sat on the ground beneath the master bedroom's window and was always running, on account of how cold he liked to keep the house.  I remember how none of us said what we knew, how despite knowing what we would find, we jumped like kangaroos outside the window.  We stood on tiptoe and pressed our noses to the glass and strained our necks to see between the bent mini blinds.

Later, after they'd dressed and he'd had a cigarette and his martini, I called him and my mom outside to where I stood on the grass beside the dock beneath a calm Florida sun.  When they were close enough, I whipped out the drawing from behind my back like it was a knife, driving it into their hands. 

If you'd asked me then why I'd drawn it, why I'd shown them, I would have told you I wanted to hurt them, but I wouldn't have been able to adequately explain how my drawing could be capable of that.  I may have gotten as close as saying I wanted to show them that I too could trespass, that I could violate their privacy and disregard their boundaries and their needs the way they'd disregarded mine.  I wanted to prove that I hadn't lost all my power, that I wasn't as small and insignificant as I seemed, that I should not be taken for granted.  And that I could see them for what they were; I was no fool.

They held that drawing of them with the waxy, popped-out eyes and gaping black-hole mouths bigger than their necks, and laughed.  They laughed and laughed, even as I hid my growing disbelief and helplessness behind a glare. 

My mistake was in thinking that I was showing them something ugly about themselves that they wished to conceal.  I thought I could manipulate them with their shame.  But I'd misjudged the situation.  They weren't ashamed.  They were so far from feeling guilt, they didn't even relate to the grotesque caricatures I'd depicted.  I'd thought I was holding up a magic mirror, that like the mirror in Snow White's fairytale, I could show the truth, and it would be received as if it were a weapon.  I didn't understand that the drawing was a mirror for my insides, that I'd just revealed myself.

When they laughed, I knew I had lost.  He would continue putting it in my mother, and she would continue driving to his house in the middle of the night, disappearing inside as we lay sleeping in the van beneath the yellow glare of a streetlight.

I'm writing this now because no less than three times yesterday did I run across variations of the maxim that we don't always get what we want or feel we deserve.  And because lately I have been wrestling the codependent in me.  When she wins, I morph into an adult child, one who pouts and thinks mean, unfair things, one who would sink a few biting words into your ear if you dared defy her.

When I was a child, before my parents divorced (and a bit afterwards too), I threw tantrums.  To this day, I have never seen a child throw a tantrum with the same level of passion and commitment I did.  When I hurled myself onto the ground, I did it with the fervor of a Justin Bieber fan groping the stage.  I hugged the earth (or checkered supermarket floor or hot asphalt parking lot or restaurant carpet) and kicked with the force of an Olympic swimmer and the grace of an enraged grizzly bear.  I howled like a dog caught in a trap.  I screamed demands and on occasion bit and scratched.

Usually at some point just before this epic scene, I would threaten my mother.  I would brush my unruly blond hair out of my face, cross my arms, and with the hardness of a rock tell her I was going to run away.  Sometimes I'd go to my room and pack.  A couple of times I even made it down the block after my mother waved goodbye to me at the front door, but I always chickened out with the reality of my situation, which was not that I loved my mother or would be lonely, but that I wouldn't be able to take care of myself.  When I wasn't threatening to leave, I would threaten other things.  I'd swear off food, hoping my mother cared enough about me that she'd give in to me before I starved to death.  I'd tell her I wasn't going to school or that I wasn't going to get dressed or that I was going to break something she cared about.  My need to control was profound.

Sometimes the fit itself made everything better because my mother would gather me to herself like I was a wounded yet dangerous animal and hold me tight against her chest until all the fight had left my arms and legs, until her perfume and the soft skin of her neck and the gradually slowing thump of our hearts was all that remained between us.

There are things we grow out of.  Namely, pants and shoes.  But unless we make a conscious effort to change our perceptions, responses, and behaviors, we don't actually grow into adults.

My most memorable adult temper tantrum took place when I was twenty years old.  I had locked myself in a bathroom to keep my girlfriend from reaching me.  Picture it: darkness because the light was off, the sprawl of a skinny 5'2" body on the floor, legs and arms flailing, fists punching the linoleum, an angry voice shouting itself hoarse on the daggers of words rising and falling: "I hate you!  I hate you! I hate you!"  And then, because she needed leverage and she'd long ago learned that threatening to run away was useless, she grabbed a bottle of aspirin and held it like it was a bag she'd packed, like she could take it if she had to and never come back.

Now, years later, in moments when I look at that scene, instead of always seeing it through the same funnel of sadness I used to when the thought of suicide was still as close as a medicine cabinet, I think to myself,  HOLY FUCK, I was actually going to kill myself because my girlfriend kissed someone else, and it's so absurd that I nearly laugh.  I look at that girl on the bathroom floor, and while I feel compassion for her and her pain, I also see what she's doing--she's having a fucking temper tantrum.  That is, in fact, what I was doing.  Because I didn't like what someone else did, and I didn't like how I felt.  It came down to this: I didn't like that things weren't going my way.  And I was going to do something about it, by God.  I was going to kill myself.  THAT would get me what I wanted.

But I didn't kill myself.  Because I knew deep down that ending my life wouldn't get me what I wanted, which I wouldn't have been able to tell you at the time but which I now know was to be loved.

I would like to say I don't throw fits anymore, but that would be a lie.  These days, when things aren't going my way or I'm feeling neglected or misunderstood or powerless, I am still prone to tantrums, but in the interest of appearing mature, I keep most of the flailing and yelling on the inside.  I have more awareness than I did when I was a kid, and that can sometimes prevent a fit, and I have more tools because I have gone to therapy and I go to 12-step meetings.  But every now and then, I feel myself slipping, my hands groping for a crown and a scepter, my mouth contriving manipulations.  In those tremulous moments when I can feel myself about to say anything, do anything, to have just a bit of power, I am grateful to have the serenity prayer, words spoken at the start and finish of every meeting, a reminder that I am not alone, that I am not powerless, and that sometimes the one watching over me denied my wants not because she didn't love me, but because she did.

God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,
the courage to change the things I can,
and the wisdom to know the difference.

Saturday, September 15, 2012

Have I Made You Uncomfortable?

My last relationship ended in early June of this year.  There's a lot I could say about why it ended, but I want to focus now not on the causes but on one of the effects.  When we broke up,  I endeavored to take a careful look at myself and at every relationship I'd ever entered.  Why?  Because I'd really wanted that relationship to work.  I'd really wanted her to be The One.  In fact, I remember telling her in our last couple of weeks together that I'd thought she was the woman I was going to spend the rest of my life with.  But the truth was that sentiment was not new to me; at some point in all of my significant romantic relationships, I'd wanted Her to be The One.  It didn't make sense to me to become part of a monogamous relationship if I didn't fully believe in my investment.  In any case, with this last breakup, I had to wonder why I'd failed once again.  I began a serious investigation and eventually faced a truth I hadn't been willing to acknowledge before: any of the women I'd been with could have been "The One," but I had rejected all of them because I was not One with myself. 

That sounds really hokey.  It sounds like that Eric Fromm bit about how you can't love others until you love yourself, just dressed up in Buddhistic wording.  And I suppose it is.

What I mean is I thought I loved myself, that if I met myself in a bar, I'd pick myself up and get married, no problem.  But the truth is, I would have been miserable with me!  Why?  Because I didn't trust myself.  I have discovered that in a relationship, lack of self-trust leads to lack of trust for the other, too.

I didn't trust any of them.  It wasn't just that I read my girlfriends' diaries.  I also scrolled through their text messages and browser histories.  I scrutinized their mail.  I dug through their underwear drawers and closets.  In most cases, I wasn't looking for any one thing in particular.  I wanted to know all of their secrets.  You'd think that the less dirt I found in my searches, the more I'd feel I could trust them.  At least, that's how I figured I should feel.  But that was not so.  The less I found, the more convinced I was that I just hadn't found the truth yet.  I searched harder.  I'd invent stories around the things I did find.  If I found, for instance, that my significant other had been looking at porn, I'd figure she was secretly repulsed by me or wanted to punish me but just wasn't saying anything.  If I found that she once had a crush on one of her friends, I'd assume she was settling for me, that given the choice, she'd rather be with someone else. 

Do you see a pattern here?  I was convinced the person I'd chosen to be with did not actually want to be with me.  How could I think this?  The truth was I didn't like the scared parts of myself, my insecurities and fears, and I was convinced that these women could see my demons and were as repelled by them as I was. I did not think I was loveable, despite all the good things about me because I wasn't perfect.  As much as I wanted to be perfect, I wasn't, and the shame I carried around this fact prevented me from being able to fully accept love from another person.  It prevented me from loving myself.  Fromm was right. 

So in the past few months, I've been turning towards my broken places.  I've been sharing with you all the stuff I always kept under wraps for fear of being "found out."  The truth is, our secrets are only as dangerous as we perceive them to be.  The truth is none of us have anything to be ashamed about.

In the spirit of relinquishing my fears, I've turned a bright light on myself.  I have chosen to believe that nothing I have done is so wrong that I can't love myself anyway.  And it's been liberating to share my demons with you.  But frightening, too.  The secrets under the secrets are the ones that really make me tremble.  It's one thing to tell you, for instance, that I would, on occasion, drop my cat over our balcony when I was 14 years old and frustrated--and blame it on being 14, and another to tell you that I knew what I was doing was wrong at the time and that doing it always made me feel like a horrible person but that I did it anyway while condemning people who were cruel to animals.  It is hard to share these things, these haunting moments that I created and cannot undo.  Because I worry that like I have done, you will look at this collection of dark fragments and judge me as being evil or fucked up, a horrible person, crazy, selfish.  Because in those moments, I was.  I was mean.  I was selfish.  I was horrible.  What I did was fucked up.  And it's clear that nearly every fucked up thing I have done has hurt someone or something else, but probably not as much as it hurt me.  That's how this world is, that's the law.  What you put out comes back to you threefold, they say. 

Imagine dropping your terrified cat off a balcony, the tension in his muscles, the limbs rigid, paws expanded, pupils wide.  Imagine his heart racing under your palm, the sick swell of a shadow in your own chest.  How you already felt horrible just holding him over all that open air, how in your mind, it was too late, you'd already done the deed, so you let go.  And when he landed and ran off, seemingly unscathed, you felt the weight of his mistrust heavy in your veins, and you hated yourself.  But that didn't stop you from doing it again.

I used to be proud of my arms, the skin of my wrists smooth and white.  I knew girls who cut themselves, who threw up their lunches or starved themselves, who took laxatives to relieve their self-loathing.  I used to think I was better than they were, better than the kids who were drinking themselves into a stupor, who were addicted.  But here I was throwing my pet from the second story of my house, literally projecting my self-hatred.  Perhaps I thought if I could throw my cat far enough away from myself, I could get free. 

I share too much now.  This is not my belief, but my observation of how others perceive me.  I have friends who cannot read what I write or hear what I say because it makes them uncomfortable.  I wonder if I am touching their fears.  I wonder what makes something inappropriate to say.

The other day I read a discussion on a friend's Facebook wall about the legality and morality of public nudity.  Some people argued that they themselves didn't care whether people ran around naked but that they disapproved because of children.  And I thought, angrily, "Take responsibility for your discomfort.  Don't hide behind children, who are innocent and in some ways wise, who don't give a shit what we look like under our clothes--they know, and they don't give a good Goddamn. WE are the ones who decide to be scared of our bodies.  WE are the ones who ascribe meaning to a nipple or a penis.  We are the ones who judge." 

If I make you uncomfortable, I am glad.  You have some work to do.  You might wonder what it is about my words that brings you to close your ears or eyes.  Do not pretend that I am ignorant, that I don't realize what I'm saying, that I'm simply not aware I'm "over-sharing."  Do not be "embarrassed" for me.  Own your discomfort.  You might realize that I am not the issue, that it is in fact your own demons that have built a wall between us.  You might realize that we can only be as close as your willingness to recognize and take responsibility for our own fears and secrets.  When you can sit in a room with me and listen to me talk about the times I told my mother I hated her, when you can sit beside me and hear me say that I was relieved when my father disappeared, that I'd wished it, when you can sit with me and think about your own dark spaces and not leave the room, we will move through our discomfort together, and all our walls will come crumbling down.

Thursday, September 13, 2012

The Secrets Beneath the Secrets

Sometimes, you think someone is telling you a secret when she is really just sharing something that you would keep secret if it were yours.  We don't give away anything that truly worries us.  We only share the stuff we can handle getting out, even if it doesn't feel like it as the words slip from our mouths, even as thoughts of how the information might be used against us, of how we might be perceived, sweat our dreams.

When you reveal something you've been hiding, it's because you have something else you're not sharing, something else that lives under that secret, another secret unto itself, one heavier with shame, one you think you won't ever be able to tell.

When I tell you that I looked through not one but three of my ex-girlfriends' journals, stealing past their secured drawers and password-protected defenses, the electric tingle of a Jerry Springer segment rushes up through your guts, shimmies in your heart.  It trembles at the corners of your faint, unintentional smile.  You feel the chill of the moment I slipped into the shadows, the hot fraction of a second it took for me to decide to flip a page or click a button and force my eyes into the role of accomplice.  You want to see me caught.  You want to see me get away.  You want to read their journals, too, but let me take the fall.  I am your hero, the one who crossed the line you always wanted to but never did.  I am your enemy, the one who violates privacy, who trespasses in the halls of the heart and mind, the one who might read your diary next.  I am not to be trusted.

You wonder why I've told you this.

But you are distracted.  The journals are a red herring.

You should not stop at the knowledge of these women's words, the image of the pages, white in my hands, the sentences scrolling into paragraphs on a computer screen.

What else, you should wonder, have I done?  What other, darker things?

Because I just gave away the journals.  You didn't even have to ask.  I told you, but because I did it in a whisper, you believed what I was saying was sacred.  This is how it's always done.  It is how you've done it with your priests, friends, lovers, parents, children, pets, bosses, colleagues, strangers.  You have hung your head over a cross or a bottle or your hands and confessed your sins without anyone putting a gun to your head.  You have told yourself it was hard to say the words, but we both know the truth.  They slipped out of you like a sigh because holding them in became harder than letting them out.

When I was seventeen, I stole my brother's girlfriend.

We could discuss the language here if we wanted to.  How "stole" in this context would be an objectification.  How dramatic it is, too.  We could have a whole conversation about choices, about responsibility.  We could slip into the world of cliches that exist specifically for cases like this one.  It takes two to tango.   It's a dog-eat-dog world.  (Or a sister tramples her brother's feelings on the way to fulfilling her hormonal goals world.)  The facts here matter a lot less than the truth.  But nonetheless, I will share them.

Fact: I met my brother's girlfriend online in the days of AOL when she instant messaged me, saying she was new in town, and because she was a little younger than me, my brother's age, I told her I'd introduce her to him so she might have a ready-made friend, and I did, but she and I continued talking and getting to know each other as my brother and her got to know each other, too.

Fact: She and my brother began officially dating not long after they met, and he fell hard for her.

Fact: My brother's girlfriend kissed me one night maybe five or six months into her relationship with my brother while she and I were watching a movie in her room.

Fact: I did not kiss back.

Fact: I told her if she wanted a relationship with me, she'd have to break up with my brother, that I wouldn't go behind his back.

Fact: It didn't occur to me that I would hurt his feelings whether or not the relationship was behind him or in front of him.

Fact: She broke up with my brother, and we started dating.

Fact: My brother did not invite girls over to the house after that.  He told our mother he didn't want me stealing anyone else.

The Truth: My brother's tears.  All the receipts for flowers he bought her while she was thinking about being with someone else.  The gold ring he gave her just because.  How he loved her more than I did.  How I loved him more than I loved her but did this to him anyway.  How long it took to repair the damage.

And so you know this now, what I am capable of.

And you feel sated.  Like unless I've murdered someone, there isn't much more I can say to drag you any deeper.  But you'd be wrong because I just gave that story about my brother to you.  Just gave it away.  Don't you remember what I said about this trick?

Here is another: I faked my own homicide when I was sixteen years old.

Closer, still: I led my twin sister, the person I loved and trusted most in the world, to believe I was dead.


It was hard to do.  I had to think carefully about what clothes I'd wear, what props I'd use.  I found a crowbar in the garage, pulled a knife from the block in the kitchen, grabbed a couple of rags from underneath the sink, pulled out a few tomato-based condiments.

I carried a rag, dowsed in barbecue sauce and ketchup, along with the crowbar to the front porch, set the bar by the welcome mat and the rag closer to the steps.  I left the front door open a crack.  It would be just dark enough when my sister got home so that she wouldn't notice the smooth, un-dented door frame.  But she'd see the black, serpentine outline of the crowbar, the ruddy handprint on the door.

I took an old t-shirt and slashed it with scissors.  I smeared ketchup and barbecue sauce around the gashes in the cloth, and before pulling the shirt over my head, spread the condiments all over my abdomen.  I finished by dabbing a bit on my ears, cheeks, and neck.  I pushed it though my hair like it was styling gel.  I smelled like a summer cookout, but in the glow cast by the the snowy TV screen, it wouldn't matter.  All she'd notice was the slits in my shirt. If she touched my face, her fingers would come away sticky, warm, and red. 

In the living room, I turned on the television.  The black and white dots fizzed and popped.  I set the condiment-smeared knife on a rag by the couch.  (I couldn't risk my mom yelling at me for messing up the carpet.)  I grabbed the portable phone from its cradle, smeared blood over its raised, plastic buttons, clicked it on, and listened to the dial tone until it broke into a harsh beeping that would let my sister know the phone had been off the hook for a long time, disconnected.  

I lay down with the phone loose in my grip.  I contorted my body, forcing my limbs into painful positions that would prove this wasn't a prank.  I practiced not breathing.  I listened for the crunch of wheels on gravel, for my sister's car barreling up the long driveway, branches and overgrown plants scraping metal and glass.

I slowed my breathing as I heard the car door slam.  The screen fuzzed in front of me, casting an eerie blue-white glow on me and the phone, softly beeping in my hand.  Footsteps on the flagstones.  Footsteps on the porch.  A gasp.  The front door creaking open.

"Carol?" Her voice trembled.  I reminded myself that laughing now would ruin everything.

A step forward on the wooden foyer floor.   She could see my body from the front door, but did she know what it was?  Another step.  Softer steps on the carpet in the hallway leading to the living room.   

Again, closer, just above me now, my name in the form of a question, tears catching on the letters.

The phone, lifted from my bloody palm.  A hand in my sticky hair.  I reminded myself to be heavy and limp, like an overcooked strand of pasta.  She shook me.  This was supposed to be funny, but I didn't feel like laughing.  I could hardly breathe.  

As she reached for the phone, I opened my eyes.  "Got you," I said, and she spun towards me with wide, relieved eyes, like I was a miracle.  She threw her arms around me and cried into my hair.  Her perfume washed over me until I could no longer smell the ketchup or barbecue sauce.  I closed my eyes and let her hold me.

What do you think of me now?  Is your lip still trembling with the thrill of revelation?  Or are you sick? Have you put some distance between us so you will not have to relate to the years of pain that 16 year old with the sauce in her hair must have been trying to escape from there in that living room while in the crush of her sister's arms?  Did you know that this is something that teenager can never undo?  That her sister still brings it up, often in the company of others, and that the one who pulled the prank knows that her sister does this not to hurt her but to show the depth of her hurt?  The sister, the one who believed the person she loved most in the world had been murdered, wonders why her sister would do something so mean.  She wants answers.  But there is only the sound of forbidden pages turning, of lips trespassing on lips, of a phone beeping into the night.  And under all of that, something deeper still, something yet to be shared.

Tuesday, September 11, 2012

Open Letter #4, to my future reading students

The department wants me to teach you the difference between fact and opinion.  Here's your first fact: I don't know how to teach you this.  Here's your first opinion: Parsing statements into dichotomous categories like fact and opinion muddies truth and shuts down the mind.

I am supposed to tell you that a fact is knowledge or information based on real occurrences; that it is an event, thing, or experience that can be verified; that it is indisputable.  And you will say, as past students have said, "Oh, fact just means truth," like you've had an epiphany, and I will slam down my dry-erase marker on the desk and shout, "No, no, no!  Don't write that down!" because you will already be scribbling Fact = Truth as if it is this simple.

Then I will tell you all to write down the facts of what just occurred.  JUST THE FACTS.  You will look around the room nervously (which I will discern by the amount of white exposed in your eyes).  Some of you will lick your lips or clear your throat.  But after a few ticks, you will press your pens and pencils to paper because it is a fact that you want to show that you can do this or that you want to pass the class or that you have nothing better to do or that you generally do what you are told.

After a minute or so, one of you will say, "You slammed your marker on the desk."  You will be almost smug when you say this, and some of your peers will give you small smiles or nearly imperceptible nods because they wrote something similar, and others will already know not to trust me, and they will be staring not at you but at me, at the points of my teeth.

"Did I?" I'll ask, staring at you until you turn your eyes down.

But I will press you because I want the truth.

"How do you figure?"

At this point, no one will look at me.  I will have to play the nice-guy just so someone will say something.  "I'm not saying you're wrong.  I'm saying you gotta show your work."

"We all saw it!" one of you will say, trying not to shout.

You have just complicated matters.  You have no idea how much.

"Hold that thought," I'll say, rubbing my temple because the weight of our task is bearing down on me.

"Let me clarify," I'll say.  "Did I slam down the marker?  What does slam mean?"

The sound of a backpack unzipping will fill the air as one of you, probably an A-student, reaches for a dictionary.  "Slam," you'll read.  "To put, throw, or otherwise forcefully move so as to produce a loud noise."

"What's a loud noise?" I'll ask.  And then I'll stomp my foot, startling you.  "Is that a loud noise?"  I'll yank the projector screen down.  "Is that?"  I'll find an audio clip of a bomb going off and play it at maximum volume through the room's speakers.  "Is that?"  I'll bring the marker down on the desk again, and its sound will barely register against the bang of the bomb.

"Let's move on," I'll say.  And you will hate me for not giving you the answer, but we have to discuss what you think you saw.

"Does this marker exist?" I'll say, holding it out in front of me so everyone can see.

You are almost too annoyed to respond.

"Yes or no," I'll demand.

"Yesss," you'll hiss.

I will move the marker behind my back, slowly, like a sloppy magician.  "Does it exist now?"

You will think I'm being condescending or silly, playing peek-a-boo with you like you might play with your babies or your dog.

"Um, it's behind your back," one of you will say, smirking, and many of you will snicker.

"Does. It. Exist," I'll repeat, not deterred.

"Yes. It. Does," you'll mimic.  And one of you, anxious to move on, will say, "We saw it."

"But you don't see it now," I'll say.  "So how do you know it's real?  What made it real when I was holding it in front of you?  Was it?  What makes something real?"

"When it's outside of you, when you can see it," you'll say, and I'll tell you your love isn't real, and you'll backpedal but some of you will wonder if that's true, and I will have touched some childhood wounds, and you will forget the marker as you remember your mother or your father or someone else or the space where he or she should have been.

I will lecture you on Descartes.  I will remind you of classic children's stories, Pinocchio, The Velveteen Rabbit.  Some of you will write frantically, trying to capture every word I say.  Others of you will still be thinking about love.  Some of you will be red in the face, angry that I would suggest love is not real, that I would put love in the same category as the word slam, as a stinky dry-erase marker.

"I'd like to move on," I'll write on the board with my questionably existent marker.  "Fact?  Or opinion?"

"Fact," you will say.

When I say nothing, you will revise your answer.  "Opinion."

When I stare at you blankly, you will grit your teeth, and the sound will be a fact and will express an opinion.

"Go home," I'll say.  "Watch the news.  Watch The History Channel.  Read some philosophy.  Meditate.  Talk to your children.  Play with your dogs.  Sit outside and let the air carry you forward and back.  We'll try again next class."

Friday, September 7, 2012

Open Letter #3, to an ex

You weren't interested.  But I allowed myself to believe you were because you called me, and your voice matched your body, strong and solid and colored by the sun.  You spoke of your ex with a longing you tried to hide but that waved in your eyes like a red flag.  I thought I could be what you missed.

You were safe.  You did not do drugs, did not drive recklessly, did not hit me.  You liked children and loved your family and enjoyed coffee and good food.  You had a car, an apartment, a degree, a plan.  I thought, because of this, I could love you.

What did I want from you?  I remember driving to a Halloween party with you, how the night spread itself like a cloak over the bridge we crossed, over the water below.  I knew I was not enough, and the paint covering my face gave me the courage to tell you to leave if you ever grew tired.  You assured me I did not bore you and I nodded, but I wanted to scratch off my makeup and tear off your hat so you could tell me you knew me and I'd believe it.

I scared you.  You said my anger felt like what the sun does to skin.  It could fill a room like light from a switch.  My anger was the flash before the bang, a jarring promise.  It barreled toward us like x-rays.  It settled in the bones.

Did you know you scared me, too?  Your anger sat between us like a grenade with its pin in, full of potential.  Sometimes I wanted to scream, "Just pull it already!" because I could feel you itching, because the thought of it going off, or worse, never going off, made my skin crawl.

I did not understand you.  Even after paging through the books on your shelves, tracing the faces in your photographs, and listening to your playlists on your iPod, I did not know you.  I only had a collage of titles and names, a catalog of aromas from the kitchen, a collection of glances and touches.  You played me Paul Simon's "Diamonds on the Soles of Her Shoes" as if it was for me, but I never knew what you meant by it.  Were you trying to tell me we were too different?  Or were you saying we could make it work anyway?

I baffled you, too.  I wanted you to touch me like the moon touches the tide.  I wanted you to be the big spoon, but if I didn't fit my body to your back, you would leave me to curl up alone on my side of the bed, and you would sleep.  I read you poetry.  I kissed the palms of your hands.  I cried when you would not look at me as I came.  I cried because you could not come while I was searching your eyes for the shadows you never spoke of, the sadness and anger and fear I wanted to hold for you.

You did not miss me when I went on vacation.  I do not know if this is because you did not love me or because you felt I was suffocating you or because you did not trust me.  I did not trust you.  Which is why I read your diary and is how I know you did not miss me when I went away.  You wrote those words and I held them in my chest like a child might hold her breath with her pet dying in her arms, like if I said what I'd done, or if I said your secret aloud, I would lose you.  I read those words and did not leave; you never knew how much I tried to love you.

When you gave me your secrets, your shame, I failed you.  Your confession terrified me.  I could have run, but running's not my style.  I thought I could change you, or that you might decide to change on your own, given my discomfort.  But that's not love, and my fear made you nervous.  You saw that I did not accept you.  You knew my love was conditional, an oxymoron.

You cried and told me you wanted to end it, even as you held my hand, and this was the only time in our relationship that we felt exactly the same way, like two thirsty people in a desert stuffing their mouths with sand to make their insides match their outsides.

I don't know if you loved me.  I know that I wanted to love you, that I wanted to move past the parts of you that jumped out at me like ghosts, that even in the end I was too scared to walk through your halls, that I let the shadows mean more than your hand in mine, that your tears made me feel small.  I am sorry I was not brave enough to love you.  I am sorry I did not tell you how much you scared me; I thought you didn't care.  And maybe you didn't, but I still should have said something, if only so you might have understood you had nothing to be ashamed of. 

I guess I'm writing not to excuse myself but to say I hope you find her, the woman you can look in the eyes while making love because you see how she loves you back, how she would never ask you to change.

Thursday, September 6, 2012

Open Letter #2, to my first crush

You had long brown hair that had a slight curl and that you often wore half-down, half-up, with the half-up part held back by a large clip-on bow because it was the late 80's/early 90's and that was the style.  When I think of you now, I think of you in our matching white-washed pink LA Gear shorts, the ones that came with that cool holographic square of plastic attached to the belt loop by a small circle of metal beads, the shorts we used to wear when we were dancing and doing cartwheels to Paula Abdul's "Straight Up" in your living room.  Or I think of you in your blue bathing suit, the one with the white polka dots.  I think of you teaching me how to dive, the long length of you sliding into that other world where we spent so much time weaving between each other's legs, playing Marco Polo and searching for treasure.

We were friends in first and second grade, maybe kindergarten too.  I can't remember, it's been so long, and time with you has always been bent by the shapes we made when your parents weren't watching, by our hands on each other's skin.  I remember your fingers were always cold, even when they passed me a hot bag of buttered popcorn those nights I stayed over and we watched Ghost or Sister Act, laughing with Whoopi, loving her smile and her braids, the way she shimmered like a rainbow.

I remember your breath on my neck: Swedish Fish and Sour Patch Kids and Ring Pops and the minty gum you always plied from your mom.  We liked to lie on the floor on the side of your bed furthest from the door.  The carpet was soft, and we'd prop a few pillows against your nightstand, yank our t-shirts up and over our heads, and begin.  Your whisper was warmer than your fingertips, which fell lightly on my shoulders, like snowflakes (but I didn't have that analogy then).  When you laid on me, your ribs filling the gaps between mine, the balloons of our diaphragms pressing toward each other like static electricity, I felt as if I'd been hungry without knowing it, and I was grateful the way a fed body is.

Do you remember the hard press of the faded red picnic table in your backyard?  I can still feel its fists in my spine, can still recall the starry ponds of your eyes floating above me, the way you squeezed them closed when I pushed up against you, how our legs met like two halves of a page that when opened reveal a finger-painted butterfly.

Maybe it began with the magazine we discovered in a littered parking lot as we peered over the edge of the bed of my mother's truck.  You might remember how my mom had left the Nissan running while she disappeared into a dingy building at the edge of the small lot, how exhaust swirled down around the glossy pages, mixing with the smell of vomit rising from the greasy green dumpster a few feet away.  I remember worrying she would come back before I could grab it.  And then, after my sneakers had hit the glass-dusted pavement, after the Reader's-Digest-sized magazine had filled my hands, I feared she'd catch me before I could conceal it.  Do you remember how I sat on it when she came out?  How red our faces were?  We paged through all those exquisite shapes on the drive home, our backs against the window separating the cab from the bed, my mother oblivious to the fire starting in the back.

Your mother was also clueless.  At least, for awhile.  I wonder how we slipped, what led her to fling open your door that day.  I remember how you jumped away from me like you'd touched a hot stove, how we scrambled for our clothes and the fire burned in our cheeks as she told us we would go to hell.  I remember her finger pointing, her voice as sure as the white dress you wore to your First Communion.  I remember the wafer on my tongue, how it took all the spit from my mouth, how hard it was to swallow.

I remember the day you slapped my face in your bedroom and how we both cried afterwards.  You had never touched me like that.  I can't remember if you hit me because I'd said I wanted to go home or because I'd refused to do something you wanted me to do.  You were spoiled, and I suppose you weren't often denied.  I remember how you begged me not to call my mom, how you begged me to stay.  Your mom materialized at your bedroom door, and when I, holding my hot cheek, told her I wanted to go home, she looked glad.

That is my last memory of you before my parents divorced and my mom moved my brother, sister, and me across the country.  It's been over twenty years since we last talked, but I want you to know I haven't forgotten you.  I see your profiles on Facebook and MySpace, see how you've lightened and straightened your hair, how you've caked your soft lashes with mascara so that it looks like you're wearing spiders.  You graduated high school but never went to college, and all of your pictures show you in bikinis and costumes that show off your cleavage and tight midriff.  You give duck face in half the shots and stick out your tongue in nearly all the others.  Are you what would have happened to me if I'd had your mother?  Are you happy?  Was I just a phase?  I hope you still worship the sun, I hope you are still quick to laugh, I hope if you ever think of me you remember who you were before you knew the world could turn on you for burning so bright.

Tuesday, September 4, 2012

Intro to Open Letter Series & Open Letter #1, to Secret

Typically, the open letter is one of protest or appeal and is addressed to a single person or group while also being meant for the public's eyes.  I'm going to twist the definition for my purposes as I begin an open letter series intended to expose my secrets; my letters will not be a means of criticism so much as a  venue for addressing personal truths.  It is my hope that these letters will not only release me from Secret's grip, thus empowering me, but will also encourage my readers to relinquish their own secrets, to face their own patchwork lives and perhaps boldly uncover the truth of who they are.

* * * * *
Secret,

You are older than mummy dust, fresher than a stranger's blood on the evening news.  You are dark as Watergate, bright as the hydrogen bomb's panoramic flash, innocuous as who ate a cookie before dinner, as dangerous as an assumption about a sanctified robe.  You're glib as the paparazzi's snap and tight as a thong on a hot day.

You are an apple, a box, The Ultimate Question.

You stir the nerves.  Truly, I'm not sure what's worse--keeping you or sharing you, knowing you through someone else or being kept from you by someone else.  You drive me crazy.  Still--

I used to love you.

Well, not exactly I guess.  I never trusted you, all wrapped up and aloof, unapologetically smug or afraid of your own shadow.

But I appreciated your smile.  (Not your shit-eating grin, but your silly, toothy crescent mouth, how your lips would part like the Red Sea for Moses, how your whispered words filled the funnel of my ear.)

Sometimes you danced inside me like raindrops on a secluded mountain lake.  We trembled together, waiting for someone to ask a question that would reveal you.

You kept me safe, I thought, all these years.  We've known each other for a long time, and despite your comings and goings, we've always managed to keep in touch.  But now I'm not so sure you're good for me.  In fact, I'm not sure you ever really kept me safe so much as you kept me from being myself.  So I'm letting you go.  It'll be slow and possibly embarrassing and maybe even painful.  Yet I know at some points I'll be laughing.  Hell, you'll laugh too.

Of course, it's going to take a lot of open letters to cut our ties.  But I know you won't mind me sharing you with the world because a significant part of you has always loved hide-and-seek (you invented it, after all!), and I suspect the reveal is almost always more electrifying than the dark space beneath the bed where dust bunnies are your only company.  So get ready to shock, to sadden, to anger, to entertain.  We'll work together until you burn out, until you're nothing but ash and the smudgy memory of unkept promises.

Let's NOT keep this between us,
Carol

CoDA Files: First Installment

I, like many people, am codependent.  I think it's important to my recovery to write about, discuss, and share some of my issues, but the disease (it's considered a disease) can be difficult to explain.  So, instead of defining this complex term, I'll be illustrating it in installments.  This inaugural CoDA post will serve as a small snapshot of how codependency (and my recovery) operates in my life with regards to triumphs and failures, and this edition will specifically emphasize how it works in relation to my bathroom behavior.  (We'll get there...)

My triumphs in my recovery from codependency are often invisible to others.  For instance, a couple weekends ago at a 12-step meeting for codependents, I unzipped my hoodie while someone was speaking.  Then, last week, I didn't apologize when a stranger bumped into me on the street.  And yesterday, I asked the woman next to me on the plane to move so I could go to the bathroom.

My failures may be more apparent but are still nearly imperceptible.  Recently I told my sister to shut up when I could no longer stand her ridiculing me under her breath.  The other day, I gave a friend unsolicited advice.  And earlier today I forgot about putting my faith in a higher power and went on a future-trip that left my stomach in needless knots.

Though it may not seem like it, I have done a lot of recovery work in the past eight years.  And here's where my bathroom habits come in.  (But please don't misunderstand; my codependency, and codependency in general, covers a lot more ground than a tiled room ever could.)  When I was five years old, I used to pee right before school and then hold my bladder all day until I got home.  I remember my painful, heavy, desperate canter up the long slope of my street in California after our bus driver had deposited me on the corner, how I silently pleaded with my body to hold on, to wait--almost there!  I remember one particular day, ripping open the front door, dropping my backpack, and pushing frantically into the bathroom to turn my back on the toilet and undo the button on my jeans only to have my bladder betray me even as the backs of my knees brushed the porcelain bowl, the hot culminating rush of that day's water fountain sips and lunch milk gulps saturating the crotch and backside of my underwear and pants.

I wish I could say the experience taught me to use the bathrooms at school, but I only resolved to do better at maintaining control.  And I did do "better," for years, perhaps achieving my "best" when I was in 8th or 9th grade.  At that time, I went on a long trip to the beach with my friend and her family.  I had spent a lot of time with this friend and had been to her house a number of times and felt a lot of affection for her family.  I also had a secret (to her and I believe at that time also to myself) crush on her, which did not help matters.  In any case, her family fed me delicious meat and potato kinds of meals all week, during which time I refused to defecate.

Yes, I was in pain.  My guts gurgled and cramped, and I did what I could to eliminate gas when I was swimming alone or walking by myself, but I never allowed myself to poop.  I was mortified at the thought of stinking up the bathroom or worse, clogging the toilet.  There were a few instances where I thought I might be able to get away with it after entering an already stinky bathroom, but my nerves coupled with my very real constipation prevented it.

The trip, if you must know, lasted nine days.

The moment I got home, I headed for the bathroom, where, as you might imagine (though I don't encourage it), I was trapped for hours.  I'll spare you the details, but I will tell you that at the start, it was like trying to pass a baseball and that later on, it was like a baseball diamond after a week of rain.

I didn't regularly use bathrooms outside of my house until I was in high school and had come out of the closet to myself (and not long afterwards, to others).  It took accepting a part of myself I didn't think anyone could love for me to be able to forgive myself for being human at the most base levels.  Because that's what it was about; I didn't think I should pee in public because somehow I'd gotten it into my head that expression of my body's basic needs was shameful or unwarranted--that fulfilling needs like these was something only other people had a right to do.  In some way, for some reason, I didn't believe I had as much right to this life as other people did.

I would be lying if I said my bathroom habits have completely reformed.  The truth is, though I would never now force myself into a state of prolonged constipation, I am still a poop ninja.  (That's what one ex laughingly called me when she realized she never detected my movements...)  I try not to go in that way at other people's houses, and I'm so nervous about it when it does happen that I'll often try to cover up the fact that I'm covering up, for instance spraying the provided scented spray only as I'm flushing the toilet--in order to cover the confessional gush of the can.  When I know I'm going to be caught, I usually advertise it in order to diminish its power.  I'll joke it up to make it seem like it's not a big deal, covering my embarrassment with false confidence.  "I would NOT go in there if I were you," I might say with a wry smile before pressing forward.  "Give it a few hours...or days.  You might want to use the neighbor's house, actually."  I'm joking with whoever I'm talking to, but as they say, there's always a little (or a lot) of truth to every joke.

So each time I let loose in a public bathroom because that's what my body tells me I need to do, I remind myself that I'm not a loser, but a winner, that I am creating a codependent victory.   Yes, a victory that a three-year-old could boast about, but still, I won't let some potty-training tot steal my thunder...or my stall.

I guess what I'm trying to say is the next time a friend tells you she is codependent, you might pat her on the back as she exits your bathroom.  Even if her issues aren't the same as mine, she might enjoy a good pat because, you know, who doesn't?