On Solitude

I hold this to be the highest task for a bond between two people: that each protects the solitude of the other.

Rainer Maria Rilke

Epilogue, May 18 2013

White.

Where the fuck am I? I reach out, press a hand to the wall I’m facing and startle at sepia smears of dried blood on the back of my right hand.

I wince as I crane my head to the right, upwards, recognize the peeling frame of the Puyet litho that hangs above the bed.

It floods back too fast and the adrenaline is an avalanche into my veins, my heart thuds in my chest. Panic is circling like hyenas. I can hear it’s laughing cackle. I can feel the muscles in my legs and arms tighten as I fight the urge to bolt from the bed.

My hands shake so bad they seem to flutter and they are pale as parchment as I draw my purple-spotted knees and thighs to my chin.

My Mac is a secondhand refurb, crisscrossed with scars, I wrench it open, wait for the familiar green light next to Matthew. Dread is a tide pool of dark water that grows deeper around my legs as I type.

I mainly focus on the lilt of his accent when he speaks. His words have taken on an unfamiliar slowness. He is careful. His normal coloring, peony, quick to blush, has blanched so white the color seems to have drained from his eyes.

My parents are next. Their reaction, pure vitriol and blame. I cry until my throat aches, until I dry heave. The disgust in my mother’s voice is palpable. In my gut, under thousands of peeling, burned layers of shame and fear a hard, little seed of hatred splits wide open and sprouts.

I find my budgie, Irish, crumpled on the floor of his cage. He is still warm. I sit and stare through the panes of the French door in a tee shirt, still bloody, holding a dead bird against my chest.

I am a skeleton draped in skin and sinew. My mind is a field of fresh snow. In the distance someone is screaming.

Epilogue, May 17/18 2013

My last clear, technicolor memory is of Benny leaving The Bull. I remember he was pestering me about driving me home and that I resisted. My tongue had recently atrophied. I was attempting recovery. I was just too desperately lonely and craving conversation to get in the fucking car.

Jack had just died on the first of the month, it was two weeks and three days after. I was speaking to a girl about her elderly hound mix. It was about the first time I had managed to discuss him in a way that didn’t trigger uncontrolled sobbing or gasping panic attacks. I remember it felt like I was leaning my head back into a set of hands that were there to catch me. I remember feeling safe and wistful and that my heart was awash in a pearl grey ache as I told her about him and about my loss of him. That is my last cohesive memory. It was likely sometime around eleven pm.

………………………………………………….

I can hear voices inside a house, my head is immobile, my neck feels broken. I roll my eyes up and there is movement, periodically, against the blue green light that is rectangular and must be some sort of window. I move my foot, and become instantly aware that the grass is soaked. It has seeped through the thin blue viscose of my halter maxi dress. The underwire of my strapless bra is inexplicably digging into my hipbone. I am barefoot, one side of my face is wet in the grass.

I close my eyes. Time moves forward. It cannot be measured. I am aware, just briefly before the black sweeps over, that this time I’m going to die. There is no sadness or self-pity. Just a sort of aching regret that I’ve gone and left so much unfinished.

My eyes crack open a second time and the feeling is a 180 degree turn. The rectangle that was blue and green and flickered with movement has blown out like a candle and I am suddenly, instantly, unbelievably frightened. I pull my knees under me and there, hunched in the shadows somewhere north of campus, I am brutally aware that my shoes, my bag and my panties are gone.

I stifle a cry, knocked flat by a swell of panic, my back and arms and inner thighs feel like they have been beaten with mallets. I am stamping down this bursting desire to run with every ounce of control I have. My hands shake as I search, blind and frantic through wet grass until my hands seize upon my glasses.

I stand and the smell of my own vomit is enough to clang the gate bell in my head but the starter’s shot really happens when I feel all my nerves catch fire and scream as the blood starts to pool in my ass.

I am half limping, half running, dead silent as I blindly move past houses and lawns. I am too deep in a foreign neighborhood to catch my bearings. My messenger bag, my phone, my fucking shoes, gone. I’m clenching my teeth against the pain. It hurts to turn my head. My knees are raw and bruised. The adrenaline is a fast stream in my body.

I can occasionally hear the soft swish of a car in the distance, passing by what my brain is telling me must be an intersection. I keep moving, faster. I can feel a hot runner of blood down my leg, curling around towards my inner thigh and knee. I am battered by the rotten smell on my dress, hobbled by my feet as they shred apart, bit by bit on the asphalt.

The intersection is welcomed and horrible at the same time. I am as prone to flight as any wounded animal. I stay in the shadows, thankful the pattern on my dress has camouflaged any blood that has seeped through.

I hit campus and my foot leaves a smudge of blood near a bench I briefly consider crawling under as I start to feel myself pass out. I am pumping blood steadily now, it is a river from my ass to my heels.

I am too driven to get home before the sun rises to be caught by the specter of shame that is hot on my heels. My terror has crowded everything out of my head but the remembered sound of my deadbolt as it slides into the catch.

On 2nd the sun is really starting to come up. The gush from my rectum has clotted somewhat and I am grateful for that as my feet have decided to take their turn in the bloodletting of mid-May. College kids, couples, a woman with a baby… people are spilling out of their apartments. I can hear the clack of a bike lock, the sound of Velcro as mother straps in baby.

I tuck my chin as far into my chest as I can, I ignore the red hot embers in my feet and my ass. I disappear into the yellow bruises coming up on my biceps and forearms. I will myself to walk somewhat normally, maintain my pace, think about the distance I’ve managed.

My heels are thunder on the pavement as I turn onto 8th, the sun is leering down. The blood on my dress has stiffened the fabric and I can smell it coupled with the round, ripe smell of puke that has warmed in the Florida sun.

I drag over the pot that holds my lipstick red Salvia, drop the spare twice, the silver metal key flashing in the sun. One turn and I am in.

The tile is a balm on my feet. I’ve torn off two toenails and it feels like my left heel is showing bone.

I feel my heart and pulse still slamming in my body as I blindly negotiate my hallway, my feet leave blood on the tile.

I just peel off my dress and stuff gauze and ointment against the wounds that slow and steady send streams onto the white duvet. I desperately want to curl into a fetal position but my spine is badly bruised.

I roll against the drywall. I press my face into it. I wrap myself in my blankets, my body still smeared with my vomit and and blood.

I press my forehead against the cold, white wall and I am unconscious, again, before the tears can start.

Bested

The Million Bells hang their heads.

Shameful shit.
Fresh drunk, the sort of feeling that makes a wet deck seem the best of ideas.

Head cocked toward a grey, striped sky.

Waiting. Waiting. Waiting.

The rain is seeping through the denim of my second-hand cut offs, eating towards the core of my fragile, ancient computer’s motherboard.

All operating systems lean towards corrupt, like ivy towards the sun.

I am only breathing when I am inhaling or exhaling smoke, as there is proof there- billowing towards the moss rose.

I fumble for a warm can, a damp pack. Co-conspirators. Find one, knock over the other.

The warmth spreading around and between my curls seems to cement me until I pry an eyelid back and the hot pink of one of my impatiens glares.

I reach out, snatch the bloom, pressing it into my mouth, I grimace a smile.

Another mocking face, another witness. Bested.

On Mercy

I am suddenly awake, as if shoved through a door, and the only thing I’m aware of for a few brief, swiftly fading seconds, are the sharp needling sounds of his toe nails on laminate. Then the sound bleeds out of my head and into the suffocating blackness, replaced by this monstrous ache that builds up in my chest, sprouts legs, and then crawls into my throat.

There’s a wet rage in my sorrow. This feeling of flailing futility. I am sitting bolt upright on a secondhand mattress. I am staring into an abyss of nothing. I can hear the patterned thrum of the window shaker AC, the rats in the walls. Occasionally, the sharp intake of my breath through my teeth is startling. There is nothing and there is no one here. I am wide awake, wild-eyed.

Grief, regardless of whom or what it concerns, reaches a point that makes others uncomfortable. Grief has a definitive “healthy” shelf life in polite society.

I have yet to see any new flesh form over the axe wound in my chest. The gash is angry, oxblood red, rimmed with pus. Until then, I’ll seek solace in a bottle or a cigarette or driving fast and recklessly down dark roads.

Occasionally, my brain will spit out a little comforting staccato soundtrack of my dead dog coming to bed.

It startles me awake. It is dirty fingers digging in the wound.

I am still grateful for the mercy.