by Tess McInnis
“Sometimes, I think it is a great strength that surrenders completely like you have” he answered talking to the window, hand upon his chin, like a imaginative child in a boring school classroom. He continued, “One day,
you just wake up and decide you have had enough. I've been there many times...I am just to weak to allow it to swallow me like you have”.
My brain was ticking sideways again, reveling in his use of the word 'weak'. It all seemed like an oxymoron. None of it made sense, but burned in me with calm reasoning. It is the weak ones who beg desperately over and over for a replay of the same mistakes. They shovel the dirt on themselves purposely for the sensation of the grave. I was weakened by life experiences yet it was my strength from them which took me down. God gives free will, and this was mine. I won the exit out of meaningless, repetitive record of everyday 'put your feet on the floor and go...' life. In a sense, being here freed me of having to continue to try to play with life. The responsibilities, obligations to perform as a constructive citizen in society, and more over, hopes for what everybody else has...gone. My shining performance is here where I belong. Maybe the doctor had a point. The weak souls cling to hope like the melted plastic on a fire stick. In my bones, I know I don't wanna try anymore. I had the strength to recognize it, and the mind to give it all to. The doctor shifted to standing, dropping his clipboard on the floor by forgetfulness. He gathered the scattered cliff notes of my mind droppings, and made his way closer.
“I am asking you if it is okay to get this leather off you,” he continued genuinely speaking “I don't advocate this forced compliance, however, I need to hear you say somewhere from deep in there, in your thoughts...you won't attempt a second act of....”
“Is that what you call it now days..an act?”I surprised him with engagement into conversation. He looked at me with a sadness, not for my position, but for a sadness in him causing his eyes to tear, his mouth tipped down so far from ever a smile, it might have as well melted. I heard him sigh. For the first time in a long while, I felt someone else's pain and I felt embarrassed by my own. His hand touched mine and he said, “I would like to remove these, but we need to have an understanding between us that you will not succumb to your broken thoughts. In fact, I am going to leave you a panic button, a lifeline to me, when you feel you gotta make it all stop. The nurses are on notice to call me when this happens...when you need me.”
“You can't fix me you know” quietly I affirmed to him.
“Yea, probably not, but maybe I can keep you alive long enough to fix me” He whispered under his breath as he walked away. Stunned. I now was a pet project to help someone else. Selfish insanity wants it's own moments. Now I had to be responsible to someone else's humanness and error. I felt sick and promptly threw up over the side of the bed and onto the floor. The ant came in to sedate me, and shook her fat head in disgust at my mess. I just spit “what!” at her, still hating, and watched her clean it up before I sank into quicksand of a heavy sleep.
Nineteen Ninety Nine. If Satan was a man, then I was to meet him this year. On top of this notion, I would also buy a first class ticket to hell. Upon my father's death, I stopped playing good girl in my life. There had been no men for years, only a career path which promised power and control which seemed at the time a good compromise. I hid behind my ego and my help-serving attitude towards life through work and raising my children. Most would consider this normal. To a varied degree I functioned. I was alone (meaning: without man), yet my needs went unnoticed, as did the depression. In early morning moments in a cup of coffee, or standing in front of the mirror I swallowed hard the building sorrow beget by breathing. I would take the kids to school only to park by the playground to watch them run and play. The tears would fall marrying my makeup along the way. Sometimes I was so frozen with apathy I didn't notice the bell had rung and they were gone. Something was seriously wrong with me and I could not help myself for much longer. I was in my office when the call came my father had passed. I remember levitating to the parking garage, to my car, to home..it felt like eternity. I was now, aside from my kids, without love. Without love. My hero had died and took his love with him. In an emotional decision, I resigned my good job, packed the kids and moved back to my hometown. I was expecting to find myself somewhere in the nostalgia...some remnant of childhood waiting for me to shine my child light once more. I got a farmhouse, horses, and all things green and beautiful. I mourned and never noticed the sun, the fields, or my children's laughter in the tree house. I watched how they played in the apple orchard but I couldn't feel them. I traveled softly in my daily actions, by a body on auto pilot and a mind like a widening black hole. Vulnerable. This is a good word to describe all the events which took place when I met him. He strolled into my life like a large entity who had been there all along. Nothing going on for him except his looks, and bad boy manner. He was trouble and I was hungry for diversion. Tall, animal mystique...when he walked into the room, you knew him. He commanded with strict expression and enforced with a big, lanky body. The children already hated him. I was flattered to be desired by a younger man. I willingly jumped into his world of drugs and alcohol. I would believe his lies. A night out, without his return I somehow was okay to overlook the obvious. It wasn't until I was in handcuffs I realized my new path and how far I was willing for the sake of love. His warped definition of love. Of all the men I could have met in the world, of all the other choices I could have made...this one choice in a man would be the pivoting point in my whole life. Anything beyond the fatal moment of meeting him would scare most women, most people. I fell with him into the criminal underworld, and played. In my continued unraveling, I chose to expedite the undoing of me. In the shadows, were my responsibilities and, on the front burner cooked an alter ego I would claim for the next four years, as I let my mind free. When you have been stuck alone in your world, when you have played the roles your mom told you too, when you have questioned your meaningless life to suicidal ideation...the next step flows obvious. To be reckless, and without abandon, shunning away complacency, burden, loneliness, and the string of thoughts which remind you everyday you suck. Before the coming of him, before the events to follow, just always. Always Ambivalent. My word for me. Because no matter what choice I make, it is always the other choice I have wondered about. I often think about the theory of parallel universes...where every significant choice you made, the opposite one is playing out somewhere in an alternate plane. Had I stay married, would life with him result the same outcome. Could love have emerged victorious again and would normal be what others looking in saw? In some other dimension am I single, made famous by childhood dreams I surrendered for him? If I didn't do this...what would be instead? Constant. Plague. I am doomed by my own mind. Sick. Never well. Not before any adulthood. As the true sickness began in my childhood.
SEND THE PAIN BELOW...by Chevelle
“I see you used the panic button...what's going on?” The doctor said. He was there as promised. I wasn't at the door of darkness, plotting events for my demise. Instead, I felt the sores festering from childhood and needed validation it happened. Years have passed, on one side I will never forget the ugliness bestowed me. On the other side, I look in and wonder if it really happened at all. I was confused, heavily sedated and frightened. The doctor-gentle, was my reach. I would give him bites from my soul's past if only for a reaction. Perhaps some form of disgust or pity response to vindicate me from those chains rotting still.
“My mother hated me” I looked blank at the floor, kicking something unidentifiable with the tips of my foot. “When I say she hated me...I mean she hated me. She told me everyday.”
“What was she like...tell me about her?” he asked while making his way to a metal chair propped in the corner.
“She was an alcoholic, like my father...but he functioned. You know, worked everyday. She was always home with a bottle. God, she hated me” I sighed, feeling my chest's breath sink in low. Wear the fucking dress ugly girl...but mom, t
his dress is from when I was nine. Wear it or nothing at all. But mom, the kids will laugh at me...they laugh at you anyways stupid, look at you....i laugh at you. Then I quickly added as for my relief “but my father, he loved me...I was his princess”.
“How did she feel about this?” more generalization survey question from doctor-gentle.
I interrupted with my call for instant gratification.
“I need a cig, mind if I smoke?”
“Well, I don't smoke.” he said as I rolled a pack from my waistline and promptly began to light up. Not moved by my self-preservation behaviors, he found something suitable for an ashtray as opposed to sitting watching me rub the ashes on my pants in indifference.
“I need to puff if I am going to sit here and run through memory lane, it's my only bus stop”. Stop, puff, breathe, reflect, pain.... “I will tell you how much she hated me...enough to use me as a cruel playmate in the worse way...like, imagine sleeping and hearing the shiver slice sounds of a pair of scissors next to your ears. Thinking you are dreaming it, you slumber back into a deep sleep. Only in the morning to discover all your hair has been chopped off”. The doctor-gentle slid forward in his chair uncomfortably, leaning into
his notes with pen. I had finally began giving life to my death.
“She cut your hair off, did this happen often?”
“Only twice”
“How old were you”
“nine and twelve”
“Were there other incidents?” He already knew, but asked for the sake of being the doctor. My voice was beginning to mimic a gradual climb to my comfort zone of stoic hysteria. Eat the goddam sandwich, it is all you are getting to eat today. Dog food is too good for you anyways bitch.
“Okay...so...she liked to kill my pets...no, worse. She loved to kill my pets and bury them under my pillow for me to find” My speech weak. But I am here. With the doctor gentle, but I am re-living each and every moment given to that woman, my fear in exchange for her wicked laughs of satisfaction. My child fear of what she would do next to up the last glorious event. The doctor gentle is scribbling away, not making eye contact with me. Probably a good thing, as I am beginning to decompose in wrath, my hate, and inside me that child is crying. She is crying hard. I can barely swallow. The same question eating my brain for my whole life 'why didn't she love me?'. I don't have to verbalize that one, the doctor is psychic enough to feel me.
“Do you wish to go on with this? I don't want to pull out history if it forces you to close down or worse...” his worried words befall me. I light another cig. And continued.
“Well, when it was bath time...that was always a delight,” I say meanly and sarcastically, knowing I am bringing it up, like regurgitation to leave it all here. Like I have left it so many places before. Hate.
I continue, tone different, different girl sitting before him now. “Yea, nothing like a kid waiting for a fun bubble bath with toys and imagination world...instead, I would be sitting in the tub, and she would dump the garbage basket on me. I would scream. And she would say “your dirty, the garbage is cleaner than you...clean this garbage, and then try you piece of shit, to clean yourself” and she would toss the can on my head and stumble out drunk, stinking, smelling of piss and ashtrays.
“How often did this happen?” He said more quietly, almost sullen and still not looking at me.
“Every time I took a bath. It got to be a game..I sometimes would go look at the water to see what things she had put in there, when the element of surprise from dumping the garbage subsided. Then she got sneaky. So, I looked first. Naked and peering into the tub...sometimes finding globs of hair from the hairbrush. Oh yea, once a dead mouse which I worked on forever to get it out of the drain. Poor thing had been mushed there. I wasn't suppose to find that one until I went to let the tub water out. It got to the point where I would wait until she was passed out drunk, then I would hurry and shower, trying not to get caught”. My gut was aching, my eyes remained closed not wanting the doctor to see the actual events occurring in my childhood, as if he could crawl right in and save me.
“Did your father know what was happening?” he asked in genuine father tone.
“I wasn't allowed to tell him, she threatened to maim me in ways he would not see if I told”
“Like what ways?”
“For example, okay...when she thought I might tell, she would lay knives everywhere for only me to see. I would find them in my bed, under my dresser. The same knives she would hand me after ordering me to stand before her at the kitchen table while she drank. She would say “Take it! Take it! Put the goddamn knife to your heart...that's not your heart you little bitch. Kill yourself! Go on, chicken shit...no one wants you alive...your dead to me anyways, so go on and do it...who could love something that looks like you...”and I at 13, stood there with knife to my heart, crying and begging “please mommy let me live, please mommy..”
“Do you blame the alcohol, her or both?”
“All of it...all of that shitty existence that went on in that trailer, especially while dad was at work. I was only safe when he came home at night. Or at school...well, maybe not even there...things happened there as residue from my home life.”
“Like what things?”
“Oh, I suppose there were so many, but the greatest ones involved my mom and schoolmates. I would get off the bus and girls would pile on me, beat me to dirt in my own yard. All while she stood at the door, bottle in hand, same stinky house dress on, and she would laugh. Hysterically laugh and cheer lead for the kids doing it to me. Don't even bother to ask how long that went on...that was my childhood. I was at the mercy of all around me, and the only one who could save me, who actually did love me, didn't know”. I began to sob. I put my head down in shame, letting my long hair cover my face and I let the tears consume me. The same scene replayed at my father's funeral not so long ago. The same shameful covering of my head with my long blonde hair hiding me from all to witness agony. The void had been opened again...pushing the pain up with imaginary hands inside me. Showing myself to this other human being for what I really was, unloved. Perpetual turning of knives in me, bleeding russet note reminders I was a human not meant to be.
The doctor stood and came to me. My head still amassed by hair and tears he said “Why don't we stop right here for now, let this moment go to something you can hold onto”.
He sat beside me, with his fingers moving my strings of hair from the side of my face. I felt I was that child again and he knew it.
“Tell me doctor, tell me what's worth holding onto?” and he reached into his file, and pulled out a picture I knew well...my children. I began to cry more.
GOD ONLY WANTS YOU by Ours
And oh the dreams we hold within our dreams. To not wanna wake up to only leave behind those feelings inside sleep which make us whole. To discover our mysterious true selves in a harmless altruistic way of being. In flashes of souls coming to you mesmerized by your light, now willing to lay it's own light upon yours. In dreams, the youth, the laughs, the intensity of wishing it real. For life to enlighten your heart so severe it should burst if one more person couldn't help themselves from unconditionally loving you. In these places, life is happening the way it should naturally. Perhaps it is the child's dreams playing out the way it was all suppose to turn out. Sleeping brings such peace, such hope and an occasional skipping threw a wonder world of love that upon waking, little flashes hit your head all throughout the day and you yearn for, no beg for something beautiful to make your reality as good as your dream. Something about a dream...
THE FIGHT SONG by Marilyn Manson
Sweating. Green Mountains. Horses. I tossed my pillow to the floor in utter exhaustion by sweating. No worse. I had annoyed my dream time with a clammy clinging to my legs. I had wet the bed. Part of me willed it away, ignoring the discomfort. Part of me had a singular controlled sane sentence in my head to clean myself. That went away with the next part. I had become my mother. Her lying there on the floor when
I came home from school in her own piss, passed out with bottle in hand and the house dress riding high up her legs stuck in her crotch. The house reeked of vomit and smoke. To curtains never opened for the breathe of sun. There was always a lined pile of glasses next to the sink full of her wretchings. When I desperately needed to drink, I would have to play eeny meeny miney moh with which glass I could clean easy enough to use. The vomit would play stretchy games amongst my fingers and I would gag every time. Hearing her moan would hurry the process. The house was always of pee. Pee as I frighteningly would walk by her room to get to mine. The odor illuminated my whole childhood. If smell was mine, this would be the one I would own. And now, I lay in it. My own smell. I gave it to you well, didn't I. I laid there in my shame. Frozen. Shivering uncontrollably all the way in. Just a head on a pillow attempting to summarize the situation without moving. I could not will it away. It would not go. My mind was sliding down to the extreme edges, I was seeing it as when I would crack an egg and lose it on the kitchen counter. Slowly it would drip. I would hurry to catch it, instead witnessing the egg slither quickly over the counter to the floor. I am the egg. In a few seconds, I would be hitting the floor. Repulsion. I jumped up feet to cold tiles. I am not my mother. I am not my mother. I said over and over and over. Crying, I yanked at the sheets pulling them off, whipping them to the corner as if they were her themselves. I struggled with the tucks and bottom sheet utilizing my weakest muscles for maximum strength. I am not my mother. In the corner of my barren room stood the tallest dairy dip of whipped sheets showing pee stains in the occasional turn. I turned creepy with consumption of her traits, following it up with her mannerisms, almost mimicking her being as if I was my mother. I even lit a cigarette the way she did and paced the floor repeating her words assigned to earth as being mine. “you can't belong to anyone...no one will ever like you, or love you...”I kept my mantra monotone and alive, cocking my head like her, walking around in the stink dress like her. I am my mother. Back and forth, puff, speak. Laugh hysterically for truth. I flicked the cigarette into the sheets and watched for red. Signals of gray began to cloud from the bottom of mom's sheets. Then tiny little flecks of orange and my aroused red. I laughed like her when she stood at the door watching me get beat up. I laughed like her killing and burying my beloved dead pets under my pillow. I laughed like her hiding the knife in my bed. Oh how I laughed from the cuts I received on my child legs from those knives waiting for flesh to slide into them. I tore off the stink dress and added it to the beautiful fire before me. Naked now with the glow reflecting off the scars on my body. I laughed because I remember the day I set her bed on fire. I was a coward, because I did not wait until she was in it. Dad thought it was from her smoking...always sitting on the edge of her bed smoking and drinking. She lived her life in that seat. On that day he admitted her into the treatment hospital. I prayed she would not return. God never heard my prayers anyways. The smoke alarms went off, and in rushed three ants to put my fire out. I just looked at them. I was crouched in the corner with joker smile letting the world know...I am my mother. I did not struggle when the needle came for me. I know of these things of needles. The point into skin into vein will give me something I recognize. A way out. A road to somewhere else temporarily. To someone else. How I know of these things. How many needles hold my red. And when we were good, just close your eyes...so when we are bad, just close your eyes.