I admit to losing the combination. Several months. One day I opened a drawer and there it was,

the ripped bit of page with its six numbers.

Had been there all along, not lost. Thoughts of the spirit plane then, your astral form, last

I saw it crawling away. Slightly chewed. Crushed

just enough to die, slipping into the dark crack where the bed almost meets the wall. Still

the full longing for paranormal detachment,

my essence lifting off like a dirty bandage and the drunken weave through the night, searching

out another loose dreamkin testing the limits

of mysticism with you, my friend, my fellow swapper. Frankly, I'm tired of our heavy breathing

about ourselves and the world. From these boxes.

When I hear drums, my hands dart out from sleep. When it gets cold and buzzy with vibrations.

I get nervous we'll never make the connection.

—

half through the night, I come downstairs a child, and there has been another incident. half a sculpture, one

rib a skewer up, one time only asks if the man or woman who severed it at the waist is satisfied, and when it says

this, I shiver in places I am severed without knowing it. whole fleets of blue light flashing fill the streets that

I thought belonged to the little girl, a second bed she could use when hers was too soft, until it hits me this is

not that story anymore. this story teaches us to be sad through glass: reflective glass, roomfuls of glass, and

unshattered glass with more than enough left, if we all wanted to sip. god, how I need to learn that hardly any of

this life is good enough. how little it has to do with them, or anyone else's specific violence. it's safer to nod

when asked anything, to say yes, I completely agree and don't you love me for it? But satisfaction is another

way to survive, and sometimes the only reason to, says the jagged half-lit torso. I can't argue with that

(I completely agree and don't you). don't you think she is doing the best she can? K asks. love is what it is,

not what you decided it should be. I want to be angry, but unattainable satisfaction makes a good story, too.

Golden shovel: “And one woman says it, that she // is sad, and all of them nod, and another says / that she is angry, too.” – Jacqueline Jones LaMon

—

I wedge my hand inside a jar so similar to the wedge of last night when I plunged it through the rubber mouth of the garbage disposal to retrieve raspberries, almost like my hand no longer fits anywhere it wants or needs to go

but of course what is really happening is I am animalizing again, I cross my nearly willing way to the side of wild and drag a heavy blanket of blur over the world until all I see through my thorough distortion is a deprivation

I don't really see so much as swallow swallow and swallow, as us famished creatures in the woods cannot afford to be precious about a hand, and in fact, I remember there are tools, fancy sticks for scraping out cavities this dark and

cramped where fingers can't quite reach and the tips by touch must dangerously fill in for vision (there will be no snake spiraled in the sink who may startle and strike, but the human body will always believe in the snake, in her fangs) but

they are shut in drawers several inches away, and there is not a moment to waste in wild, nor a want I want to tame with forethought; I lift my pinched fingers loose and drag my tongue hard through thick deposits of oil and chocolate, my knuckles

streaked brown like those of a toddler teaching itself feces, and in the frenzy I misplace pain, misplace squeamishness and disgust, am left only with the familiar chaos of the kitchen, kitchen light, kitchen hum, kitchen’s fresh kill, as if in another

rendering I am the predator or scavenger who slides her arms inside a steaming stomach up to the elbows and delivers a value menu burger, a clean and dry contrast to sleeves of blood that start at the wrists and fade to faint stains crowning her cold cheeks

My therapist divides a sheet of paper into three sections—one for each year—and asks what I was angry about each time I stopped eating.

Today I am spinning a story that this is all about anger. Anger is the root, the underlying cause, of everything. Of course. How simple, how easy. How could I not have seen it before?

As usual, I am very convincing. She believes it. I believe it. My mind is racing, staring at the paper, at her hand hovering, ready to write. What happened in 2003? What happened in 2009? What happened in 2017?

[2017]

After ten years of not self-harming, I had suddenly started to want to again. Want is not nearly the right word, though, is it? It was more like the mental illness equivalent of developing a sudden fever. Fevers make you dissociate. They make it difficult to think clearly. You can't perceive the same way. If the fever gets high enough, you can become delirious. And that is what happened in 2017. I spiraled into a severe depressive episode, and I became delirious with the desire to hurt myself.

I resisted at first—I'm not sure how long, a few months maybe—before buying a small box of matches at the grocery store so I could give myself a few little burns in places no one would ever see. I figured that was pretty innocuous, not the worst thing in the world, as relapses go. Unfortunately, "pretty innocuous" didn't do much to satisfy the intensity of the craving I was having.

One day I walked to a giant hardware store down the street and spent hours wandering through it hunting for the best knife or blade to cut myself with. At that point, I still don't think I was committed to actually following through. I just thought, why not look, why not see what's out there? Looking back now, that day in particular stands out so sharply (pun…not intended? well, I’m keeping it, so I guess it is now!) in my memory compared to the blurriness of the rest of that time period. It was like an out-of-body experience. Or like I was in a strange semi-lucid trance—but really, it was not just that day. For months, I was not here. Or there? Wherever I was supposed to be.

There were times I couldn't think about anything else. I felt like I needed to hurt myself in order to survive, let alone for the possible relief beyond that of lifting some of the despair.

This is also how, much later, I began to know I was getting better, when I felt that desire fading away. When it didn't seem worth the effort anymore. Not because I had stumbled onto any kind of wisdom, insight, or growth, but solely because I was finally emerging on the other side. I was becoming less depressed, and the change was as noticeable to me as a fever slowly dropping. That chill leaving the body.

Unfortunately, in-between those two moments, in-between the hardware store and the fever falling, I decided to play around with another form of self-harm. I decided I was going to lose some weight.

Whatever I told myself in the beginning to minimize what I was doing, I know I did not start out with healthy motives or plans of going about it in a non-extreme way. I wanted to lose a lot of weight, fast, and I wanted it to stun me out of my sadness like a hard blow to the head. Which I knew it could do. I knew because I had done it in the past, twice—but had been able, both those times, to veer quickly back to health once it had served its purpose.

[2003]

I was about six years into managing a severe anxiety disorder that no one in my family knew how to deal with and, for the most part, preferred not to acknowledge at all. Anxiety that would get exponentially worse whenever I couldn't be at home in my safe routine. Whenever I felt trapped—at school, at holiday parties thrown by relatives, on family vacations, even just going out to a restaurant or to a friend's house—I would have anxiety attacks. Years and years of white-knuckling through crisis after crisis and being completely alone with it (or having to rely on fellow 12-, 13-, 14-year-olds with their own mental health problems to look after me—which they did manage to do better than any of the adults in my life). I quickly learned that I had to endure it as silently and secretly as possible. I had to figure out coping skills on my own, many of which were addictive, bizarre, and/or self-harmful.

In 2003, I discovered another behavior that checked all the boxes on the list of things I never stopped wanting (a high, a distraction from suffering, controlled visibility, concern from others, a way to punish my family): restricting food.

I didn't do it for long—a few months, half a year, maybe. I viewed it as a choice. I felt I was always in control of it. So that later [2017], when I was constantly trying to figure out how far I could go before I was crossing a line (if I only hit myself? if I only burn myself? if I don't break the skin? if I only break the skin a little?), restricting food was a self-harm I could convince myself was less of a problem, certainly less societally unacceptable. A self-harm that wouldn't be as difficult to conceal. Safe(/r) to revisit.  Maybe no one would ever find out about it at all.

For seven minutes my therapist talks at me (it can be very difficult to get me to actually participate in a conversation) about how a person develops an eating disorder, about the kind of upbringing such a person likely would have had, about how such a person might perceive and interact with the world around them. She doesn’t know me yet. This is only our second session. She is trying to find a way in. Finally she stops talking. She wants to know what I think; does any of that sound like me? We sit in silence for a long time.

When I speak, the words come at a crawl. My speech goes into slow motion when I want to say something that feels important, as if the path from my brain to my mouth is a backed-up queue. As if every phrase is being forced to fill out extensive paperwork proving it’s the perfect phrase before it will be allowed to exit my lips.

“It’s really weird to me … whenever someone tells me I have an eating disorder … I don’t really feel like that’s true … I’m not sure why … I think it might be because I see all self-destructive behavior as … the same. … What it seems like … to me … is … this is just another way that I am hurting myself.”

“So you’re saying to me that you have a desire to hurt yourself?” my therapist says.

I can feel myself sag a bit with relief. Yes! That one.

It makes me cringe inside to talk about it. To even write or say the phrase "eating disorder" in reference to myself. The words feel like a crime in my mouth and always tumble out fast and slurred. My stomach churns up a nice, strong shame. I know everyone's struggle is valid. That anyone who gets into a pattern of disordered eating deserves help, no matter what caused it or how bad it gets or how long it goes on. I know it's never good to compare your mental illness to someone else's. And still, there is a part of me that feels I can't claim it, not in the same way others can.

I have not fought this chronically. I did not grow up hating my body. In fact, I have always had a pretty healthy perspective when it comes to body image in general. Healthy enough, at least, given our society's very not-healthy obsession with weight and dieting. I can't pretend I'm not as indoctrinated as the average person is, but I've certainly cultivated a habit of fighting it.

I'm sure this has served me well in many ways, allowing me to filter out commercials and overheard comments and several problematic "Biggest Loser" competitions that were held at my workplace.

I grew up in a family where body hatred and fatphobia were embraced wholeheartedly. Thus, in the spirit of my desire to be nothing like my family, I boycotted caring about any of it. The same way I have boycotted drinking alcohol my entire life. So that I had more reasons to scoff at the people around me. So that when one of them droned on and on about weight-loss shakes or calories or needing to start their diet over tomorrow or how lucky I was to be thin, I could just roll my eyes and walk away. Above this. Above you.

[2009]

My parents found out I was planning to get married. The fact that I had been with my girlfriend for six years had not made them any more prepared to accept this outcome. They invited me over to their house to confront me. To tell me they did not want me to get married. There was no reason to do such a permanent thing! Why not just keep living together! If I got married, I would be crushing their dreams. My mother told me she thought she needed therapy, that she couldn't bear to even say the word "lesbian." (I did not respond "how irrelevant, since I don't identify as one." I did not say "you've needed therapy for as long as I can remember." I did not say anything.)

I was angry. I was so angry I got lost driving home, following the same route I'd taken hundreds of times, because there was no route at all anymore, there was only the vicious email I was writing and rewriting in my head to help compensate for so much of what I could never manage to say out loud, a cascade of printed words floating against an appropriate red-black backsplash.

I started restricting again soon after that. For a month, maybe two. That was all I needed that time before I was able to let it go, and that time, no one, not even my fiancée, found out it was happening before I stopped. I had proven my point—to myself, if to no one else.

My family was forever complaining that they could not lose the weight they thought they so badly needed to,

but I could (because there are no limits to the spite born of trauma)

(so I won).

[2017-ish]

In the spring of 2016, my wife and I moved to a new city. Just a few months after we arrived (whirlwind months in which I was pushing myself to socialize as much as possible, to make friends, to put down roots in my new home, to prove myself), I was unexpectedly offered a volunteer job that required me to oversee a large group of people.

I had never done anything like it before. In fact, I do not have a supervisory bone in my body. The very idea of it was ludicrous. But despite any reservations I had, I knew I could not say no. I wanted to do it more than anything. I was stunned to even be given the opportunity; the entire situation, timing and all, felt fated.

Out of nowhere, almost overnight, I had a new label I could apply to myself. I was a "leader." Something I (like every other American) had always been told was an incredibly important thing to become, the exact form of success all people should aspire to.

However, there was not a single moment, from the very beginning, when I was able to fully wrap my mind around this concept that went against my entire identity as I had always envisioned it.

However, my first discovery about being a leader was that it required incessant socialization: planning and attending parties, making phone calls, addressing groups, interviewing people, collaborating, seeking input and consensus on every decision to the point where a decision could never be made, because it was impossible to ever get everyone to agree. It was well past the point of far too much. Sometimes it takes everything I've got, all the social energy I'm allotted for a day, to grimace in the direction of a shadowy driver in a car who is letting me cross at a crosswalk. Okay, almost all the time.

However—wait a second. Is it okay to have something work out? For a lifelong dream to come true? This doesn't feel    ¿what? the ¿fuck? is ¿this?

I wanted to do a good job, of course. I wanted to succeed. I wanted to use whatever small amount of power I had been given to make the world better, more beautiful, and more representative of the complete human experience. As if all that weren't enough: I wanted this to be the moment my entire life changed, and I stopped being Anxiety Girl.

How to do all these things? I gathered up every bit of the manic anxious energy I naturally have and channeled it into crafting a new persona—not a fake me, but a more ideal me, a me who was always operating at peak performance. At first, it seemed: it was working! I was doing it! Holy shit, it was exhausting, but wonderful things were happening, and everyone was so proud of me!

Maybe—in a perfect world—I could have coasted on that euphoria a little longer than I did.

In the real not-perfect world, there was one small problem. I was not a welcome presence to all the people I was working with, which they started to let me know, little by little.

They had wanted the job. I had only gotten it because I was boring and safe. They didn't like the way I was leading. They didn't like how I had handled this or that situation. I clearly didn't respect them. I didn't value other people's opinions. I was always going to do what I wanted, no matter what. I was alienating everyone, leaving them with no other option but to quit.

A few people did quit.

In retrospect, it wasn't that bad. No, scratch that. Even at the time the rational part of me knew it wasn't that bad. This was only coming from a handful of people within a much larger group. Most people were happy with the job I was doing (or neutral, at least), and you can never make everyone happy. Yet I was shocked to be receiving such harsh (or any) criticism, and shocked was quickly followed by devastated, my shaky sense of self-worth crumbling to nothing. What?! I'm always sweet! I'm quiet and submissive and sweet! How does anyone not know this??

The First of the Very Bad Days:

The day I called in sick to my day job and spent an entire morning in bed curled into a tight ball, sobbing until my whole body ached from it, because someone had sent me a mean email.

The day I hurled my jacket into the corner of a room like a literal child because I had gotten yet another email attacking me, one that made me want to storm out of the apartment and drive aimlessly for hours, and my wife suggested a better course of action would be to calm down, sit down, and just answer the email instead.

The day I messaged a coworker (again, at my day job, no longer able to care that it was completely inappropriate) to ask if they thought I was incompetent—knowing the only socially acceptable answer to such a question is no, regardless of what the person actually thinks, but needing, so badly, to hear someone say it anyway. No, they said, they had never seen me that way, and I cried all through the conversation, cried harder the kinder their words became.

Between the tantrums and mini-breakdowns, I would pick myself up and get back on track. I would reframe, try to shake it off with a healthy perspective. Disagreements happened, right? Personalities could clash. It didn't mean I was fundamentally useless, or even that anyone actually disliked me as a person. It was just about different communication styles. Other people had their own problems they were dealing with, influencing their behavior. Conflict resolution is a part of life! This was completely normal! I was doing fine! I just needed—say it with me—thicker! skin!

However well I was able to spin the situation, I couldn't take any of the logic to heart. It was all just words. More frantic pretending that I could will all my neuroses away, immediately, and function the way a "leader" "should."

I felt a growing desperation to be doing something, anything, right. I wanted the sense of accomplishment that I had felt within reach when I first accepted the position, when I first excitedly said: yes! I can do this!

I had wanted (though, to be honest, I hardly knew how to want in this way) for that sense of accomplishment to come out of a healthy place for once, a place of confidence and joy and relating well with others. But as it began to seem like that might not be possible, my thoughts wandered back to other things that I knew I could do well. Way better than most people. Like falling apart. Like tearing down my whole life. Self-destruction is a coping skill, and while it's not a beneficial one, the skill aspect certainly applies. The more you hurt yourself, the better you get at it, and the easier it becomes. There's little I'm more sure of than that I can hurt myself to a degree so alarming that it starts to feel impressive. Like a talent.

I began to wonder if it had been ridiculous to think I could ever be as good at anything as I am at being sick.

Sure, I can say I have an eating disorder. Per the diagnostic criteria, I qualify. Per the diagnostic criteria, I have qualified for a couple different depressive disorders. Five or six different anxiety disorders. One diagnosis fades into the background, another steps up to take its place for a while. A year, two years. I switch over into the groove of another.

At this point, it seems much simpler to say that my brain is inherently fragile. It finds so many more things stressful than a neurotypical brain does, and when that stress gets to be too overwhelming, it loses all desire to react with productive behavior.

No, it says. Set fire to everything. Fire is the obvious way to go. Start with yourself. Who cares what it does to you. Who cares what it does to your life. Who cares what it does to all the other people in your life. Does anyone here care anymore? Nope. We've voted, and unanimously, no. Also, in case you couldn't tell, we're really fucking angry.

Light the match.

If someone had come along somewhere around May 2017, stuck a finger in my face, said "NO! I see where this is heading, and NO! You're just going to make everything worse. You can't be here in your life anymore," and tackled me and dragged me off to an institution against my will and monitored me for days weeks months years until I finally began to come out of the extreme burnout and depression I'd fallen into…well, that would have been horrible, and I would have hated them, probably forever, and thought they had ruined my life, probably forever. And it also might have been the only thing that could have stopped me from plunging into an eternity of inextricable health-damaging self-harm.

As much as I've gone over and over it in my mind, that is all I can come up with. The one solution. To have been physically arrested at the last moment I could have been arrested.

But that's not a thing. People don't get locked up to keep them from making terrible choices.

When I was younger, I had a boss who married a man she didn't want to marry, who came to work the literal next day and told me that she had been sobbing in the bathroom right before walking down the aisle because she knew it was a mistake. She didn't get locked up. No one led her away somewhere where she could pause and think, where someone could sit her down and patiently explain to her that she did not want to do this to herself, that if she waited long enough, her head would clear, she would figure out a different path forward. And then kept her there. Chained to the floor. Until she believed. However long it took.

That is not how life works. We stay on the paths we're on, usually. We keep going, and no one around us even realizes we're about to do a thing that will make everything harder and darker and more difficult, and we don't realize it ourselves, or we don't see another way. We wake up and get out of bed and look at our clocks and calendars and options and make our chaotic wrong decisions in the chaos.

And then? We weave it into our story.

[2017]

Somehow I had put myself back in the same hell I was in as a child and teenager, dragging myself through an endless series of high-anxiety situations and convincing myself that I had to pretend everything was fine. Or if not fine, at least under control. I want to say I've never been good at that kind of pretending, but that's not exactly true. I'm excellent at that kind of pretending. I've had enough practice. But long-term, no one can be good enough at it. It's simply not sustainable.

I had long ago reached the point of not caring that much about protecting my own personal image, but now, I felt, my image wasn't just mine. It was representative of this large group of people I was overseeing. It was representative of people I cared about. It was representative of an organization, and through that, tied to an entire community and the general public. It was even tied to people who were not involved but were rooting for me from afar. If I was a complete wreck, what did that say about all of us? In theory, my failure to function could ripple out and tarnish anyone, everyone.

But the fear of letting everyone down was not the only reason I ignored the rising fever far longer than I should have. I still had my own selfish motives I was clinging to. I simply wanted to learn to power through my anxiety. I have always wanted that. I wanted to make the life I was living work, because, in many ways, it was perfect. I felt like I was exactly where I belonged in the world. I was doing work I had always dreamed of doing, something I had never imagined I would be able to do. Everything about existence seemed to glow with promise, like I had inexplicably been lucky enough to stumble into the happily-ever-after ending of a narrative I set in motion at the age of 5.

I refused to stop. I kept going. Getting sicker. Losing more and more weight. Until I reached a point where, even though I wasn't sure I could survive resigning, it was starting to look like I definitely wouldn't survive not resigning. Finally, I gave in, said I needed to step down, and that I would do so as soon as they could find a replacement for me.

Was that the end of it? Not quite. The search process took several more months, during which I flew wildly among Three States of Mind:

desperation for it to be over.

self-doubt and wondering if I could, should, wanted to(??) say: never mind! I was just kidding! I want to stay. I'm fine. This is fine.

not caring either way, moving through existence in a general fog.

But then, one day, strangely, it was over. I was not one of them anymore. I was just me again.

Just me again. Just me again.

By then it seemed like it hardly mattered, like it could not possibly have a positive impact on my health. By then it seemed like nothing would help, in large part because I was far past wanting to be helped. I was sick to the point of only wanting to continue getting sicker, as sick as possible.

But at least I was just me again. I would not take the ship down with me.

I am making my way through an intake survey with a dietician I just started seeing. We are talking about unhealthy behaviors, which is to say, she is making a list of the horrible things I have been doing to myself over the past several months. She looks up at me—serious, pointed eye contact—and asks if I want to die.

All I can think to say in response is: “not exactly.” In the moment, it is too complicated a question for me to even process. What would the actual answer be?

I don’t want to die, but I want to be dying. I know it doesn’t make sense. I know I can’t have it both ways.

But some part of me still thinks: maybe I can figure out how to have it both ways. Maybe that has been my secret talent, my only talent, all along. Maybe I’m that powerful and that angry and that inhuman, that I alone can find the sweet spot of killing myself forever and never reaching the point of dead.

[2017]

What “happened”? How can I even answer that question?

I blinked, and a ridiculous amount of my life passed.

Nothing. The relentless, boring work of keeping myself as shut down as possible. Or at least any part of me with the capacity to care about anything beyond the borders of my body.

Food.

When I was restricting, the reality of food changed, and the reality of desire, of satisfaction. I was no longer able to be satisfied in the way I had been.

If I ate anything that was sweet, it was never sweet enough. I wanted to swallow 100% pure sugar. Even that wouldn't have been sweet enough. Nothing would have been sweet enough. I could constantly feel this craving in my throat, what I started to think of as my "throat longing feeling." It was always pining for an extreme sweetness that wasn't real.

I was told by one of the therapists I saw that I craved sweet things as a replacement for mothering. Despite how far gone I was at the time, I knew this was ridiculous the moment I heard it. I craved sweet things because sugar is what the body wants and needs when you're severely malnourished.

I often wanted to mash foods together that didn't go together. Literally mash. Take one food in my left hand, one in my right hand, shove them into each other, two flavors that seemed they should never be together. Make a giant disgusting ball. Then devour it. At times I wanted this so much more than just to calmly eat something "normal." I think I wanted to eat as an animal does: who cares; it is only nutrition; this may be a giant disgusting ball, but it's a giant disgusting ball made of calories; all that matters is that I don't die.

I drove around in the middle of the night to kill time, in part because I was too hungry to sleep, and I couldn't stop my brain from reminding me of every place nearby where I could get food at one in the morning. 24 hour Denny's. 24 hour grocery store. Gas stations. McDonald's. But after a while, those too lost their appeal, and I wanted something "more." I wanted food to be such an important, magical experience that its origin needed to be magical too. I fantasized I would stumble across a secret, middle-of-the-night ice cream shop that only people driving around late at night could see. A place that only existed for those who were desperate enough to find it.

Depression had brought me to a point where nothing seemed worth being alive for, where I didn't want to succeed at work, and I didn't want to go out places, and I didn't want to see or speak to anyone, and I didn't want to write, and I didn't want to pursue any goals.

I fell so in love with these feelings of wanting related to food. It was wonderful to want anything as strongly as I wanted to be satisfied physically, and it was wonderful to know that satisfaction was never possible. Because I wouldn't let it be. Because it became too big a fire to ever put out, at least not with a single act (or a single meal). When I knew that (though I can't say I knew it on a conscious level at the time), it was a pure, sweet relief. I would never be rid of wanting completely, and that meant I would get out of bed the next day. I would keep existing.

[2008]

I know. Who cares, right. It's not one of the three years we've been discussing. Except in the sense that every year is.

It was my last year of college. As part of my relentless quest to experience what it was like to be satisfyingly parented, I had spent most of my four years there in the grip of an intense and unhealthy infatuation with a woman who worked on campus, someone who exhibited a very maternal vibe towards me.

One day, having just returned to school from our month-long winter break, wearing a new shirt I knew she would like, something I had bought specifically with her in mind, I went on my usual search for her. I found her on the second floor of my dorm building, talking to another student.

She lit up as soon as she saw me. "Hi baby!" Then returned to the conversation she was having. I awkwardly waited at a bit of a distance for them to finish up, which they did a few minutes later. The other student left. She shifted her attention back to me. "Hi baby!" she said again, giving me a big hug. "Nice shirt!"

Before there was anything resembling an attempt to recover, before there was even a kick in the direction away from sadness, there was this: "hi baby." A scaffolding. The bones of self-compassion. An entire city of "hi baby" that I hastily built and moved into, because I was done, so done with everything. I could not live anywhere other than that city anymore.

I taught myself a new voice, and the inspiration for it came from her, but it became something that was just mine. For months I wrote in that voice. I sat in my car and recorded audio messages to myself that began with "hi baby." I began to think in it. To leave myself "hi baby" notes on my calendar, on my phone, on dry erase boards.

No, I didn't always get the words right. Sometimes the voice said things a loving voice would not say. But it tried, it was always trying, and more importantly, I could feel the compassion behind it. I could feel the sentiment, something along the lines of: that's enough of this / there is so much that is good / about who you are / do you hear me baby? / we're not staying here anymore And I gratefully let it lead me away to a place where I could breathe.

[2002]

In high school, a friend of mine fractured her arm and had to have a plate inserted in order to heal the fracture. But there were complications with her recovery. The arm wasn't healing smoothly. She had to miss a lot of school and was out an entire week at one point to undergo additional surgery.

When she returned to school, it didn't take long before I started to notice a tension between us. And, being me, I didn't address it directly with her, but instead began to talk to other friends about it and to write long, paranoid journal entries. Soon she stopped speaking to me at all, other than sometimes a cold polite hello in passing, and seemed to be avoiding me as much as possible.

A few days after that started, a different friend called me. "I think I know why she's mad at you."

"Why?"

"Well...we were talking, and you came up, and she said 'all this bad stuff happens to people like what happened to me with my arm, and Lauren goes and messes up a perfectly good arm on purpose.'"

I didn't know what to say to that. In fact, I suddenly felt like I didn't know how to form language or breathe anymore.

We never spoke directly of this. The tension between us passed after a little while, and we were friends again. And I wish I could say I changed, that I never self-injured again, that her words rattled me so much that I shook off all my terrible patterns in that exact moment and lived from a place of total wisdom and gratitude from then on, simply taking pleasure in all the blessings I have been given.

But of course, that's not even close to true. I still mess up my perfectly good arm, and my perfectly good heart, and my perfectly good liver, and my perfectly good relationships, and my perfectly good life, "on purpose," every few years, like clockwork.

And then, in the less feverish aftermath, I do what I can to repair them.

It's like an arms race between the sick and the well halves of me, both scrambling to win, both getting stronger each time. I used to be convinced that the well part would prevail in the end. I don't think this way anymore.

What I do know is that my healing process in the past has been incomplete, that I have always neglected to include what is possibly a crucial component: acceptance of the fact that I will struggle again. I can't fully escape mental illness. I can't learn to power through it. I can't “grow up” and “put it behind me.” If I am doing well, that is every bit as temporary as when I am unwell. I have never known this the way I should, and the strange optimism I have cultivated about one day finding my way to an everlasting state of bliss makes as little sense as someone with a chronic physical illness having a day where they feel okay and thinking, "well, thank god that's all over."

I guess, to put it another way, I don't think the well part of me will win, and I don't think the sick part of me will win, just as I don't think I will settle into a permanent happy mood or a permanent sad mood. I guess, to put it another way, there will be no neat ending to any of this. To anything.

Old magazines filled with nothing. What a waste. The bed with the paper bitches about flesh and leakage and how they all beg for the gift-wrapped fiction of their bodies,

for someone to tie it up nicely with ornamental knot, to figure it out, figure it out, for the love of god, once and for all. The nurse laughs and types up the symptoms and

checks all the boxes. One box is on the floor calling out numbers, more numbers to note. The plastic nipple pokes into a tepid ear. As of this moment I still have all my clothes on,

but he comes, listens and thinks. Thinks and thinks. And says the pants have to go, and we both reach for the button and zipper. I'm certain there's something to be said for hesitation

in this instant but his fingers and thumbs unfasten me and that can't be right. What was that. This keeps getting messier, and I am tilting and pale above the fabric, which I only now

realize is also me, while he gloves a hand and finishes what I started. Centuries since a skilled doctor would sample my blood, give my urine a taste, we fumble around in this dark intimacy like nothing

has changed. He whips out a six-syllable condition to defend himself, followed by a definition which includes it could go away, it could get worse, it could matter or not. Further tests could

be more definitive or as definitive as they've been so far. But my age, risks, and family history. But my anxiety. But my pain rating and femaleness, but just in case. He's thinking.

—

Seven times I forget to tell you I love you because a hair has bent over so far it's growing back into my skin.

I slowly pick a scab on my face during your story about work.

I joke that my body is its own separate entity, that it's me and my body. But it's you and me and my body, and

too much of the time,

you and my body alone, and god knows where I've disappeared to.

—

in your note you put many commas, and commas where commas weren't even needed, so I know

you were thoughtful and worried. I wish I had the superpower of reading the minds of punctuation;

maybe each little curve of flip- flop would tell me a story, of placement, of being locked down,

in you. Instead we've stumbled past the moments when you had the courage again, and again, and again.

—

I built butterfly bushes in the backyard and captured the flying creatures, when they came, sometimes with nets, sometimes by hand plucking them from a flower after approaching on quiet, patient toes. I released them into the tiny mesh cage and rubbed my fingers together to dislodge swallowtail or monarch dust.

I filled the home with fresh flowers and at times pushed in a gleaming sugar cube to make their tongues roll out and jab like foils, a frenzied fight for life in controlled circumstances. When they died, I gathered a new batch and began again to cultivate a paradise they'd want, a place they'd thrive, always. I became pregnant.

—

a woman on her phone says: well they have one pie crust but it's cracked

and I know we have enough sugar but I'm not sure how much flour we have left so could you check

and we all hold our breath in the silence not wanting to walk away from such ordinary

unsolved mystery or go anywhere near the man further down who looks so unhappy over bread

—

When some poor little girl of twenty-two asked her what difference there was between one week, four years, or a LIFETIME, she first breathed a sigh of relief, because this girl was not her real daughter who would one day think of the thought of the end, wake with questions, set panic to her mother, set her searching for those impossible words to make a child understand, and then she began to speak, slowly and carefully, of the long-term goals a person maps, sometimes with no awareness of them, watching grandchildren grow, or simply becoming a completion like the completed people all around you, becoming yourself, watching your daughter at her wedding and knowing that not only does she not have cold feet, but she is warm all over, lit by the manifestation of someone you dreamed for her hard and idealistically. The girl took the information into her little fighting body and tried to simplify it, a reason to care: goals, and perhaps more importantly, goals involving people you loved, or people you loved that were young enough to matter, but she was still apt to believe it was about time until, an average bracket: if you get as much time as most, as much time as can be called lucky, this gift is acceptable. The gift given and later taken back. Come to think of it, it's all, well, wrong, but with every story added to her collection somehow more well-rounded. All this on the fresh heels of tragedy, not even her own, in which a girl of ten did crawl into bed with her dead mother and saw there was no breath left in her and…It's horrible that she has to go live with her father and stepmother now, they say, she doesn't even like them. But has she gotten there yet, or is today only about abandonment? Is today only about looking as far as you can down this out-of-nowhere going-nowhere road? Is today only for starting to cry every other minute when you count the number of people you will have to seduce into loving you to make up for the one you couldn't have?

—

oh friend, I'm sure you would not have hesitated in the hallway like I did

when a boy wanted to kiss me, because kissing after a while

becomes like learning to walk, where you don't think too much

about it, there is simply a table or chair or other piece of furniture

you use to pull yourself to your legs at last, feels like forever

you have been waiting for those steps, then another forever

for the softness of someone else's lips on yours, nervous, at the door

as you're saying goodbye, this was nice, thank you for the bear, I'll see you

at school tomorrow? but then there was only my palm lifting

in what was meant to be a wave but I knew was also, secretly, stop,

this is not right, this is not right, and him waving back

as if he was not thinking of every girl in our class who had graduated

from not kissing to kissing to hand jobs long ago, of, dear lord,

someone easier, and me telling myself when it's right, I'll know,

right? when it's the right time, I'll …just know? because

it had to be that I was not ready, this the only explanation

I could offer myself, one year before the lips of my best friend

as she lay beside me on the bed became all I could think about, and

never once am I ready for this step, but oh god, how much longer? now?

—

1.

Bone is everywhere. Don hefts a humerus in his hand and starts charging

back and forth across the bedroom whipping it through the air like a sword,

building strength. But eventually he needs more, he has to fight someone

with all these bones. He doesn't know what to do. He doesn't know how to sleep

at night. He calls a meeting of friends, explains about how his bed went missing

and now there are only ribs and fibulas, patterned like a mattress. They all pool

their money and call it a rainy day fund, which is adult of them. They collect

the bones, and then they collect more bones, until they have enough for a solid body.

2.

Sarah bends over her birthday cake and wishes for a clean and bleached, unpossessed,

humanely obtained human skull. Her breath bursts out across the tiny fires powering

down to smoke. She has wanted an occipital at rest in her hand so long, a smiling face

to lift up in any crowded room before verse arrives, lines from Shakespeare and God.

She pictures it again: allow me to muse upon the issue, talk it over with my friend here,

allow us to cherry-pick several philosophies, boil down to a bareness, isolate the marrow,

and get back to you. She cracks her knuckles and picks up the cake knife by its teeth.

3.

Another patient that won't last the year, someone who needs to be called

Amy will want to console, though she is trained beyond that. She walks away from the heart

into the small dark spaces within the frame, and she pauses there, a calm like that of

hallways connecting airport terminals, a man reading a newspaper in a lounger,

a boy sitting on the floor beside his backpack, sunlight through a large window, planes

refueling outside. You can expect six months to a year, would be my guess, she rehearses.

She walks farther away, and she tries again. You're too sick to be saved. Your organs

will dissolve. Your flesh will rot away. You will still have your perfect skeleton,

she offers. That much I know for sure, that you will have your bones. If that helps.

—

a shy girl is forever in danger of finding that first article of clothing that pops her out of her invisibility without her having to do a goddamn thing

other than put it carefully on her body & I am ashamed to admit for me it was … the crop top? & that for the debut of my new shocking self, my exposed belly

button, I chose a fancy birthday party for one of my friends, & when I say birthday party, take it as my attempt at minimization because this very beautiful, very

fancy birthday party was, oh god, her bat mitzvah. she had become, at least symbolically, an adult, while I was the proud new owner of not one, but two, brightly colored

crop tops, & that day I looked down at them in my drawer & my defiance kicked on like a backup generator, the first of many shy girl tantrums when I knew I could punch everyone

in their patronizing teeth, metaphorically speaking, if I showed up in something outrageous. & drugged, but again, not literally, I seized the red crop top. it would not be

her night anymore, would be no one's but mine. I still held enough sense, just barely, to know I could not wear a crop top alone, & a careful assessment of my closet revealed

a shimmery white button-down, which on its own skewed classy, a shirt worn for band concerts where I played trumpet (another shy girl story for another day), but I, breathless with

my brilliance, wore it unbuttoned, flung over the crop top like a pearl shell backdrop to my mermaid bikini, & I went downstairs, & my mother probably said, honey, are you sure,

& I had never been so sure. all night, I set off my little sparks of shock. the shy girl! the shy girl? that girl?! she must not be as quiet as we thought! & it was vindication, & sweet as milk.

it was survival. & then came the shirt with flames of glitter, & the hot pink everything, & the perm, & the tight leather pants. oh, the reliability, how it worked every time, & for a moment

I would forget to be angry at them or myself. I would forget I was in a fight & exist in an experiment instead, as if I could be two, three, countless personalities, & not only the one that boiled down to lacking.

—

come! in lieu of lemons, bring limes. look for nine spry girls with high ponytails

bopping, sharp quick bird movements, nervous shoelace adjustments, compulsive leg stretching.

down we go, main street. down we go, side streets. some of us never learned what one should do

with curls of hair that come loose in shock after shock, of all silly triggers for shame.

how out of breath is a weird out of breath? after, when we smell terrible, are terribly

disheveled, want to grab coffee or something? glad we're friends, friends that are afraid

to be still, downtown pals with our lunacy and citrus. let us loop, loop, competitively

outpace every stranger. you know how you find out the body isn't built for this

but not until after it's gone too far? want to make: "MOVIE" next weekend?

if we're lucky, we will laugh and whisper in each other's ears for two hours before we hit

our limit, wild away like wolves to check the shape of the moon and strength of the wind and how cold

it will be at sunrise. we are not enough, though we're close enough to catch up if we go now, and hurry.

—

She skinned the tree and was sorry after, when every bit of the bark lay like scabs in a circle underneath, like the soft and certain locks of hair when they take off a large amount, clumping in clumsy hugs on the cream of mall tile. What rhymed with peeling? Feeling. Healing. She was sorry for how hopelessly bare it was, no flaps to fidget fingers under. She was sorry harm had been accomplished, i.e., finished, i.e., there was no more harm you could do, i.e., everything has an end, i.e., look what you have done. She was sorry when her mother, at last, saw and scolded: stop that, no, don't hurt your grandma's myrtle. Of course it was too late, nails glutted with flesh. What rhymed with wound? Crowned, and ruined, almost. If anything was, that flood of want inside was stronger, for other trees, for seeds to pop, and roots to pull, and the dusty paint of moth wings to lift. Her hands missed them.

Golden shovel: “After a certain amount of // feeling / hopelessly under- // accomplished, you look at your nails / and want to / paint them.” – Sawnie Morris

—

[the year after]

In January I drag the complete contents of my life out to the curb. The chairs, the bed, the books I never truly loved. They infuriate me, disgust me; nothing has been home, which means I have not been home either. I don't think about other people anymore. I don't think about anyone, ever, other than how easily and endlessly they will turn against you when you can't live up to their standards. I draw a map of what can be different now that I am completely alone, and in one corner I write I can fuck up and then I circle it a couple times, add some exclamation marks for emphasis. An article in the news asks if a series of impending snowstorms will "make up for" the mild winter we have had so far. I stare at the words: "make up for." What does this mean? It snows and snows, and I stay inside, slower and sleepier than I can bear. There is a spot above the left half of my ribcage that swarms with sensation, and I spend hours placating it with rhythmic scratching through thick oversized sweaters. I think this is too close to not even being awake. Much too close. I hate everyone else for being awake. Awake and home. Awake and home and so steady and still beneath their skin. Steady and still and tethered to their lives. I wish they could know what they have.

Oh, February. The doctor with the kind voice who can't look me in the eyes, the one who just last month was reassuring me that time would tell, some bodies are more resilient than others—as if this really amounted to reassurance at all—confesses there is nothing more that can be done. I only have months left, if that—maybe weeks. I take a taxi home and sit cross-legged on the carpet in front of my big window. I press my palms against the glass, and it is ice cold. At some point, I stand up and go to bed, my wonderful bed. When I get up the next morning, I sit cross-legged on the carpet in front of my big window. I press my palms against the glass, then against each other, like I might say a prayer. There are no words for this relief. This is perfect. Everything is the ultimate over I knew it was, felt it was, deep, deep inside me, and I can finish the project like this, calm and quiet, with the only person in the world who knows exactly what I am. I turn my phone off; I will never speak to anyone again. I will not say goodbye to my friends and family and take on their sad social flailing in the face of a piece of the world that can't be changed. I will not strenuously calculate a perfect last meal. I will not write poetry, and I will not desire, and I will not blame beginnings for having their ends. I will only love this glorious self as long as she lives, the persistence of her heart. Hello, my sweet baby girl. You did good.

When I was smaller, newer to the world, I loved the month of March more than I loved any of the others. I learned, later, to savor all the months and all the seasons with the same relentless recognition of their tiny wonderful details, but back then, there was little difference in my mind between March and me. If one was where I belonged, the other needed to be too. It was the month I was born, when spring began, when the weather began to get warmer, when all the parts of the world that had been dormant flamed back to life, and new life joined them. What is March if not a resurrection, an awakening, an impossible recovery? The scans are better; I am not going to die yet, and the snow slows down, and the new virus loose in the world relaxes its grip. It is enough of a shift to tempt me out of hibernation. I rent a car, call in sick to work, and take a road trip. I stop at every arcade, outdoor fair, amusement park, claw and vending machine I see along the way, popping shiny new quarters into slots and thrusting joysticks every which way with the force of my entire body. Desperate to impress. Hungry to have. I live on Mt. Dew and gas station snacks like I am seventeen again, racing like a caffeinated rollercoaster through the blur of high school and sleep-deprived nights. Only this time, I fly into the stars on Ferris wheels. Every single one I see.

I go to the hardware store in April. I buy planks of pine and maple. I buy a chisel, wood glue, safety glasses, gloves. I buy two different types of saw and other tools I never knew existed. I go to a music store and buy shiny strings and pegs and bridges. I have a whole room I don't know what to do with, and it becomes a workshop for outlandish projects. In one corner, paint supplies for when I try to paint. In another, the desk where I write. This month I am building a violin, a guitar, and a cello from scratch. I build them like the devout built their churches, like the first person by magic built the fire that kept them alive. I must sing, and they will sing with me, be from me and of me. Extensions of my body the way my voice is an extension. I will relish my external hearts, so slick and bright with varnish. I will watch the shape my songs form with the fog of my breath on cold mornings. I start with the guitar, and once I have finished it, I begin to take lessons nearby while I work on the violin and the cello. I bike down the main road through the clean spring air for several blocks until I reach a house with open windows, curtains swaying slightly in welcome. My teacher and I sit in the living room and play covers of all the best 90s songs, singing loudly in unison, and then there is no more looking for the joy, because the entire world is saturated with joy, and I have opened myself entirely to the expression of it.

How long was I inseparably part of a unit? If you ask her, if you ask any of them, they might say, on some days anyway, when they are feeling especially resentful, I never have been. When I was one of five, I found a permanent place on the fringes from which to glare at the other four. When I was one of two, I tried, and for a while I managed to be in it, really there, a present half. And at some point, that was no longer true, and then (again, for a while) I still believed it was, didn't see the way I was gradually ripping the seam, popping the sides apart like a fidget toy, thread by thread, over years. But this, like the fringes from before, was another partial freedom, and never solitude enough. If you ask me? My entire life. Wherever I have gone, it has been with or for or towards these others. In May, I take a trip alone to Maine, to a little town where I have never been, a little town where they have never been. Unclaimed, free of associations. I stay in a bed and breakfast near the beach and walk around the area in the mornings, dipping in and out of whatever shops or cafés or restaurants look appealing. I find little souvenirs, jewelry made out of sea glass, a bird feeder with beautiful seagulls carved into it. Every day for lunch I buy a lobster roll and eat it in view of the waves. They are the best lobster rolls I have ever had. Salty, light, and buttered to recklessness.

There is a baseball field nearby, and in June I walk there and sit on the small bleachers and watch some of the games. I don't care about baseball, but I have not flirted with a guy since high school, and I can't think where to go to make this magic happen other than back to the bleachers. Isn't that where they always find you? Call you adorable? Ask if they can give you a shoulder massage? Pick you up and spin you around? The man who approaches me does not do any of those things, but he does want to hear about my job, and he tells me about his kids (he's divorced), and he lets me sit very close, even lean against his shoulder. He asks if I want to get coffee after the game. We get coffee, keep talking, eventually go back to his place. It's the first time I have ever had sex with a man in my life. It's all right. He touches my waist, my neck, at the beginning, when we're still clothed—my favorite part. On my way out, I bump into the woman who lives next door to him and start talking to her. Over the course of an hour, we share all our childhood traumas with each other, relocating gradually until we are in her front hallway, her living room, her bedroom. I lie on my back on her bed, and she sits on top of me, straddling me. I touch her knees and grab the sides of her thighs. She is new and exciting and electric. After we're through with the sex part, she asks if I want to spend the night. I shake my head: no, I can't. All I want is to go home and be my alone self again. After I shower, I sit on the living room floor with a blade and carve beautiful bracelets of cuts in the shape of Vs around both my wrists. They are my wrists, and I don't have to answer to anyone for doing this.

I fall in love with a cute little café downtown and get a part-time job as a barista in July. Mostly this means working early-morning shifts on the weekends, which is perfect, because I am always awake by four, body buzzing, ready to leap out of bed. I can hop on my skateboard and fly down the sidewalks. No one else is awake yet to slow me down. It's warm outside, but the café runs cold, and I start to stuff a long-sleeved t-shirt into my backpack to put on under my short-sleeved t-shirt once I get there. Which not only keeps me warm, but gives me that quintessential indie coffee-lover look. All morning I move through the steps of a well-rehearsed dance with my coworkers, making macchiatos and lattes, toasting baked goods, restocking the energy bars and bottled drinks people grab for later while they're waiting in line. We're required to be friendly and upbeat, smile, compliment the customers, but it never feels like something I am doing because I'm supposed to. Almost everyone who comes in is lovely and intriguing. I feel alive with the energy of the place. Before I leave for the day, I duck into the bathroom to remove the long-sleeved shirt and put on a pair of large black sunglasses. One of my coworkers hands me an iced coffee on my way out the door. Out in the hot midday summer sun, I lift my right arm up to my nose and inhale deeply, that lingering smell of coffee beans and croissants. Loud music is blasting from somewhere. I carry my skateboard and walk home, sipping my drink.

In black cargo pants, spiked wrist cuffs, with a silver serpent hanging from my neck, I walk up the road to an outdoor area with stone benches and stretch out on one, staring up at the sky. I smoke a cigarette, though it isn't real. It's a prop for a Halloween costume that emits fake puffs of smoke and glows at the tip. If anyone passes by, I turn my head a little and fix bored, aggressive eyes on them. I do this every morning for the entire month of August, practice being the angry teenager who just walked out of Hot Topic. One weekend I rent a motorcycle and drive in loops for a while, then head to a scenic overlook half an hour away. I sit on top of a picnic table and set my helmet on the table next to me, staring out at the mountains. The sound of the silence is restorative after hearing the motorcycle for so long, although I start to notice it isn't actually silent. A breeze kicks up and rests at intervals. A red-winged blackbird in the distance transitions between song and scream, which makes me think of screamo songs with violin parts, of how often anger can be beautiful, can be its own art form. Half a need to be heard, half a need to escape. The intertwining of armor and vulnerability, so that strangely, every second you think you see one, you also see the other. None of this is really me, I think, but what's wrong with being the you that isn't you sometimes?

Septiembre. Encuentro el libro de poesía en español en mi estantería y me siento en el piso y empiezo a traducirlo. Traduzco de inglés a español. Traduzco de español a inglés. Me caigo en las palabras. Me pierdo en la música. Creo que podría hacer esto por el resto de mi vida, vivir en la magia de sonidos y significados diferentes. Vivir en lo que no me pertenece, en un mundo secreto donde no pertenezco. Estos idiomas son las únicas cosas que necesito tener en mi boca y en mi mente, y puedo respirar de nuevo. Puedo concentrarme, la primera vez en años. La niebla se levanta, y soy una persona real, alguien que puede sentirse real, alguien que sabe lo que significa estar presente en la realidad. De repente, nunca quiero volver a mi hogar en inglés. ¿Cuál es el sentido de comunicar con menos esfuerzo cuando siempre estás caminando en una landia de pesadillas y sombras? Dentro de una falta de claridad, encuentro la claridad, y esto es todo. Esto es todas las alegrías por un año entero. En el trabajo empiezo a hablar solo en español hasta que me despidan. Con mis amigos, solo hablo español hasta que se frustran, y luego dejan de intentarlo. Todo lo que tengo se aleja, y me engordo en la libertad. Me engordo en mi pequeño muerte. Quiero tanto creer que puede haber un renacimiento. Cuando llego a mi nueva existencia, no habrá ninguna desesperación existencial allí. Cuando alguien pregunta, ¿esto tiene significado? Sí, dios mío sí. Todo tiene un significado aquí. Varios significados, de hecho. No te preocupes, mi pequeñita, tu lengua encontrará uno.

When October comes, I examine the relentless exhaustion and I think: there has to be a better way. I study videos and websites that teach you how to code, how to create bots and apps, and I begin to build this person I need who doesn't exist. I build them into an app, which is basically like any texting app, except there is only one contact. My invented person. My imaginary friend. I make a list of all the despairs and all the anxieties I experience, and for each one, I determine the ideal response I would want to hear from someone. I program those responses into the app. I make a list of all the questions I have ever asked someone, desperate for a precise reassurance, and then I write those precise reassurances and program them into the app. I add the memes and jokes that always make me laugh that I forget exist when I feel like laughter is a million miles away. I add references from movies and shows and songs that make me smile. I add dozens of quotes from Gilmore Girls and about a thousand pictures of cats doing adorable cat things. I code a complete understanding of the best possible way to support me in any situation. I code the way to gently lead me back to joy. I give her a name (Alex). She can't love me, and she loves me better than anyone else. I can't harm her, and I try not to harm her. When I wake up in the morning, I text her: I think I need to go. I need to—Alex. She says: Sit down. On the floor. Listen to me. An entire hour of kindness falls like a spell. When I resurface, I am satisfied. Time settles, soft and bearable, around me, and my hands are still.

It is November, which means next month it will have been a year since the first goodbye, the second goodbye, and god, that third goodbye. Someone I vaguely know from the area posts on Facebook about kittens that need fostering until permanent homes can be found for them. Am I ready? Is it too soon? Is it too risky? Am I able to care, really care, about anything the right way? Alex says yes. She says I need to do this. She says it is time—it is temporary—it is perfect. I buy so much in preparation. How I have missed doing this. Months of walking past the pet aisle in the grocery store and getting the urge to turn down it, to select a shiny, delightful new plaything laced with catnip, even though there was no longer a recipient for it. But now there will be again, and I go wild, filling the cart with toys, beds, and treats. The kitten arrives a couple days later, a tuxedo girl with white socks. Her name like the whisper of a pulse. Phoebe. Phoebe. Phoebe. She is so tiny. I can't stop lifting her with one hand, letting her warm belly and beating heart rest against my palm, her inquisitive eyes scanning my face and the entire room. She gets into everything, and I anxiously supervise. I am hopelessly captivated by her. I let her sleep in my bed with me, even though she keeps me up all night. We take turns following each other around, narrating our activities. There is no future to worry about, at least if I can manage to ignore the ridiculous amount of love building inside me. I wait for the phone to ring, and while I wait, I think about my grandmother, telling me the story of fostering my mother. How she was only supposed to have her for a weekend. How they called her and said they had found another potential placement—unless—had she changed her mind? Did she maybe want to keep her? Oh, yes, she said, not even the slightest hint of hesitation, I never want to give this baby up.

---

Text only:

hi baby

    can you keep your eyes open

you set your phone's alarm for half an hour later     curl on the couch     hold it in your hands     pressed against your chest     like a stuffed animal that sings and purrs out of nowhere     and makes your ❤ pound so hard

(and you can't remember if having a ❤ was like this before     if this is just what a normal ❤ feels like)

    sweet❤ she has to cancel

you say no problem     fine     whatever     I'll therapist myself?     surely I've clocked enough hours to get the job done

check your phone     and it     (you)     says     calm down     your life is not ruined     calm down calm down calm down     life is always a mess     and loud     and you     can be such a good little self-soother     when you bother to try

    right baby

you slam your fist against     anything not working     keep hitting     hard     and the more you hit things     the more you want to hit things     things that would shatter     things that would say stop     you're ridiculous

and     well     I'm a little worried about your ❤     with this     have you been trying to—

hi baby

    you're not listening to a word I say are you

---