when insanity hits

I fucking hate languages.

I was thinking about the Chinese pronoun “renjia” 人家 and how useful it is and how difficult its connotations are to translate succinctly into English.

So, the joke goes something like– (and stop me if you’ve heard this one before) it goes something like, two kids with depression walk into a relationship. Now, the bartender asks– wait, shit, sorry. See, there isn’t any bartender, ‘cause, let’s be honest: they’re not doing their drinking by the glass, they’re doing it by the bottle. Okay. Okay, so, the therapist says—but I mean, who can afford a therapist, these days? But the antidepressants, the antidepressants say, “I haven’t worked in two years, but my list of side effects is too long for you to ever leave me. I am where you learned to be needed.”   So they’re coping. Of course, she’s forgotten how to talk about herself in first person, while he offers up his life’s story like it’s a joke only he finds funny. Turns out the world is just as heavy on two sets of shoulders.   Two kids with depression walk into a supermarket. Two kids with depression walk into a doctor’s office, walk into a brick wall, walk into the same bad day three hundred and fifty six times and call it normal. The only thing I know about this punchline is that I’m not gonna like it. That it looks like a hurricane of nothing. Of repetition. Of wake up, wake up, wake up. Of moving just fast enough to be considered alive, but only in the way a houseplant is considered alive, or a creeper vine. Plenty of things are still here simply because they don’t know how not to be.   My boyfriend talks about death like a place he has tried to visit—like a destination he is always pointed towards, even when it is not the place he is going. For me, I don’t bother aiming for an ending when, most days, I don’t feel like I ever started. What I mean is–   Depression is ugly. And it’s easy to backslide when you are trying to climb mountains, but that does not make you a failure. Two kids with depression woke up this morning, walked all the way to tomorrow and the day after that. Two kids with depression are still walking. That might not sound like much to you.   What I mean is we’re a couple of fighters and we are still here. In spite of everything. Or maybe because of it. What I mean is suicide is not cowardice, but it is, without a doubt, an act of bravery to survive.

Don’t you dare, for one minute, believe that my kindness makes me anything but insurmountable. I did not unzip my chest to every kind of hurt, and stagger back, wounded and alive, just to hear you call me weak for trying. I opened my door to Heartache– I gave her the fucking key. My softness for wayward strangers has made me nothing less than a halfway house for aching soles. So when you open your mouth and call me ‘baby’ understand that I am not your next victim in a laundry list of broken girls. You think I don’t know you? People like you? People with mouths for hands. I’ve got skin like topsoil and your teeth could never take root. So when you go looking to make a plaything of a sunburst, you better look for someone with less fire than me. Because softness or no, I will eat you alive before I let you make a meal of me.

There are poets who sing you to sleep and poets who ready you for war and I want to be both.

In grade school, I pigeon-holed my skeleton into any crawlspace I could find because little girls weren’t supposed to have backbones. I walked to school with my insides on the outside—I never unlearned how to be that raw. That exposed. I couldn’t fit the bones back into my body, so with my skull fitted over my head like a helmet, I readied my softness for battle. I was unashamed to be the flower-girl in the combat zone. One day, I would plunge my fist into the pomegranate, and dare them to make a victim of Persephone. I didn’t know that childhood fear could grow into a rage this mighty, but I will march with my beating heart like a beating drum, through the marshes of it’s own destruction. I will come out on the other side, and the blood in my mouth will be mine and I will go kissing old wounds with the copper tang of it. I am scouring the Badlands of my body. I am climbing the peaks of the words they used against me. I am painting pictures of dead men on the palms of my hands, so there will be no such thing as surrender.

If I learned anything from the media it’s that my body is wrong and I’m probably not pleasing the man in my life. I learned two wrongs don’t make a right but, apparently, three nos make a yes. It’s no wonder so many boys view rejection as negotiation when we teach them the key to true love is bargaining past lack of consent and kissing girls who do not want to be kissed so when boys turn touch into weapons, girls are taught to expect it– that their abusers abusers can still grow up to be presidents.   Even the evening news taught me my sexuality only exists on a man’s terms, that my body is all locker room talk, all public property, but I’m still expected to “leave something to the imagination.” I must be available, shameful, and repentant because we seem to think that once a woman opens her legs, she doesn’t get to close them– because if a woman likes sex then she’ll like it with YOU  and if she doesn’t? She’s a whore, a bitch, and a liar. All the things the television has been saying since long before you ever touched her.   See, they went and put a price tag on all things beautiful and now they’re trying to sell us back ourselves. Imagine their surprise when we couldn’t be bought.