terra incognita

my body wants so much rest right now. i feel like my brain has made the decision to shut down all non-essential functions until i get through this event.

there are aspects of this year’s event that make me queasy, mostly due to my bosses’ interference. i’m trying to stay focused on what’s important. to make our families feel loved, honored, and cared for. to nourish the memories of their loved ones. and that if they never hear the words “thank you” from a single recipient, that they at least hear it, and feel it, from us. 

not sure where i go after this. i don’t want to manage and i certainly don’t want to be managed. i want to work for myself but i also don’t want to be forever broke. i like that s and i work for separate organizations in the same building so we have no professional interaction, but we can easily buy each other coffee and lunch and go for walks when i’m feeling sad. i would be sad to lose that. but the people i work for, who like many of us feel small and scared much of the time, act so poorly from that crouched position that i can’t respect them. 

1. Taking a break from drinking. My rule for the last few weeks before vacation had been that I could drink at large social gatherings, but not at home or by suggesting spontaneous happy hours with S, who has mostly observed the same rules. We both took a hiatus from our hiatus this week while on vacation in West Texas, but plan to taper again once we get back to work. It has been challenging (I write, halfway through a bottle of wine), but blessedly easier than the time I stopped while I was still at the hotline.

2. The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron. I was very excited to be gifted this book a couple weeks ago. So far, I’ve done my morning pages faithfully each day (if sometimes a bit later than, technically, morning or upon waking), which have very effectively drawn my attention to how anxious and afraid I am, how much of the time, and why. 

3. Doing things that serve no greater purpose than to experience joy or to play, which stems both from the drinking hiatus and from The Artist’s Way mandate to engage in artist’s dates each week. I really struggled with this idea when E. said that I need to do things with no point as I abstain from drinking, because I will fall back on drinking if I don’t re-wire my brain by seeking actual joy and alternate means of coping. 

3a.There was a piano at the last place we stayed on vacation, and I was surprised to see how many scales and key signatures I remembered, although I could also see why my piano teacher was so exasperated by my reluctance to practice reading and playing bass clef, and playing the sheet music as it read rather than how I felt it should. I wasn’t very good. So I decided to buy a keyboard and practice doing things that I’m not good at, with no expectation of mastering. 

2a. I’ve thought a lot this week about my mom’s terror, and how her voice has become my own, and how easy it would be to pass it on to everyone around me. How much I already do. S. was so giddy and excited about the place we lucked into staying, and my first impulse was to caution him about everything that could go wrong: getting drunk and arrested for DUI’s the night before, getting into a car wreck on the way, our families experiencing medical emergencies (i.e. death), and/or getting murdered by murder gangs that have lured us to the house. I know there are many things my mom has never confronted, and that on some level she believes in the power of fear to protect me. I have much more compassion for that now. But I don’t want to do this to the people I love.

The holidays have always been for me, like anyone who’s survived childhood, an unsettling season of griefs, some vaguely recalled and others acutely relived. 

I found a tribute I wrote in honor of a friend who died by suicide when we were in ninth grade, in the first week of December. As I’ve been finishing my unpacking, finally, and reading my old notebooks as I’ve organized them, I’ve been surprised by my obsessive nature even then, my compulsion to record every observation of my own behavior and people around me (“Still, my hand flew to my mouth and my eyes filled with tears. I will never forget the complete silence in that room. I looked around and saw my friend Josephine take her glasses off and wipe her eyes.”) and the desire to commit everything I understood or thought I did about a person to the page. 

Later in life, I thought my grief for Jordan had been disproportionate to my relationship with him, that as usual, I was centering myself above others, the only child desperate for attention. Even this entry is largely about me and my struggle to keep my grief bodied, rather than some intellectual exercise. 

But there was a time when I was less embarrassed by intensity of feeling, when I instinctively understood how to grieve. And when I read these memories, I feel surprised by yet thankful all over again for a boy who was kind to me when few were, and a mourning for the future he deserved to grow into.

We were on the swings together, kicking up the sand. We talked in line for the river boats. Walking past a market, there were some guys playing this special flute. Jordan loved it. He bought a CD and a cheap version of the flute. He drove us crazy with the flute. We’d be crossing the street and he’d be playing it. Stephanie and me would laugh and tell him to shut up. At a McDonald’s we stopped at, early in the morning, we put salt, pepper, straw wrappers, and other crap in Stephanie’s drink. Then we dared Jordan to drink it. He took a sip and made a nasty face, wanting to know if were trying to kill him. We laughed. Jordan was one of the first friends I made at public school. We were in a group for a Spanish skit. It was about a surprise birthday party. Coming back from a band contest, him and Rachel H. were sitting together. He made us guess what year all his quarters were made in. We had fun on the yearbook staff,like when we had to sell those stupid bunny grams for yearbook staff. This year, we were both in Ms. Johnson’s room, re-taking a test. Lockers had just been assigned. I complained that my locker was upstairs, which was a pain. He actually volunteered to switch lockers with me, since his is downstairs. 

I love you, Jordan.

[Reading my journals from middle school and high school is a trip. I feel like I understood so much more at 16 than I did at 22. Although this could also be a self-own, in that I should have advanced more in my reasoning and writing ability over the last 16 years LOLOL.]

Because as much as I try to fight it, human nature yearns for acceptance. So in a way, not conforming is like denying one of the most basic impulses which makes us human. However, are humans created with that instinct, or is it a conditioned reflex beginning from the moment of birth, possibly conception, by external stimuli? In which case, it could be possible, improbable but possible, to overcome the programming of our society. Although, conformity, to a certain extent, may be needed, as far as morals, ethics, and religion are concerned. I always wonder why God created us, and what is the meaning of life. Maybe the meaning of life is only the meaning we imbue it with. But that would be saying there is no universal meaning of life. I suppose that could be. 

I think that man’s common purpose is to help their fellow man, love God and love their neighbors, and to work towards improving the quality of life, no matter how futile certain matters of that may be. And, along with the common, each person has some specific task, lesson, maybe a role, to carry out. And part of our purpose is to help each other achieve their purpose. 

“I stood there a little out of range, and I thought, It is all still new to me. I have lived my life on the prairie and a line of oak trees can still astonish me.

It wasn’t long before we were seeing each other at least twice a week. He was all I talked about with my friends. My notebooks at school were decorated with his name. I thought about him every day and trusted his advice more than anyone’s. I was a natural gossip with a mean streak wise as the Rio Grande, but his compassion moved me to seek the best in people. I didn’t know if I could ever be good like him but for a long time, it was enough to try. 

My parents and I used to argue about how much time we’d been spending together, but it wasn’t long before he won them over. He has that effect on people, you know.

He and my dad stayed in touch after I left. It’s a terrible thing, to wonder who the people you love would choose if they had to, between you and someone who’s come to represent so much of what you neither are nor can be any longer.

I know it’s common for these kinds of relationships to end in college, but I admit that I thought things would be different for us. I stayed by his side throughout those years, but a distance that hadn’t existed before opened up. I grew tired of the way people’s faces changed when his name came up. I defended him reluctantly to those among whom he’d lost favor. Don’t blame him for what I’ve done, for the ways I’ve let you down, I’d say. No matter how many times he didn’t come for me.

We're almost a year out from the beginning of the #MeToo movement, and now it's the Kavanaugh hearings that are prompting survivors to re-live our worst memories and make public our pain in a desperate bid for validation and change. There have been few lasting consequences for the perpetrators of #MeToo, and I'm sure there will be few for Kavanaugh. What is the fucking point? 

I think of why I didn't report and how it took two years for me to say anything at all about it, and two more after that before it came out again, this time in therapy, and someone finally defined it as sexual assault. Four years of stuffing it down, because it was too painful to think of at all. I blamed myself for not fighting back, that freezing was the evolutionary survival response my brain deemed safest in my situation. I blamed myself for not saving sex for marriage, despite a year and a half of sexual coercion within the relationship. I blamed myself for staying. I had always seen myself as strong and independent, and I was ashamed at feeling so weak.

Since then, there have been seasons of my life where I could barely function, barely speak or write a word without it circling back to trauma.

I think of how I wanted to forgive him as quickly as possible, lest my anger become sinful by virtue of existing. I put his well-being first: I told mutual acquaintances that they could still invite him to our events and told them nothing of the abuse, because I felt that doing so would be spiteful, a smearing of his good reputation. I protected him for years after, even though no one protected me, even when they were present for the abuse.

I've struggled not to hate myself for making it so easy for him to get away with it. It infuriates me to know that there will never be justice. I remember fewer details than most survivors in the public eye, and because I felt so ashamed of the way he treated me that I told no one as the abuse was happening, I have no one to corroborate my accounts. I know that it would be pointless to ever walk into a police station and tell them what a man did to me in his dorm room while I was drunk ten years ago. 

Reading my recent posts, it’s clear that I am purging some grief. Some days it feels almost as though it has metastasized into every area of my life, but I think that’s because I’m trying less to forget. 

I’ve been thinking a lot about my officemate, L, who has become a strange but true friend. He can no longer take the stairs at work. We went to Hut’s for burgers recently, and we had to pause frequently for him to catch his breath as we walked less than half a block from his car to the restaurant. He talks about the future with the assumption that he will receive the heart transplant, although I sometimes wonder if that’s more for my benefit and others’, as I’ve also heard him question if this might be it and the 19 years after his first transplant are what he gets. 

Yesterday E and I talked briefly about why death is my thing, in the way that everyone has a thing, and death is mine, my life’s North Star. I described how similar my parents are to Patricia Lockwood’s mother in Priestdaddy: 

She resisted the internet for so long, but has finally succumbed to its embrace: it is, after all, an excellent place to find stories about people who have died horribly. “Did you hear about this, Tricia?” she asks me, and then reads aloud the story of a young boy who smothered to death on his own teddy bear. “Who would have thought that a hug could be deadly,” she muses. 

My dad once told me the story of a woman who died in a car accident when the steering column went through her chest, and worst of all, he said, she was on her way to deliver Christmas presents to children whose parents couldn’t afford them. Not only will you die, you will die in the pursuit of goodness. E laughed very hard at the absurd sense my perspective makes in light of this information. 

But my fear of death is also a direct consequence of losing my faith in an afterlife. It’s been six years since I surrendered my faith as wholly as I’d once wished my surrender to God could be. And since then, I have reconciled many losses and gained much. 

I belong to a community. I don’t believe life has any intrinsic purpose aside from that which we create, and I feel secure, mostly, in what I’ve created for myself. I’ve re-calibrated my moral compass in the freedom from constant shame. There is so much love in my life. 

What I haven’t accepted yet is the loss of heaven. It is difficult to lose the belief that something eternal will remain of us beyond death.

To be honest, I was skeptical even as a Christian. After church, my friends and I would often wonder aloud whether it would get boring to spend eternity doing nothing but worshipping God on golden streets where no one has sex, ever. 

I still felt secure in my faith, but had begun to think perhaps the existence of heaven, as we understood it, was not justified anywhere in the Bible’s text, when David died. I made a conscious decision to squelch that particular line of questioning, because I needed heaven to cope with one of my oldest friends dying so unexpectedly. 

Jessi died four years later. Had I already drifted so far from the shores I knew and welcomed my new world enough that I no longer needed heaven, or did the immediacy and depth of such horror just obliterate any remaining capacity for hope at the time? 

I can’t drive the length of Lamar Boulevard without thinking, she was already dead when I was on my way home that night. 

I’d gone to see the midnight premiere of The Dark Knight Rises with M, my AmeriCorps campus mate, and the first man I’d slept with in a year and a half. I was disappointed because the man hadn’t met us before at the food truck for dinner, and he didn’t come home with me afterwards, either, when the movie let out after 3 in the morning. 

I felt strange as I took the curves near Pease Park, woozy with exhaustion and imagining myself careening around in the Batmobile. 

In the morning, I scrolled through my feeds, rolling my eyes at the half-hearted proffers of thoughts and prayers for the latest mass shooting. Until. The text message from a friend, asking if I’d heard. 

I cried. I had lunch at the Tex-Mex place down the street with M because I needed to drink. I told the man who didn’t come home with me the night before, and he invited me over. I sat on his couch, as he tried to verify the number wounded with me, and I thought, please, don’t. But I thought that was what I wanted, to be near someone who wouldn’t dream of asking how I felt.

The group went out that night, but it was oddly quiet, and I didn’t know if anyone else knew. I was grateful when a friend began a lively debate about the grammatical accuracy of Half Price Books, and whether it should actually be named Half-Priced Books, a point of contention I would later reach for when conversations with strangers began to feel stagnant. 

When I came home, a large cockroach flew in the door with me. Furious, I grabbed a chef’s knife. In two swift movements, I bisected its body with the blade atop the refrigerator, and flung it outside, noting the green guts that foamed from its shell. Then I laid on the linoleum floor and sobbed on the phone with B. 

Hard to believe that it’s been six years. Six years since Jessi died. Six years since my birthday, only five days after her death, where I renounced my faith at Liberty on East 6th, telling B that we as Christians were fucked because we believed in something that didn’t even exist. 

sipping rosé

on the porch

during summer storms

with people i love

toasting

the credit check i passed

the lease signed

breaking down a chicken with my bare hands