oh no, oh my

Nancy never came to a meeting again. I wanted to be the one not go, but I had to because six full months earlier I’d run my car off the side of the road high on ambien. When the police drove up their flashing lights looked like patriotic lightning bugs, floating around my head in small, furry glow balls. I got out of my car and waved my arms as if they wouldn’t see me. As if they weren’t coming for me.

I got a sponsor after awhile, a woman in her 40′s with skin that sagged around her eyes like flaky breakfast rolls. She wore florescent colored t-shirts she’d gathered from different bachelorette parties with slogans written on the back in black graffiti type: “Maggie’s Final Hurrah” or “Sarah Finally #SealstheDeal!”. She constantly encouraged me to go to Vegas saying that I would love it, absolutely love it. I told her my ex-boyfriend lived there playing poker for the mob and also I had epilepsy. She never remembered and maybe it was because she could tell they were lies or maybe she was a lousy sponsor. 

I called her only once. 

It had been month’s since Nancy and I’d spoken. I was angrier than I had ever been in my life. I took adderall every morning and went for long, fast runs through the streets before the sun broke the sky into light. I would think of strange men in long coats and how if they kidnapped me I would beat their faces in with my fists. I’d go even after I heard their bones break. I’d kick their crotches till their balls exploded. I’d pepper spray their faces until their eyes fell out. I wanted to feel that. I wanted to know I could fight someone bad and that I could win because I was good. 

And one morning I wanted to fight Nancy. or fuck him. Or save him. I ran for 100 blocks until i reached his apartment, my ribs exploding and searing. I could feel myself turning crazy as my feet slapped sidewalk after sidewalk, my hair frizzying and my face growing redder with each block. When I finally got to his shared apartment, I stood outside looking into his windows holding myself sideways and wondering if I should scream or throw stones or shimmy up the drain pipe and break his window open.  

I called her and she answered completely awake. 

“What’s wrong, Lisa?”

My body was thick and so heavy that I thought if I stood still enough I’d fall through the cement and through the dirt and slide through all the magnum and sludge and come out fresh and new in China. In that moment I wanted everything that had ever happened to me to be different. I wanted to erase my part of the world.

And I sat down on the side of the road and I told some woman that and I told her about my drinking and the pills and how sad I was and how I felt like things made sense for everyone else but they never would for me. I told her about the book I had read that Nancy had read too and how he used to text me lines from it every night and I thought that would save my life. I told her that I didn’t know how to get home from here. I didn’t think my legs would make it. 

She came an hour later in a rusted mini van that smelled like old paper and drove me back to my house. When we pulled up I could see that the kitchen lights were on. 

“Lisa, what would you like to happen from you doing all this?”

I stared at my kitchen window thinking of all the excuses I would need for where I’ve been, why I can’t walk, why I will inevitably call off from work and lay around all day smoking cigarettes and watching Teen Mom reruns.

“I just want him to call me and I want to play him songs on my iPhone,” I told her, hot tears pouring from my eyes. “I just want to make him cookies and ask him questions. I don’t know, I say I want only that but I always want more. I don’t know.”

We sit for a long time in silence. I stop crying and wait for her to tell me how brave and strong I am and how my dedication to AA will help me figure everything out. But she doesn’t. 

He was the only person I ever fucked in a bathroom, actually fucked in a public bathroom. I had wanted to always do that, but everything grosses me out and I’m not easily wound up. But Nancy ignited something in me. Maybe it was because we had both read the same book, this one really important book in my life, and I felt like we both knew each other in the strangest way. 

I wanted to make him happy and I had never wanted that before. I wanted him to smile his big perfect-toothed smile and forget all his troubles. I would have daydreams during meetings about watching TV together, some sport or something--because I’d get into sports for him--and he’d be laughing and cheering and it would have been because of me and all the happiness that I would bring him. From fucking him. From being nice and baking cookies and fucking him.

But Nancy was not someone who just needed a book, a girl, a meeting to make things OK. He choked me hard the second time we ever had sex.

I wrapped my fingers around his hand and tried to pry him off. “Stop” I mouthed and he released me. I cautiously returned to kissing his lips but within minutes he was at my neck, biting and throat. 

“What the fuck is wrong with you?” I shouted as I pushed him off me, wiping his spit from my neck. His eyes opened completely, betrayed. 

“What? I don’t know.”

“You hurt me!” I shouted, immediately relishing in the irony that I was finally the one saying that to someone. 

Nancy looked down and I could tell I wasn’t going to make him happy. 

“I don’t know Lisa. I told you I wasn’t ready for this.”

“Nancy...” I started reaching out towards him. “I just want...”

“What? What do you want?”

I take a step back. I don’t know. I don’t know what I want. I want Nancy to be happy. But I don’t even know why I want that. 

“I don’t know,” I tell him. 

I met Nancy at a meeting after he’d been back from war for a few months.

He was older than me, strawberry hair, big straight American teeth. The kind of mouth you could tell how much money a person had. How much of a commitment someone’s mom had taken; how many times she had driven to ortho appointments, years of bitching about braces and cleaning them with the special Crest tooth brush nobody actually used and then shelling out the cash for the professional whitening service after they’d come off.

My mom had done it and so did Nancy’s. I could tell right away. 

We weren’t supposed to talk the way we did, but I wouldn’t be telling you the truth if I said I didn’t go to all those meetings to eye fuck sad boys in gray folding chairs. From the first moment we saw each other it was on: I chewed my lips raw and cried without touching my face. I kept my eyes away from him until I knew they were heavy with water and then I would lock him in, drag him quietly to me. 

I’m sorry that I keep doing this, but I feel like I need to tell you about it. I want you to know that I can’t stop even when I know the story is old. That’s probably why these stories are getting told at meetings instead of tumblr. My audience has changed. 

He wasn’t easy to win over, but he did come eventually. He was really into the cookies I was baking at the time. 

I started baking for all those meetings. We were supposed to rotate snack duty, but nobody was into it and I was, so it was all mine. And I needed for something to be mine back then. 

I started with chocolate chip cookies. I make mine with cake flour and bakers block chocolate that I chop myself with a butcher knife. Then it was red velvet sugar cookies with cream cheese frosting that I whipped by hand an hour before I left from group. Then it was soft, flourless chocolate crumble cookies that melted as soon as they hit your lips. 

I made cookies and cried and waited and waited and went every week and smoked on breaks even though I wanted to quit and eventually, eventually he inched up next to me and asked what I did to make such good cookies. 

We walked for a long time and I sang him a little song. I felt a little hurt when he pulled out his phone to record me. I can’t explain it, but I wouldn’t do it again. 

Trying to remember all the songs I listened to. Trying to remember what the fuck I ever did on the weekends in college.

I think so much of my anxiety is actually anger at all the things I let myself believe, all these clouds of untruths that I floated my head into. 

I wake up every night, in the middle of it, and I feel placed somewhere. I am so sure, so entirely positive, that I am in a different time, a different version of myself. It is my oddest form of dreaming, but nightly I am a child, I am a teenager, I am in my dorm room, curled in bright green jersey sheets. My tube socks pooled in thick cotton rings around my ankles. In a house in the mountains my family and I once stayed with endless hills of daisies and clouds shaped like horses. Walking along icy Lake Michigan, quietly stepping over bloated, bloody fish, their eyes in the backs of their heads, their mouths comically slung open.  

There was this one night when I shot straight up and I was sure that it hadn’t happened yet. I was in the night before, at some junk house party, clutching a warm beer I would probably just dump into a sink. 

Oh my god, I don’t have to go through it, I thought to myself, taking uneasy steps. I can fix it this time. 

And I’m looking around and it’s as honest of a memory as I have and each passing moment I am growing up and up, thinking on loop I don’t have to go through it, I can fix it this time. And as the reality awakeness brings came in through the windows of the home like a poison smoke, I came thinking over and over I can fix it this time. 

After it happened, I was just so angry. White lightning angry. Rage that electrified me and brought every small translucent hair on my arm to alert. It was like the world had been smashed from me. 

I walked home at 2 a.m. and I climbed a tree that was too big for me and the bark tore thin pink lines into my skin. I hung upside down on that tree for what felt like hours dazzling in the small pains on my arms, my knee caps. I don’t care, I thought a thousand times. This is nothing to care about. 

I went home and did all the things you aren’t supposed to do like ignore your roommate asking if you’re OK, like taking a shower, like falling asleep under every blanket you own. 

He told me that he would kill himself if I “didn’t try our relationship” again and I was younger, I was dumber, but mostly I was freaked so I went back again and again and on the walks over up I made up three excuses, but I didn’t leave and for years I excused him with that very phrase. Years of my life have been spent apologizing to myself for something I didn’t do for fifteen minutes. In some greater way of thinking about it all, it was only a couple hours all together. One hundred and twenty minutes. Tops. In the grand scheme of my life, how much should I let one hundred and twenty minutes matter?

And for a long time it didn’t matter in a way I could recognize. I told myself it was “bad sex” or that he was right, I was a tease. I tried to tell people, but the words would come out wrong so it seemed easier to say nothing at all. I took mushrooms a couple weeks after at a gray lake and I cried for so many hours I asked my friend if the hospital could make it stop.