An Attempt Was Made

I don’t know how to do trigger warnings on this site, so this is my blanket tw for all my posts: this is a vent blog, I write about depression, anxiety, social anxiety, panic, self-harm, and suicidal ideation. 

There’s a peace in being overwhelmed and held down by your senses

There’s a dying swallow beating itself on my ribs.

There’s a shaking that starts in my heart and travels outward. It crashes against the tendons in my wrist and doubles back hitchhiking on my veins, an endless feedback loop, an undertow like ocean waves.

The shaking comes back to my chest. My hands are still when all of me is shaking.

I wish that my fear made my hands shake. I wish that my fear made my stomach rupture.

My fear is Don’t-Move-So-It-Won’t-See-You. It is child fear. I am cold but I cannot move to reach my blanket, it is two am on my phone and my tablet and a fidget cube trying to silence the stillness of sleep, Don’t-Feel-So-It-Can’t-Hurt-You, I am afraid.

I am staring down an afternoon already asterisked with lies because “I forgot” is easier to say than

“I wandered away from my body because I could not get my hands to release the crushing

Tearing of tinfoil bones,

I sat in my room with heart and lungs functioning

Puncturing holes in a Styrofoam cup with a thumb nail because the pain in my chest was too great for

inhaling.”

“I didn’t do the homework” is easier to say than

“a small death, better than a large one,

better eating dollar store ramen than sitting on the highway, breathing, eyes closed.”

The dead thing in my chest flutters

I am rotting from the inside out, collapsing like a building, or the weighted moment after a car bomb when gravity reasserts and the ringing in your ears is cut with crumpled metal falling to earth

I am a million live things under my skin and the dead heart and the half-dead brain

I wander away

I wander away

“I cried when we moved the furniture,” I said to my therapist on Monday.

“You’re not a child anymore,” she says to me, 

But not in the cruel way it’s been used:

What she means is, 

I don’t have to move my furniture if I don’t want to.

More than that

I can rearrange 

Content that safety isn’t a place

A habit

A maple tree older than me

And the seashells from the trip to the shore we took ten years ago.

It’s hindsight - no, wisdom -

Either way I can’t take my trash out without permission. 

Cotton-ball mountains and craggy tissue rivers wind across my room

Haven’t they always been there? 

Isn’t it wrong for me to move

What nature ordained and the company I’ve kept for a hundred days?

“It feels like an electric shock in my muscles,”

I tell my therapist on a Tuesday,

“I can only freeze and cringe with the pain.”

“You’re a poet,” she says,

Not cruel as the words have been,

 - not understanding, either - 

“Life isn’t a metaphor or a stretch of sensation, sometimes it’s bending to pick tissues off your floor.”

In hindsight, I had vines in my throat as a toddler.

My first memories are of shame.

My first memory is throwing up at a birthday party, and I-

Have a deep horror of foods that are not prepackaged and safe

My therapist wonders out loud when it started,

I do not say that I was an unwanted child;

Born flawed,

Born sweet,

My mother’s voice when she said I was sweeter than she’d expected was a trap to me.

Remember 

She didn’t want a girl. 

No, she wanted a girl.

She didn’t want a brat, a bitch, a hissing feral cat who preened in front of gilded mirrors,

So I

Sweeter than she expected,

Tough, uncomplaining, lavish with affection and apologies and dimple-cheeked smiles and silenc-

In hindsight, my mother tells me that I could have said something.

I should have said no.

I did, then, in that conversation in front of the windows when I’m twenty-two and already broken. 

“No,” I say, “I couldn’t have,”

And she replies,

“You could have told me anything, I would have listened.”

We are both too blind and deaf with tears to hear the irony slipping in.

I would let my house burn to the ground.

No, I would put out the fire 

Or

Lay down with it and sing it to sleep.

Either way, I would let the trash spill out of the bin and toward the bookshelves.

I would let the broken sink stand in its place while I wash my hands in buckets to avoid the noise of clanging and creaking pipes and a man’s half-muffled swearing and the glint of a silver wrench and the rotten smell of old pipes;

I would leave the furniture where it is and let dust settle in the corners,

“I cannot make a home,” I tell my therapist on a Friday,

“Your home,” she says, “is only what you make,”

“Control,” she doesn’t say,

Because she isn’t cruel,

Because we both know

I swallowed my voice when I was a child

Watch bodies like putty in uncareful hands

Melt away in my arms

A ruin of a girl

A ruin of crumbling earth and decay

Anything worth while in me

Is so distant now that it might be another reality

I slurp and gulp and am incapable of drinking tea normally

Today that is my damnable sin

That and my sad songs

My ravenous terror

I ask the seething lines of algorithm

Make me sleep

In a room that’s too hot and too cold

My teeth are coated in sugar

Grease pools in craters of pink

Mint was too strong

I whisper to the shining screen

For a moment it seared white on my tongue

I spat penance into the sink

-touch

Says the computer

-your skin is always touching you

-cant you feel it

-your clothes are close as a lover but you forget to feel them touch

-blood is hot and copper exploding under your tongue in time to heartbeats

-blue lines of pulsing life kept silent by a thin sheet of skin

-translucence

-lives in your mouth

Tell me a story

I say

That is not a story

I think this is denial

I know

If they heard

The world would reject me or 

Worse

Fret

About the wounds

Fret endlessly endlessly endlessly

At the words

Did you mean it when you said you want to die

No you’re beautiful the way that you are

Stop chasing-

You chase after

Unbury

The hurt that I’ve hidden

Like the shame of watching your own skin fester while you 

write poetry

About the wounds

Choppy verse

Amateur

See what the rough-cut

Card-stock

Does to you

Keep digging at your wounds

Keep watching the red run

Pretty like art

Like lines on a page you didn’t write

The poetry stopped and you

Bled

Out

Until you were out of words

And the silence was worse

Alone with yourself 

In your head

With that psycho poet 

Who didn’t call the ambulance 

Because the sirens would scream out his words

And he wanted so badly to hear the hurt

He could never say out loud

He could never judge

What would be judged by the world

What was acceptable 

To show them

And how ugly did it have to be

Before they said 

It could never be redeemed

Art should say something, poet

And here you are

I wonder if my grandmother knows the word “trauma.” The word “abuse” is written in bloody gouges in the hall of portraits I keep in my mind, scrawled over the blurry image of a great-grandfather nobody talks about. It’s written lighter, in a more forgiving fountain pen, along the picture of my pépe. His is a black-and-white photo of a loose-jowled man with combed-over black hair, eyes smudged away by thick-lensed glasses and cigarette smoke. My grandmother has never read studies saying that kids who are abused are more likely to find themselves in an abusive marriage. If she’s ever stopped to wonder what drew her to a handsome, hard-drinking man with eyes for other women, she’s pushed the thought away after years with no answer. She takes it all in stride, says with hard eyes that that’s the way the world is. I disagree, use as evidence my father, who stands gentle and open-handed in the doorway, enduring her ice-shard demeanor with his warmest smile. He calls her “Mom” and doesn’t resent her for resenting him. My arguments rest behind my teeth, and my grandmother cradles my face in gentle palms, kisses me on the nose, says “darlin’,” while I swallow back my complaints and resolve never to defend men when she makes herself vulnerable. She loves me despite the fact that my creation required the presence of a male, so that will be enough.  

I wonder if my mother knows the word “gaslighting.” I wonder if she knows that we can do it to ourselves, downplaying what we went through and attaching “of course” at the front. Do those wire-rimmed glasses warp the light so she doesn’t see the horror in my face? Or does she see it only as something to comfort and soothe away, never considering she could accept it as it was meant to be: a gift, for her. Mother, let your children hurt. They do it for your sake. My kind mother is so good at perceiving the needs around her that when we adopted my sister she talked for weeks about childhood PTSD and had no idea she was describing herself. My mother built a home on her sweat and tears that is nothing like the one she grew up in. My mother learned kind words and soft hands on her own, when there was no one to teach her. There are no shouts in this home, no curses, no bottles flung at the wall. I descend from a line of women with Teflon on one side of their hearts and gauze strips on the other, kiss away a child’s scraped knees and leave their own wounds bleeding and raw.

I wonder if I’m being too sensitive, when I hear the words “generational trauma” and know that they’re true. I know that every time the light fades from the sky and my father isn’t home, the gut-wrenching terror of a little girl realizing daddy’s never coming back sinks ancient claws in my mother’s soul. She thinks that she’s angry, she feels the burn of my grandmother’s bitterness suddenly swamp her bones, but maybe it doesn’t cross her mind that she’s mostly frightened and sad. I’ve never asked. It’s my pépe’s last name that stayed even after he got a divorce. It’s my pépe’s family that my family uses jokingly, each time my brother flares with white-hot temper or stands his ground like a guard dog. My grandmother claimed that name as her own. My mother carried it until my father convinced her to set it down. But I only grazed the edge of it with my fingertips, born under a different banner, saturated with my father’s side, voice too quiet to make that fierce name heard. My matriarchs are warriors who gave birth to a moon-moth. I crumple like tissue wings at the slightest touch; I hover between freezing to death and burning up, unable to get warm even when the fire hurts too much. A deserter leaving the front lines for my bedroom, I retreat each time my father meets the glacial wall of my mother’s eternal cold shoulder. A fugitive holding her breath and waiting to be found, I put my ear to the ground and study the different tones of angry sighs. No one else in the house knows the difference between the “money’s tight again this month,” and “he didn’t come home for dinner again,” but I am the most careful student.

There is a clutching, dizzy, hungry thing

That lives in my throat and howls,

Full of rage.

No, that’s not right, try again:

Full of grief.

There’s a part of me that still remembers

Burgundy carpet,

Patch of sunshine,

End of the world while I closed my eyes,

The beast inside me knows what it’s like

To have things taken away

Before we’re ready,

And it holds and holds and holds on-

Scraps of old poems and broken nutcrackers,

Seashells from past vacations, books I haven’t read.

Fact: I’m saddest when I should be happy.

Eyes wide like

Blue camera lenses

Lungs tight

Like I could hold a moment in them,

The world is bright and all I can think

Is how much I’m going to 

Miss this soon

My heart is a phone storage

Yelling low battery

Yelling not enough room but

I keep holding on to

Blurry dark

A thousand pictures of one second

I could get back there if I tried

Claw my way out of time to be whole

Fact: I write poetry when I’m grieving.

It’s been an entire day that I’m frozen

Steeped in bad fanfiction

Staring at a computer screen

As if it could be my salvation

I’m not ready to be real

To live in this world where loss

Is a cracked pane of window glass

Fast like a frozen bird falling to the ground

Hearts like concrete cracked inevitably

Saying goodbye 

Takes one heartbeat, two,

One short forever

curled up with my spine against the wall,

and writing makes it come back in smudged colors