What united us in friendship was not sharing sickness or eating disorder behaviors. We did not use each other to swap “tips” on how to lose weight or to share which maladaptive coping mechanisms made our eating disorders happy. We never used each other for thinspiration.
I always find my way back, to this rhythm, to this impulse to breathe. It is the place I return to, time and again, when I'm scared, when I'm empty, when life hasn't gone as planned. Deep breath in. Deep breath out. Take it in. Let it go.
Are my feet cold, like, a normal level? Are they refrigerator cold? Or is my racing heart really imploring me to run away from the lava that's coming, that'll bury me in years upon years of an unhappy union?
I think about loss. I think about the phrase 'so sorry for your loss'. I think about how many times I said it before I could possibly begin to understand it.
When his psychosis hit, you'd find him out in the parking lot jotting down license plate numbers. He was trying to solve the mystery of the universe, the great pastime of all successful manic-depressives, myself included.
Because she has hearing problems, she watches your lips as you speak, and she plucks the ash of your words from the air and takes it inside herself and lays it beside her heart, where before too long your words start beating as if they were strong, capable, living mammals. And then she gives them back to you.
I cry when I think about the words I never said to him, I saved them for the right moments. I cry because sometimes it's hard to be here without him, to look forward to the future when he wont be in it.
This is the tunnel I cannot pull her back from; this is the delirium that can come with dementia, a disease where there is no IV, no drugs, no treatment to make it all better. My mother's decline has been rapid and heart breaking.
