My husband and I have a secret practice, a fetish that no one sees or knows. While others bind each other with silken cords or ask of each other unspeakable things, we meet in the living room, and make an altar of the coffee table, bow and kneel and bless, break open the Word and share the Communion cup, and when Kayla is old enough she joins us. When our first daughter, and then our second, are of an age, we bring them into the circle, too.
I got to ruminating on breaking up with my boyfriend Craig. I got to thinking of the names he’d called me-- lazy and selfish--and how most of them were right on. Maybe my coming here, helping to clean up Long Beach--maybe that would make him realize I wasn't so bad after all.
It was the best of times. It was the worst of times. This is a tale of two masks, this mane and this zebra pencil. It’s a comedy about a tragedy. One of my own doing.
He told me to lie down and I did, on the scratchy ground. There was so sound- not a car, not Mamacita calling my name. Nothing. I remember I wasn’t really afraid, but mostly curious why he wanted to take off my clothes, lie down on the scratchy ground. I remember he touched my body all over and once put his finger in my pee place which hurt, and he stopped touching my body.
I now know that what I suffered that day was a classic panic attack. Not surprising, given that I felt hounded at work, constricted with grief for my aunt, and strangled in a dreary,
dead-end relationship from which I did not know how to extricate myself. For as long as the transit strike wore on, I had – quite literally – nowhere left of my own.
They say grief is a bottomless pit but that doesn’t mean you are always falling down into it. Other activities are possible. You can toddle around the perimeter, peering down into it. You can hang off a ledge, partway down, and take in some of the sights. You can just generally pretend, sometimes, that you are moving intentionally.
I wondered if her sharing had once included tears or that she simply never volunteered any information. But now, if someone asked about her life—to get to know her better, to deepen a potential relationship—had Sarah decided to let people hear the hardest truths? I think her honest, unadorned words were like sentries on a castle wall, warning about an approaching threat.
We write to be read, to be understood, and to understand. We write because when someone else reads us and processes her own pain, we have given a gift. You are either a writer or you’re not. You either understand the need to put down words or you don’t.
After two terrifying weeks on the pills, I decided I needed a new psychiatrist. My instinct continued to tell me that my racing heart was connected to the head injury. It told me to quit the drugs altogether. But the same friends who encouraged me to start on them, kept reassuring me that it could take a few tries to find the right match. My new doctor was a woman, and she spent more time listening to me than Dr. G had. Nevertheless, at the end of our session she handed me a prescription, this time for Paxil.
The next day, I felt substantially worse.
This was my fourth year of college and I was twenty-one years old. This semester I had registered for fifteen units of classes, and not attended a single one. Without a conscious thought, I had devised a simple way to sabotage my life.
My name has always felt like a placeholder. I was given a gender ambiguous first name by my parents, as well as a decidedly masculine middle name. I was told at an early age that my middle name was given to me in case I was not happy with my first name. Somehow in their minds they thought it likely that I would not be pleased in ambiguity, so they allowed me an out, a sure and plain path toward a normal cisgendered life.
