The Problem of the Matriarch

It’s a strange balance, really, when recounting one’s relationship with a mother.  There’s such tension between telling it plainly and letting loose the pent up rage that’s been fucken stewing inside for years.  The decade or more of mutual misunderstanding, the maturation of self, but the mother clinging on to the thought of you as a dependent child, and treating you thusly.  And they do care, they just do so, often, in fucken terrible ways.

See, and that’s the thing.  We all make sense to ourselves, and since that’s true, we rarely explain our actions, and rarely feel the need to.  Why would we?  This makes total sense.  Fucken duh I was going to do that.  Figure it out for your goddamned self.

I read a friend’s account of a recent prolonged visit with her mother, and the sewage of memories which were in turn dredged up.

We find ourselves baffled by paradox:  something pleasant here, something less so here.  An apocalyptic fuck up here, another one here.  I mean, there’s no question which way the scales slide in this narrative.

But maybe what I’m surprised by more than anything is the normalization that we children do, the fucken rationalization that we do when we trace back.  We need it to make sense, we need all these tragedies to fit neatly in a box.  And that’s why we write about them.  Because we care about them, and we want to think that there was some higher purpose, some bigger reason, as to why we suffered at the hands of our mothers.  We become their apologists in the hopes of it all making sense.  If the pain of years ago is today meticulously arranged, we think, it will hurt less.

And it does make sense, in a way, but maybe not the way we think it might, or should.  Because to them, they raised us, and got us out of the fucken house, and boom, end of story.  And they were goddamned right to be mad about her girlfriend, or justified in hitting me when she found a box of condoms.  This all made sense to them.

I raised you, you didn’t die, you seem sane enough where I don’t need to worry more.  I did a good job, leave me the fuck alone.

What they will probably never think:  I am sorry for the lack of emotional nurturing.

What they will probably never say:  I made some serious errors.

What we wish they would:  Tell me about the times I hurt you.

What we wish they would:  A child should not have been treated like I treated you.

What they might say:  I did my goddamned best.

What they might say:  Your father, don’t even get me fucken started.

What they have said:  I don’t think you’ve been a good child to me.

What they still say:  Drive carefully on your way home. 

Could you take some of your stuff with you next time you visit? 

We grow up, it’s true, we race on ahead to check things off the list, and these childhood memories become tiny people with big voices and discomforting strength, and they live inside of us, and then they take over when we are adults, and we find ourselves distressed, and in the case of my friend, and in the case of me, this can take on unsavory habits.

In the writing trade, you’re taught to let the audience get mad for you.  Don’t get mad or be bitter on the page.  It flattens things out.

So I can’t say, You fucken bitch, do you have any idea? 

So I shouldn’t say, The less I talk to you, the happier I am.

But there is fucken rage, and it lives on, and I tell my therapist that it isn’t just rage, it’s a desire for action, to throttle the direct object of my anger, to bludgeon it until it sees what I want it to see.

Take a look, asshole – that crying child is your handiwork.

And:  I’m glad I fucken hurt you.  I’m glad I broke you, too.

Because the rage is a cover up for the sadness, the pain, the vulnerable little shits that we once were, and therefore still are today.  Secondary emotion is what the social workers call it.

And it lives on, but it stays clamped down until it doesn’t, and then man, there are fireworks.  It’s a drunken Thanksgiving with all of us yelling, or me reading a book in the adjoining room while my parents still threaten a divorce that they haven’t followed through on for almost 20 years, me nearly crying about it later.

So fine, we’re not angry, we’re telling you calmly.  My friend, in her rendition, is not angry.  There is confusion, yes, the gropings and attempts to extract some higher meaning out of the ether, something more satisfying than She just fucked up, and fucked up big.  And there probably is some meaning in there.  There’s the story of her mother.  Because her mother was rational unto herself.  Still is as she makes her husband work three jobs as she lives a life lavish beyond her means; still as she blames her newer children.  Still, as she stays in a hotel room to visit her daughter.  That’s the story.  Or another story.  Either way, the answers lie down that path, and as a child of that story, it’s a fucken scary route to want to take.  Digging up the past is rarely a fun and easy thing to do.  Especially when it deals in the business of rearing kin.

It all makes sense to her mother, and that’s my friend’s struggle – to make sense of that shit.

It’s my fucken struggle, too.

It’s what we’re left with.  I don’t think they’d remember the things that left the marks.  Or at least not remember them the way we did.  Or at least not feel the need to defend.

My friend isn’t angry, at least not on the page; the detached voice, the quiet, uncertain analysis, has the intended effect of unsettling me.  You put up with that shit? I asked her in my head.

Problems of the first world, yes, but problems nonetheless.  The impulsive decisions of my friend’s mother, the gross neglect, the social conservatism of my own mother, and her absolute need for control – these are things we are left figuring out, because they couldn’t do it for their goddamned selves.

We’re picking up the shattered vases of our youth.  We’re tending to our younger selves.  We piece it all back together, but we can see the fault lines, the cracks, the fragments that got lost.  And that’s fine, there’s nothing wrong with it, really.  Just goddamn, I wish there were less work to do.  It didn’t have to be this way.  But it is this way, and while there isn’t redemption at the end (there never is, there shouldn’t be, who wants to read about a happy fucken ending?), there’s solace, and there’s finally calm, as we leave them behind, and give at last ourselves the love that we wish we had gotten back then.  Filling the deficit daily.  It’s exhausting.  And it’s shitty to admit that getting angry doesn’t help one fucken bit.  So I don’t.  Instead, I administer a spoonful of self-acceptance, and hope that my friend might be doing the same.

To AH

Word Choice

Okay, wait, stop right there. I need you to hear this. I need you to have this with you cognitively, she said. Whenever she commandeered the conversation this abruptly, I knew to listen, because she was about to give me some piece of knowledge that was supposed to help.

This was in response to something I said toward the end of the session. I told her I’m still freaked out. I guess I haven’t gotten over the fact that I almost died this summer.

She would later say, I’m glad that this part came up, and we should talk about this next time.

But what she said immediately after I said almost died was Okay, wait, stop right there. Which is exactly what I did. I stopped, and I waited, right there, on the couch where for three years going I’d sat once a week.

That isn’t true. You didn’t almost die. You didn’t die. Let’s stick with the facts. You didn’t die. Let’s walk through what actually happened.

So I tell her what I told her in July, the week after the entire shitty thing happened: I cut a lot into my arms. Then I put the knife against my neck. Then I looked up and I saw myself in the mirror, and I thought to myself, holy fucken shit. You have a fucken knife at your fucken neck. If you do that, that’s it, that will actually kill you. You can’t undo that one. That’s good night.

She said, Right. You did not want to die. Looking in the mirror, and being able to say that to yourself, that was your true self, that was you drawing upon your infinite resources.

I did not die. I did not almost die. This was not how I viewed things, but she was asking me to change that.

See, Jeff, the thing is, you did not want to die. Remember that the cutting is not because you want to die. The cutting for you is a painkiller, a way to slow things down, to stop the hurting, whether it’s the anxiety of being abandoned, and she didn’t finish the sentence, I don’t think, or maybe I wasn’t listening anymore, because I was still replaying the scene, struggling to reconcile in my own mind how having a knife at my neck while self-mutilating didn’t constitute coming close.

And so you cut your arms, and that wasn’t enough, so you went for your neck, but then your true self stepped in. You took control, and stopped letting these parts of you handle it. She mentioned the word leadership somewhere, but I can’t remember when.

The brain can create stories that aren’t actually true, she said. I fucken know that, I want to say, but don’t. Not in an angry way, just in a resigned way. So it’s important for us sometimes, in cases like this one, to remember what actually happened. You cut yourself, you had a knife at your neck, but then you looked in the mirror and stopped. That’s it. That is what happened. I think she was repeating herself to beat it into my head; she probably knew that I was having trouble believing this. Do you see the difference?

I tell her that I do, at one level, at a theoretical, intellectual level. But that I don’t believe it at a felt level yet. I’ll have to tell myself repeatedly. She nodded.

I did not die. I did not almost die. Those are the same thing. They are different from I almost died, but didn’t.

But what about the blood lust? What about the gory visions I had, the fetishization of unzipping my stomach? I don’t ask her, but I think it, and this doesn’t make me happy.

Maybe I want to be worse than I am. Maybe my identity is wrapped up in the suffering. Maybe I want to be a martyr for an unknown cause.

Let’s stick to the facts.

The goddamned facts. Even the facts aren’t pretty. Even the facts involve blood.

I don’t say any of this, of course. Instead, I get up, and make an appointment for next week.

Props

{written in August}

I am driving back from a session with our couples therapist. A good session, all in all. We made it from the office to the street before I said something wrong, before we threw our hands up again.

Why did I just not say I wanted to go to dinner in the first place. She wants to know this, and I want to know this, too.

It is because like any addict, I’m going through withdrawals, from not carving myself up. I used up every bit of fight I had not to down a cocktail of pills, not to drive into a pole or my fellow man, not to push the blade into my neck. So good responses are beyond me.

I am not thinking clearly; I say so. The question remains: why I just didn’t say yes in the first place.

We leave in our separate cars. I don’t have a knife so I dig a key into my forearm; it leaves scrape that swells. When I see it, I am glad that it was a key and not a knife, because I traversed at least one vein.

Then I am driving and I am screaming Fuck repeatedly, and I am punching the steering wheel, and I think about the corkscrew in the glove compartment.

But I do not use the corkscrew; eyes on the road at all times. Instead, I reach for the baseball, which I normally use to massage my shoulders and my legs on long drives.

One hand always on the wheel. One hand always with the baseball. The baseball is pitched repeatedly at my head. The baseball hits its target for the twenty minute drive.

I prefer to administer the pain. I prefer the headache to the shame.  I prefer the headache to the rage.

River Mouth

{Written in July}

There is the institution of the knife. This institution, these knives, they exist in my life. And they sing, they talk, they scream, they yell. The butterfly knife, the throwing knife, the kitchen knife, the santoku knife. There’s a straight razor, too. They all have something to say, and they talk in a way that is slow, and calm, and clear, and sure. It’s something to the effect of this feels better than feeling nothing. I know that you’ll agree. They’re right – those blades gliding across and into me, the scrapes and slices: they’re the only thing, when things get this bad, that let me know I’m alive. They either convert pain into numbness, or, recently, they bring me out of the numbness and back to life. When they speak, they speak clearly. When they speak, I listen.

In times like this, when it’s all shit and misery, everything is flat and gray. There’s a burnt out quality to everything. Fuck the routine; fuck discipline; fuck the social norms; I’m just trying to stay in one piece here.

Unpunctured, I drift, I float lifeless throughout my day – the desk job with e-mails that all say blah, blah, blah, and colleagues in meetings who say blah, blah, blah. Friends who care about me and want me to stop, to get help, to sound the alarm, and still, all I hear is blah, blah, blah.

When my current lover tells me that I have done her a great wrong, and that I have lied to her, and that this is hurtful, and that I am defending a former lover, and that this is not building trust, I hear blah, blah, blah.

But then, here, in this case, something else happens. It’s no longer a muted droning. I start to hear the other voices, familiar ones. They tell me that I’ve been hearing this for days, and that it’s hurting way too fucking much, and that there is so much shame, and that the shame is miserable, and that I need that fucken feeling to stop, and I need it to stop now, not in fucken five minutes, because it’s too goddamned loud, and I want a gun, and a drink, and bottle of pills. Because that’s the only way to make things quiet, to shut things the fuck up. But these voices.

It’s like this: it’s as though instead of hearing static between radio stations as you slowly turn that dial, you hear everything playing on the radio all at once, and it’s too much, it’s too much to listen to, and then when you finally get a handle on it, and you can filter out the background noise, all you hear is what a fucken shitbag you really are. Newsflash – you suck; this just in, everything she’s saying about you is dead right, and here’s a breaking story, that you are fucken terrible, really, though, a real fucked up case, and that it’s time to go, time to turn out the lights, time to create a scene that no one’s watching, time to have someone else clean up the mess.

Time to walk out onto the road at night in front of a truck. Time to get the bat from the shed and break yourself. Time to jump off the porch and through the windshield of my car. Time to get that imaginary gun, and that imaginary bottle of pills and empty the bottle into my mouth before I empty the chamber into my temple. But I don’t have the courage to take that jump, to confront that oncoming car; I don’t have the gun or the pills. All I have is a stockpile of knives. I take them out and I look at them. I say hello by running my finger across the blade, testing the sharpness. They respond by shaving off a bit of my fingernail. I am listening close.

They say: We can give you what you want. We can’t make you happy, but we can make it better.

We’re the only ones who know what you need. We’re the only voice in the room that isn’t judging you. We’re mercenaries, we’re on your side.

We can’t make you happy.

But we can make it better.

My eighth grade science teacher described what happened when a river ran into a lake:

It goes like this: whoosh, ahhh, she said, and she spread out her arms, leaned forward as though to fly, and blew air out of her puffed cheeks. It looked like the breast stroke. She clarified, saying that when the river meets the lake, that the water slowed down, because it was flowing into such a large space. She said that the sediment would settle near the mouth. Things got calmer. The ripples get smaller and smaller. I learned the word diluvial that year.

If my body were this science lesson: there is the skin opening at the beck of one of these blades. It is the river of overwhelming voices, or the stream of staggering numbness that meets the lake, and I can listen, I can hear the whoosh, I hear the ahhh, and those voices settle like the sediment, and there’s calm, there’s quiet, and there’s me, the fucken bottomless body of water, standing in the mirror with bloody arms and bloody stomach.

There’s a moment when I observe the damage, the new construction. I want to know: did I break the skin? In those areas where it’s little more than a scrape, I return with the knife, and try again, calmly, and go harder this time, and breathe through the pain that initially prevents me from going any deeper. It is not a good thing, but a thing nonetheless, that I am figuring out the most efficient ways to draw blood.

Push into the wall with your hand. Take up the slack by pushing into the wall. Position the knife on the extended arm. Draw in a deep breath. Double check the position on the knife. Make sure that the trajectory is known. Simultaneously breathe out sharply, quickly, and fully, as you make your cut, hard, fast and straight.

I am looking at myself, sometimes at myself in the mirror, sometimes at my actual body, which has recently gained ten pounds, and for that reason, it feels even better in moments like these, when I am abusing it. You fat fuck, bleed.

Each new cut is a place I’ve been – a landmark or an exit sign. The cuts becomes an interstate network of my depression, here an intersection, there a dead end, here the old exit 58. The highways on my stomach and the country roads on my upper arms. The historic markers on my right forearm and hand. Each new cut is an act of encouragement – it’s okay, do more, go further, try the thigh, go deeper into that shoulder.

There are places I have not yet gone, but I can see the road from here. After all, I have started tracing the paths to get there.

I am imagining the mess, beckoning my entrails to spill onto the floor; there’s a lust to it. Let’s drain the tub, let’s irrigate this mother fucker dry.

I think of how the blood goes from slippery to sticky once it’s been exposed to the air and rubbed between your fingers long enough.

Then, though, there are still those moments of fear – That’s pointed at an artery. That might actually kill me.

And still, this is what I see, when I see my ten-pound heavier body reflecting back at me, suit jackets and cardigans in the background, and mountains of t-shirts folded and piled above: A knife against my neck. A blade tip of pointed at my heart. Two hands with a strong grip on a pair of opened scissors, ready to rip my stomach open.

Arrows on a map.

Arrows suggesting that there are undiscovered pathways to other rivers, bigger mouths, lakes, small seas and blue holes.

Each waterway, every possible path: you can either find it on me, or you can carve it into me.

The lines on my body: directions to a costume ball. A history of troubled loves. Scribbled over several times. Rewritten, revised, again and again, the original obscured but never erased.

Repeat

I admitted that the situation was fucked. That took a lot. It takes a lot not to smile back at someone when they ask you how you are. That was on a couch; that was with my therapist; that was a few days ago; that was after it happened.

I am sitting at my desk, wanting to cry tears that have been stored for years. I am sitting at my desk. Wanting to jump out the goddamned window. Wanting to sleep a night undisturbed. I am sitting, thinking of how I hold on too much to too many things. I am thinking of song lyrics from a band that no longer is: dad would dream of all the different ways to die / each one a little more than we could dare to try.

I am thinking of what I’ve written before about this – describing my sadness as a quarry in coastal Maine. Not bottomless, but way deeper than our minds can grasp as they first start descending, thinking, I must be able to touch the bottom, right? They just carved some rocks out of here, no big deal. The signs about the drowning deaths, ignored, or acknowledged, then dismissed. The panic, walls closing in – all this happens on the way up, after they know they’ve made the mistake. Things are just about to get better, they’re about to breach, to get that breath – and lights out. I’m up top, I’m treading water (or am I the water), wondering where they’ve gone, unaware of how far down I’ve dragged them. I don’t have that oh shit moment when they realize that two hundred feet down really is quite deep, and they might have gone too far, that the ear-popping should have been heeded more closely. I just seem them float up, blue and lifeless. They were alive on the way down; they died on the way back up. My relationships, my loves, seem to take this course, to die the same, wet, recovering death.

I rub my stomach, and feel soft. I haven’t run much recently due to a sprain, and I imagine that I’m ballooning, even though I know that this has no base in reality. I am rubbing it, sometimes scratching it. The scabs from where I cut lines into my abdomen are falling off, and they itch like hell sometimes. I am wondering if there will be scar tissue, and how much.

I am at my desk. I am listening to two songs on repeat with near constancy. “Jumper” by Third Eye Blind, a song I didn’t discover until after it was relevant, and “Change the Sheets” by Kathleen Edwards. They’re giving me solace, but I’m worried that the continued playing of the songs might not be healthy, like any other drug. Maybe hearing Kathleen Edwards sing about margaritas and sleeping pills or listening to Stephen Jenkins scream right before the guitar riff kicks it up a notch is rotting my brain or carving dangerous neural pathways. I don’t know. The worst side effect that I can notice immediately is a precipitous drop-off in my productivity at work.

The drop-off, though, could also be my brain just being fried from recent panic attacks, sustained, heightened anxiety, and a high number of blows to the skull from hands, door frames, and other hard objects. Burnout, exhaustion, the energetic cost of healing.
Jumper. Interesting song. A few days ago, I tell my therapist that I think that I was suicidal on the evening in question. That it wasn’t a strong urge, but it was there. That I wanted to go to the third floor deck and jump off, crashing through the windshield of my car.

This was after I told her about my temples, the door frame, the dent in the wall, the knife and my stomach.

After I told her about the temples, the door frame, the dent, the knife, she had asked if during this situation I had had suicidal thoughts. I told her yes, that I did.

Were you looking for ways to do it? Did you have a plan?

That was when I told her about the porch, the roof.

That’s an interesting method.

I told her that the logic was that the fall probably wouldn’t be high enough, so crashing through the windshield would cut me open enough so that I would bleed to death. I think she looked markedly more concerned when I said this. Maybe it was because she heard me say that there was a logic to it; that there was a vision.

As if asking her not to be too concerned, I told her that I didn’t think about it too much, and that it wasn’t like I was up on the third floor deck staring down at the car, shimmying my way to align myself with the glass.

And I wasn’t on the third floor. I was on the second, and if I had jumped, and cleared the deck sufficiently, I would have gone through. I’m pretty sure of that. I did look down at the car for a while. It was after nine at this point, getting cold. I think if I had been startled, I could have accidentally fallen. I was not startled, though. I got too cold, and went inside.

Did you ever think to call me?

I told her that I did, that I knew that I should, that part of me was telling me, even as I held the knife that was about to cut across my stomach, that calling her was the wiser thing to do. But then: part of me tells me that I’ve already call her once today already for an emergency call about hitting myself repeatedly in the car until I heard bells ringing. I couldn’t bring myself to call her again, because at that point, I was afraid I was a nuisance.

The other truth, though, was that the beast in me that wanted blood was bent on getting it, and it had been caged up for way too long for anything to stop it until it got its way. In a way, the breakdown of my defenses had started earlier that day, when I did first hit myself several times in the temples. I was in my car, on the way to work. I pulled the car over and proceeded to give myself a headache.

And here I was, a workday and a few hours later, with a swollen skull, a bleeding stomach, and an urge to rush upstairs and hurl myself down three flights through tinted glass.

It’s a flood I had tried to hold back for two years; all the sadness, all the self-directed rage, it was in check. It told me that it understood; it told me I could be in charge. It put the knife down. It put the pots and pans back where they should have gone, and stopped wailing on my skull. It lets things slide off more easily. And then things happen; a near crash here, a change in drugs there. A euphoria from a new love I am convinced will last. A stumble here, a stumble there, and then the thoughts return. They know they haven’t been indulged in years, and they know that I am still afraid of them. They know they can run wild now since I have an dyke of antidepressants holding them back.

But it builds, and it builds, and it’s nature taking over. Fuck calling it a pressure cooker, fuck the need for a steam valve – this is a fucking big-ass predator we thought was extinct, but it is not, it is pissed, and it is a superior species. It will get what it wants, and it wants silence, it wants quiet, it wants all of this at the cost of life if that is the cost of calming damn.

I will tell my therapist that this scared me. That the ease with which it overpowered me scared me. That I felt no pain after several long cuts across my stomach scared me. That if someone else were not in the apartment, I was likely to have kept going scared me.

In the session, we focus on short term goals: seeing my doctor, discussing a new drug, trying to find a fucken psychiatrist in this state that is still accepting new patients. In the session, she addresses the part of me that is freaked out, the part of me that plays with pots and fists and knives, that stops pain with pain. She wants me to forgive them, to tell them that they are okay. That, in their own way, they serve their utility, and that we need to acknowledge their intentions.

I know this; we have discussed this before. But I had gone two and a half years without bleeding on purpose. Two and a half years since a self-induced concussion.

She reminds me that for now, that’s okay. That I’ve already beaten myself up. So I don’t need to continue to do so.

It gets better. It takes years, but it gets better. It does, and then, all of sudden, it doesn’t. It doesn’t anymore; it crashes in an instant, or what you think is an instant, and you look up at the mirror and you’re bleeding from your stomach. You’re holding up your shirt, you’re seeing the reflection of the knife. Your brow, your swollen, ringing brow, your furious, furious brow that is still calling for more. You’re staring at the love handles you’ve learned to hate, you get back to the bloody lines that are spreading out; you call yourself ugly, you call yourself terrible, and lord, when you say it, you say it with a sense of fucking conviction.

Crutch Across the Skull

The bumps all over my head are fewer than yesterday. The one on my forehead is still large, likely noticeable. No cuts, no blood on the face or scalp; it was a bad week to shave my head, though. It is easier to see the swollen contours. The throbbing has died down, but there is that dull, background pain that sits quietly until you have to move or think.

It was interesting that my skull broke through the wall so easily. One clean strike, leaving no mark on my body; hello big hole, good-bye, security deposit. Normally, that should have been enough to stop me, to make me think about what was going on, to think about how to repair that so that my lover would not notice. But I guess it was not enough.

The swelling on my forehead did not come from breaking the wall. The swelling on my forehead came from rapid, repeated contact with the door frame. The bump on the back of my skull is from slamming it repeatedly against a support beam as I sat in our closet. I continued to do this after my lover got home; she was searching the house for me; I hit my temples with the heel of my hand, and then with a closed first. I stopped when I heard her coming down the stairs to the bedroom. There are other bumps; I get to those.

Here was the scene. I had called her several times. I apologized in a voice mail and via text messaging. My calls went to voice mail; my texts went unanswered. I apologized repeatedly. I apologized into the night, into the morning, even after she came home. I apologized. I never was entirely sure what I did wrong, but she left, and it was after I said something, so I assumed that it was something I did. So I said I’m sorry, and I’d take it all back, that I would do whatever it took to bring her back home.

I rarely use the word crazy when speaking with my therapist, but that was the word I used when I spoke to her earlier that day. I rarely use the word because I rarely feel fucken crazy. I feel sad, furious, bewildered and bitter, but not crazy. But today, I felt it, and I said it, and it alarmed me. It was a different type of discomfort, one I did not know, one I did not know how to deal with. Crazy, losing my mind. Running in circles. Repeating myself, and never having the words make sense. The strange sensation that you’ve been convicted of a crime you know you haven’t committed.

This panic started after I watered the garden. That was the first time I tried calling her, and the first of dozens of calls that she would put straight through to voice mail. Fucken Christ, I was desperate, I was freaked, I was asking her not to leave me, I used the word ‘begging.’

The one message she sent back said that I had made her do a lot of thinking, and that she needed to recollect herself, and that she didn’t want to discuss over the phone. No words of assurance, nothing to suggest that she wasn’t leaving forever. Not that it was her responsibility to; it wasn’t; it isn’t. But fuck, that was a moment when I needed to know where things stood. From this, I assumed the worst; in my own history, to make someone do a lot of thinking was a prelude to bad news, to a breakup.

I tried calling again after that message, and again, it went straight to voice mail. It was at this point, or shortly there after, that I guess I lost my shit. I screamed ‘fuck’ over and over again; it was a nice, honest scream. I threw my phone at a window; it came apart in three pieces, and the window did not break. The blinds got bent.

Then I put my head through the wall in our bedroom; an evenly shaped oval dent. And then I made contact with the door frame. There was pain, but not the concussive force I used to get when I pounded the shit out of my temples until I fell over. In those moments, I kept going until I couldn’t walk straight.

This was rage, this was fury, this was directed right back at me, and the pain, the dull ringing, the slight blurriness immediately after a strike, couldn’t slow it down. It was this: a furred beast clamped down so tight that we think it’s in check. Clamped so tight that there’s no backup plan for if those chains break. He’s just going to do what he wants until he is satisfied.

And he was not satisfied even after I caused swelling on my forehead. And this is why I went for the crutches. Their original purpose was to support my right ankle, which was recovering from a severe sprain. Currently, one of them was striking the top and the sides of my head repeatedly, harder each time. With each strike, I would either hiss or yell ‘fuck’ again. I then threw that crutch on the ground, and picked up the other. For some reason, I wanted to use both. Call it fairness. Again, strike, hiss, strike, cuss, there’s ringing, there’s some clinking within the crutch from a loose part, there is my grimacing face. I threw that crutch on the ground and I screamed again, tensing my forearms; the image in my mind is a soccer player who has just scored a goal. Except that my screaming is not from some joyous thing; it is pain leaving my stomach; a sound so loud to make things silent. I ran my fingers across my head. There was pain, there were bumps sprouting up all over. I wonder if it looked like I had just gotten the shit beaten out of me. It kind of felt like it, and I did not know what to make of that.

I then sat in the closet, where I remained until she came home. I had a knife poking my forearm, then pointed at my stomach, then pointed at my heart. I was breathing heavily, and that was the only sound. Well, that isn’t true. There was ringing and pulsing in my head. Passing cars on the road outside our house were muted, audible whispers. A scratching sound if I dragged the exposed blade lightly across my skin.

I closed the knife, and opened it several times. I’ve already said it, but I was hitting the back of my head against the supporting beam.

She came home. I hid the knife as I heard the door open. We needed to talk. We talked. She got up to go to the bathroom. I asked her if she was leaving me. She repeated that she was going to the bathroom.

I heard the shower start. I took the knife back out, and sliced away at my abdomen. Nothing too deep, but no slash that didn’t break the skin. A little blood, a little swelling, lots of jagged lines. It looked messy, unplanned. None of the slices hurt as I cut myself open, and that was a surprise, a disappointment. Red intersections at all angles. I was looking at them in the mirror, wondering if I should keep going.

I put my shirt back on. I went upstairs. I sat on the deck. We talked again. I wanted to cut again. She cried. We slept. My head hurt. It still did in the morning. I was still apologizing, still unsure of why I was apologizing.

A crutch across the skull. Slashes on the stomach. The only way to slow things down. The shittiest painkiller, the most steadfast companion. The worst regression in two and a half years.

At the office, I have to wonder if my colleagues can see the abnormalities on my head, if they can see the burnt-out distress in my eyes, the fatigue from fighting, the sadness of having no force left inside. I brush my hand across my head repeatedly, just to make sure it still hurts. I treat it as though the bumps, the soon-to-be scars on my stomach are some way of gauging time. No more fights until the my skull is smooth again; no more shutdowns until the scabs fall off my stomach. An hourglass that takes days for all the sand to sink.

These contusions, they go away; the body forgets that they happened. The effects of blunt trauma to my head won’t show up until later; the cuts stop stinging in the shower, become scars, and are then ignored. The body refreshes itself. The body forgets. But my mind remembers the release, the surge, the way that pain creates the silence. It’s the mind that beckoned the blade. It’s the mind that grabbed the crutch. It’s the mind that brought it crashing across the skull.

Kid Inside

I drop you off at the airport 4:45 a.m.  15 minutes early, and I’m back in bed in 45 minutes.  I’m on two hours of sleep, love, I’m fucken useless.  I get the trash out too late, and misplace the recycling bin – another two weeks before we get rid of that shit.  Sorry, love, I thought I had it together, but things like this, they remind me that I don’t.

You saw a lesser version of me last night into this morning; I didn’t mean to get freaked to shit, but I did.

I’m trying to tell you that it’s nothing you’re doing, and that’s the goddamned truth.  You’ve done fuck-all for me to be thinking the thoughts that I’m thinking.  I’m afraid, darling, that you’re me two years ago, or that you’re me six months ago.  Moral compass broken, or just pointing always towards flesh.

You’re the one with the squeaky clean history; you’re the one that hasn’t transgressed.  And yet here I am, thinking that everyone is like me, that everyone is tired of making sacrifices, that everyone will take what they can get if they can get away with it.  That we’re all looking to commit the perfect crime.

It’s not a fun way to think about the world:  that we’d all speed if there were no tickets, that we’d all fucken steal in the absence of law.

So much of my life is lived in terror, darling, and that’s a shite state of affairs.  If you could see this part of me, the one that slapped that blank stare on my face last night, the one that made my heart race like I was gonna fucken die, I don’t know what you’d do.  This kid is young and this kid fucken freaks out.

Imagine this image:

A small, young version of me; he can walk, but he wobbles; it’s still a new thing for him.  When he grabs my leg, he barely clears my knee.  And baby, he fucken loses it when his world shifts, when the things he knows as safe and secure are going away.  He’s asking if you’ll ever come back.  He’s asking when he’ll see you again.  He wants to go with you, he wants to sob his fucken soul out now that you’re gone.  A fucken toddler lives inside me, love, and I’m sorry.

This is the kid that shuts me down.  This is the kid that you saw staring at you while you were half-naked, packing.  This is the kid that almost made me vomit last night, that was ready to call in for reinforcements to stop the pain, and love, I never want to go there again.  This is the kid who’s in so much fucken pain that a knife to the hand or a gash in my thigh is the only relief.

I’ve described the sensation before, to a therapist sitting across the room.  It feels like someone has grabbed my heart and squeezing it in their fist to kill me.  I’ve read that this is one of the ways that they kill goats inMongolia– they squeeze the heart of the goat and it dies.  I think it’s supposed to be excruciatingly painful.

This time, my therapist asks me to find the edges of my heart, and to soften them.  And there I am, on the goddamned couch, making invisible spheres with my hands.  But it works and I don’t know how and I’m fucken thankful as shit, because darling, I hate being this psycho.

Of course, you and I both know that I’m not like this all the time.  But fuck, if it scares me, it can’t feel good for you, either.

He’s a kid, darling.  I can’t blame him for what he feels.  He’s seen a lot of shit that makes him afraid of things like this.  But baby, you’ve got to believe me when I say you’re not the cause of this.  And sweetheart, no offense, but I can’t ask you to be the solution.  Just be there.  Be the ears you have been already.  Be the arms that hold me.  Be patience; be love.  Fine, yes, be everything to me.  You already are, and you know I’m going to keep asking you if that’s okay.

To LMB

Church Across the Channel

I am in St. Paul’s Cathedral, darling. This is my first time here. My second time in London.

I cannot escape your influence, here I am, and fuck if I can’t escape what I learned from you.

The last time I was in a church this big, this grand, well, you know what i’m going to tell you, darling – it was the Sacre Coeur, that basilica we were brazen enough to call our own.

There’s a chorus singing, darling, and I’m almost in tears; I’m shaking inside with every crescendo. I see Jesus on the ceiling in northern Paris when I close my eyes because you took me to mass on a Thursday night.

I genuflected when I came in here, sweetheart. This isn’t even a Catholic church.

I’m sitting and I don’t want to be, but I’m thinking about you, and my elbow joint on my right arm is tingling like it does when tears are on the way. Leave me darling, please. It’s time we said good-bye, it’s time my body felt different in a place like this.

There are tourists like me, with backpacks like me. We all turn when a new person comes into view or a wooden chair creaks as someone sits or stands.

Darling, i’m still terrified. Darling, I thought I had you safely sealed in a glass jar.

The sounds are beautiful and I don’t have to know when to genuflect, say “and also with you.” I can’t tell if there are male and female singers – if it’s all male, those boys have quite a good falsetto.

Someone who is miked is praying for all Christians. You, I suppose, but not me.

You wanted me to become a Catholic, told me that i’d have to convert before we got married. I said OK.

Gold, and columns, and candles, and staff scolding the photographers.

The rising sound.

My new lover, darling, the one who I think’s the one, with whom I can be sane and passionate and who’s patiently watching my sorry ass heal – she knows that i’m writing about you.

She asked: “Do you still love her?” I told her no.

Sorry, darling, it’s the truth.

But damn, these demons won’t be buried without a fucken fight. I’ve let you go. I’ve forgiven you. I’ve forgiven me, too. Well, I’m working on it.

It isn’t love, it isn’t dread, it’s just these moments when you reappear, and you catch me off guard and I make a face that cannot hide the panic and the churning wheels. But it keeps my lips sealed tight, so that I can swallow the worst of it back down.

“For those who are anxious and afraid.” I guess there’s a prayer for me, too.

I guess that’s nice. I guess that that brings me something close to peace, something close to surrender. Still bitter, though, trying not to be. And that’s not the worst of it.

These Stones Are Rage and Sadness

I meet with my therapist.  She begins the session by telling me that she will be attending my reading next week.  On the day of the reading, she will call me, tell me that the weather might prevent her from coming, and if that were to be the case, she apologized.  The roads will clear, though, and she will sit in the audience at a highboy in a highchair by herself.  People will ask me who she is.  I will tell them.

But this day, this one, we talk about my crash the weekend before.  Not the closest I’ve ever come to killing myself, but the closest I’ve come to wanting to in a very long time.  The scene was as follows:

I am reacting poorly to a recent exchange of e-mails between me and a former lover.  I am sitting on the futon which serves as a couch in the combined living and dining space of my apartment.  Wrapped around that futon is rabbit fencing.  This is so that my rabbit, when I let her out, does not get under the futon to chew out the mattress, which she has a history of doing.

I am drafting a furious response which I do not send.  Instead, I respect her wishes and proceed to drink heavily, smoke weed, and sit there dazed.

And thank fucken god that I was sitting there dazed and not indulging my desires.  From the vantage point of the futon behind the fence, I was looking at my knife collection, hanging on a magnet strip above the sink.  I looked at each one, at the straight razor, and the scissors, too, taking time to dialogue with each one.  At least four of them have cut me open on purpose.

I learned the word dissociate in therapy.  I still have a hard time telling when I’m dissociating and when I’m just spacing out, but I’ll be goddamned if those knives, that evening, weren’t fucking singing to me.

I would tell a friend later, in writing, that I was scared to shit that I was going to pull a “lights out,” and just unseam myself like a goddamned fish.  The only good news is that I was too inebriated and too glazed to act upon the furious voice that wanted blood and guts.  It wanted a mess, it wanted to flip the switch.  Somehow, I made it to my bed and slept like shit.

The next day I busy myself with coaching, running, and a date.  As soon as I’m driving back home, though, maybe even before I get in the car, it all starts again and it’s a dialogue in my head on the drive back home.

I write a rough copy of an essay entitled “Tailspin,” which recounts the prior evening.  I have violent dreams and I wake myself up because I think I’ve broken a tooth from clenching my jaw.

On Sunday, I called my therapist.  Told her that I’d like to talk today if possible, and not wait until Thursday to see her.

I tell her:  Hi, I’m not in crisis right now, but I’m wondering if we can meet sooner rather than later this week.  I was in a really bad place this weekend.

I recount the scene, and she tells me she’s going to get her appointment book.

And here it is, Tuesday, and I’m still freaked out, and she tells me that she can tell.  I am wondering aloud why the fuck I reacted so strongly, why this, of all things, caused the closest call I’ve had in years?  Wherefore the intensity, wherefore the violence, from where the power of that all consuming anger that wanted a head on a fucken stake?

The summary of it was that I was still processing my breakup.  That the summer into the fall and early winter had been so full of distractions that I never gave myself the time to think much about it until the Holiday break, at home with my family.  Home, where I always have time to think and the sluice gates of memory open up thanks to the magical power of Southern Comfort Manhattans that my father tends to make starting atnoonduring these vacations.

The summer, fall and early winter:  rebounding, falling back down, running for hours on end in the woods around my neighborhood, writing a book.  And now, with the lull of the holiday break, I settle back and think about the fact that I have lost something.

OK, sadness, OK, loss, OK grief.  But the anger and the panic that are tangled up in there?

I tell her that I’m lost.  That I’m still not getting it, that it’s all one big, sad, hungover mess.

My therapist, for the first time, brings in visual aids.  She places stones on the ottoman where she is usually resting her legs if she hasn’t tucked them under herself in that big white chair of hers.  Each stone is a part of me.

From left to right, here is the setup that together we create:

A translucent pink stone is young and vulnerable.  It freaks out easily.  It seems unable to defend itself.  A blue stone, then.  This stone wants harmony and silence; it wants to obtain these things at all costs.  Then, a gray stone.  This stone is the murderous rage, this stone is anger, this stone is a wolf with a bloody jaw.

Over the blue stone, she places a wire dome the color of gold.  This is the part that calls for the firestorm, that wants the system shutdown, that is overpowered by the gray stone.

The gray stone attacks the blue.  The blue protects the pink.  The gold wire crashes down on top to render the whole scene blank, so that there’s only the white ottoman.  Peace at the cost of life.

The gray stone.  The object of my inquiry.  We talk about it:  it attacks in any direction, outside and inwards.  Since it was not allowed to attack the former lover, it attacked me, it attacked the blue stone, the pink stone.  It sees in black and white, and it fucken comes to play.

She then asks:  is this your mother’s rage or your father’s rage?

I want it to be my mother’s, for some reason.  But I know that it isn’t.  I tell my therapist that it’s his, not hers.

My father’s rage.  Something I’d known, something I’d seen, something that sat at the dinner table, yelled at coaches and referees during my hockey games.  It had power, it had depth, and it was loud.

I tell her this one.  The one in 2004, the summer after I returned fromFrance.  The one where I really thought he might go for it, that he might kill my mother.

He was on a business call in the family room.  I can’t remember what it was about.  My guess is that it had to do with the Republican National Convention inNew Yorkthat summer, but I can’t really be sure.  Most of his calls at home were around natural disasters, armed robberies, or big upcoming events.

My mother had asked him if he wanted us to wait on dinner for him.  He waved her off, I guess, not giving an answer.  I think that I also tried to check in.  I think he was there with the phone up against one ear, a finger in the other, until I appeared and asked if he wanted us to hold up on dinner, which was, at that point, almost ready.  He flashed his index finger, either to say, “one minute,” or “I’m on the phone,” or, “go away.”

Absent an answer, my mother, a former lover of mine, and I had dinner.

We should have waited.

His call ended.  He came out of the family room, and saw that dinner had been served and that he had not been included at the table.  I do not remember if I was in the kitchen or in the hallway or somewhere else when he first started screaming, but I got there quickly.

He was standing by the kitchen sink.  My mother was seated at the kitchen table.  I stood directly in between them, with my lover immediately behind me.

He said things that were approximately as follows:

Don’t fucking wait for me, no. 

Some fucking treatment. 

Jesus Christ, you people.

You people.  All of us to blame.  All of us the reason that he was still hungry.

The door slammed and he drove away.  Where did he go?  I’m guessing that he went to D’Angelo’s, and ordered a large steak and cheese grinder with peppers, but no onions.  He  might have even brought it home and eaten it alone in the kitchen as a way to reclaim what was his.  His goddamned kitchen table.  His goddamned dinner.

You people.

What freaked me out the most about the scene was my mother – she just sat there and took it.  She always puts up a fight and usually wins or at least has the last, passive aggressive word.  But she just looked back at him while he fucken screamed and gave it to us all.  She just looked back at him.  Didn’t even try to make a move, to get a word in.  She was frozen.

I almost wanted her to get up and tell him to go fuck himself, that he fucken waved all of us off when we asked.  That, in my own narrative, would have been more fitting.  He shouts, she shouts back, they fight, they quarrel, I tell them both to shut the fuck up or to take it outside.  The fact that even she was freaked out, well, that was something new.

OK, so he leaves.  He slams the door and drives off to get a grinder, maybe some chips, and a Dr. Pepper.

My shoulders drop as I make my way to the stairs.  I can feel it coming, and I want to make it to my bedroom to be alone.

But I don’t fucken make it.  I lose it right there on the staircase.  I’m halfway up, I collapse, and there’s my lover, trying to console me as I sob my fucken eyes out.  Snot and tears and a lover doing her best to calm me down.

I am twenty years old.  He yells, and I’m a puddle on the floor.  While he was screaming at her, I was torn between running to hide and launching myself at him to beat his ass.  I did neither, and like my mother I stood there and took it, and then I fucken cried on the stairs.

The gray stone.  My father’s rage.

You people.  That’s me, you asshole.  Your fucking son.

But I don’t tell him this.  I never do.  I just stand there and take it, and take it, and take it.

My father’s rage.  A small gray stone.

Enough to break me every time.

This Is How You Think of Me

I tell you I’m in trouble by way of an essay.  In my e-mail to you, I just type “Rough Weekend” for a subject line and allude to the attached document.  You respond by mailing me two books.  This is how you say you get it.  This is how you tell me that you feel it, too.  Or have felt it.  I wonder about the depth of your empathy in general, of your sympathy in particular.

I read The Silent Woman first – a book, in this context of yet another close call for Jeff, about the ethics of telling your truth, while casting unwilling characters.  The biographers of Sylvia Plath at war with the Plath Estate – what to include, what’s necessary, the morality of peering behind the curtain.  And then telling the world.

You know this:  that I write to let people in, to have that peek.  To surrender the myth that I’m smiles and Sketchy Jeffrey, to take off the mask and say:  I don’t give a fuck what you think about my angry sorrow.  You know how it feels when someone asks you not to share this or that.  And how violent, how total that rage, that indignation can feel.  Even if they ask you nicely.  Even if you get where they’re coming from.  They are your already active voice of writerly doubt, now in fucken stereo.  In my case, the scene where my mother waves a draft of a poem I wrote in front of me.  She found it while going through my trash.  It was about the scene I always talk about:  the one where my mother and father tried to strangle one another in front of my sister and me.  The sounds of us screaming, of the answering machine breaking.

Stop it.  Cha-ching.  Like a cash register.

She tells me:  I hope you’re not planning on sharing this with anyone.  We don’t need to go back to that.  I lie; I tell her that I don’t know why I wrote it.  I hand it in as a junior in high school.  I get a B+.  A draft of it makes a good Christian girl cry.  This makes me feel good about the piece.  And now, a former lover asks you not to share a piece in which he was mentioned.  To summarize how that went:  Goddammit.

The second book.  Crush by Richard Siken.  This is what you said about it:  This is my favorite book.  I carried it with me through Asia, through a dark winter in Boston, through two of the darkest years of my life.  It’s sexy, gritty and gorgeous.  I want you to have it.  And now I do.

You mentioned the book to me in 2007, when I was still writing verse.  And here it is.  Love at first sight.  I’ve read it once already, on the subways and in the hotels ofNew York City.  I consumed it with greed, with abandon.

The cover:  a man, who we assume has stunning features, such as a strong jaw line and defined back muscles.  I want to lick his stubble.  The blood off his thumb.  Well, we assume it’s blood.  But it’s a black and white photograph, so we can’t know for sure.  At first read, the words are in synchrony with the cover.  A lot of love, a love of blood.  Gritty, gorgeous.  You’re right again, you.

You know I’ve loved like that.  You know how I love, and you know just how fuggin’ sad that can get.  It isn’t bottomless, this pit that I’ve let you see.  It’s a quarry in coastalMaine, where the young go to swim.  There are signs there warning that it’s very deep.  That people drown here.

Those who drown are those trying to touch the bottom.  I wonder what goes through their heads as they realize, not without a little panic, a little sadness, a little frustration, that this hole is deeper than they thought.  That this constitutes a serious miscalculation; and might carry serious consequences.  I wonder what they think or feel as the terror slides into acceptance slides into the blurry turning gray, turning white, turning off.

I think:  they get the closest to the core of the earth.  They die on the ascent.  They die rising, floating, weightless.  Dancing ghosts who were minutes ago young men, with lives they were supposed to live.  The quarry swallows them up.  Those young men:  stand-ins for my relations.

I would let my lovers in, and they would think it was a swimming hole in Vermont:  a ten foot jump and your feet touch the bottom.  Okay, no big deal, excited that I took the plunge.  I know you better now.  But no:  it’s that Oh shit moment, seeing the rays of light, the blurry, wavy legs of the other swimmers waiting eagerly for these young men to brag about how far down they went.  Those are the last images that they see as these young men, my relations, gulp in water when what they need is air.  They die on the way back up.  They die moments before the bodies breach.  They go without a whimper.  An apology, maybe.  A dammit, Jeff, maybe.

Back to the cover:  I want, in a way, to be that man who we assume has stunning features.  I think, as I take the 1 train up to 86^th, that I sometimes want a bloody thumb, that it’s been over a year since I drew blood on purpose, but less than a month since I wanted to, since I wanted to go down the quarry myself, since I wanted to bring the insides out.  Intestines on the carpet floor.  Maybe I’ll die sitting seiza.  Without the blood and guts you’d think I was meditating or serene.  And maybe, in a way, I would be.

As fortune would have it, I would have blood on my hand by the time I disembarked.  It was on my index finger which had been happily scratching my ear.  I stopped when it felt wet.  I inspected my finger and sniffed it.  I looked at the cover and smiled.  I thought:  well, the boy’s still got it in him.  Good.  I also think:  I think you’d appreciate this.

This is how you say you get it.  This is how you say Don’t do it.  This is how you say I’m here.

You say:  Listen.  Listen well.

And then you show me something you know I’ll like, you know I’ll need again and again.  A bible for the abandoned, for those who said no to gods.

You say Listen.  Every time.  Every time.  I’m leaning in close.  I’m cupping my ears.

{To J.S., again}