Still can’t find what keeps me here.
Never there. Never there. NEVER THERE.
So fucking empty. Who knows what’s real and what’s not, what’s past clawing back up the throat to sing the same barbed song again?
I want to help. I don’t see how I can, but I’ve been in that place, the black heart of the fire, the ice chamber, the cut-off zone where breath freezes in the lungs and no one hears you scream.
This girl is my sister’s partner’s little sister. She’s around the age I was when admitted to the inpatient unit, when the shit got real. The story is the same familiar routine, it makes me laugh and beg inside for something different, a change of scene, a shift in the script … Theatrical, creative, introvert, worrier, guilt-trip, frightened waif in the face of the world. Me, not me. Her, not her. Where do we start eating our own tails?
My older sister is going out of her mind with worry for this girl. As well she should; they all worry, but oh God they’re not afraid, as much as they should be. Terrified for her, when she goes out of the house for a powerwalk, after being made to eat three extra butterbeans on top of her fat-free tomato sauce. I know it so well, This path full of shattered glass, this clawing soul and dialed-down mind. That pain which can’t be articulated, except to wither the body down to a single point in time, when birth trauma is but one atom and you’re the next, into the grave.
It’s why my sister contacted me. Why she asks my advice, when I barely know how I’m still alive. Why I survived, and others didn’t. As I told her, it’s pot-luck. My body didn’t give out, when others did. Well, fuck me if fate doesn’t have a laugh coming on.
My head is so loud tonight. Not with old routines, not with that creeping daemon come to catch my eye and trap my mind again. Pity. Revulsion. Such deep-wading waters of sorrow, for another life taken by its foulness; for another child lost to her own darkness. For all we lost souls, wandering.
No one can save her but herself … and still, I hope to try. I hope to stop my own lamb screaming, if I can comfort hers.
And why the fuck should I care, why should I bother? Who wins in the end? The world gains one more human being back. Big deal. Too many of us as it is. I’m so tired of being here sometimes, it’s like staring into the blackest mirror and finding your eyes are the only reflection.
This pain is just too real.
In so little time, I have become a woman. In so many words and thoughts, I have learned love. Insofar as I know, I lost both in the space of a year. The lump in my chest grows larger, pains me more every day. I don’t know how much more I can take. Waiting lists are but one fact of life, with mosquito bites and politicians.
But I can’t not help, can’t turn my face away from the glaring fact that someone is, once again, tearing at my heart. Trying to gain my attention, when all I want to do most of the time, is disappear.
Why the fuck won’t the world let me go.
Because you’re not ready.
I was ready from the start.
You don’t know where beginnings end. I know you better than you think.
You don’t think; you feel, and steal away what I was owed.
You are owed, and owe the world nothing.
I am nothing.
You are nothing.
That makes us equal, at least.
So it goes. The song remains the same.
They need to fear it; they need to fear for her. Accept that she will die without intervention, that the chest pains won’t go away, that the food won’t magically disappear off her plate unless it’s into her hair, the flowerpot, the bin. Their family will tear itself apart with love and terror, and I see it all happening as a vainglorious parody of my life, ten years ago.
I can’t help as a professional. I can help as one from the other side.
That’s what this stupid thing called love is about, right. I’ve never met this girl, and I love her already, this tiny, frightened soul I know so well.
Daemons haven’t got shit on me. I will burn them.
Coma
Flowers on my windowsill
Pale and lifeless, cut
And steeped in old water
Their heads shun the light.
The scent of the lilies
Streaks my mind, lost
As it is in memories
With no hope of return.
This bed, my soft grave,
White as the skin
Which papers my bones,
Holds a memory alone.
celenagaia 