five years

pharmacy lines, brain damage, and an incoming storm.

I give up on Valentine’s Day. And I think that might be something I say every Valentine’s Day, possibly because Lent being right around the corner puts me in the mood for release, but I digress. Nothing makes me feel dirty like Valentine’s Day. I couldn’t tell you why. I’m not prone to feeling dirty; never have been, likely never will be. Somehow, that all changes once you surround me with pink and red and heart-shaped objects. Maybe it’s because believing in that fairy tale, saccharine-type love also means you have to choke down the fact you’ve been denied it— no sweetheart candies or love notes or boxes of chocolates for you, bunny. Last time I checked, though, I didn’t believe in it. I’ve never had the privilege of being able to hold that belief. In that case, maybe I’m bothered by other people’s faith. Maybe I’m jealous. Maybe it would’ve been nice to have had the kind of life where you can genuinely believe that some stranger you see at the grocery store could be your soulmate, not someone who sees you as background at best and a toy or a whore or a freak at worst.

Whatever way you want to slice it, I realized that a wardrobe almost solely consisting of knee-length skirts and modest sweaters means that I really do get to keep my body for myself. I am the only person who sees my skin. And I don’t have to do anything that I don’t want to do— no shaving, no sex, no doctor’s appointments where I need to show up in a bikini, no nothing. It’s my skin and my hair and my choice. And isn’t it so disconcerting when something obvious continues to be a revelation?

It’s not only that the right to bodily autonomy feels obvious, but that it’s also been firmly incorporated into my belief system for literal years, and I just forgot it also applies to me. I guess it’s hard to practice what you preach when you’ve spent your entire life viewing your body as an access point for other people. If you want to talk to me, you have to go through the body. If you want to touch me, you have to touch the body, and maybe I’ll feel it, too. If you want to hit me, the closest you can get to that is hitting the body. She is me but I am not her. It’s extra difficult, too, when the incorporeal parts of you are treated disdainfully because they’re the only thing preventing someone else from having access to your body.

So I’m giving up, at least until I forget that there’s something to give up on and fall back into old patterns— shaving my inner thighs even when no one will see or comment on it, letting other people treat me like some sort of doll, consenting to sex I don’t really want for cigarette money or just to keep the peace. I don’t even know exactly what I’m giving up. Unwanted things, maybe. The idea of winning, probably, because I should know by now that there’s no winning. The only way to win peace is by completely restructuring society. For now, all you can do is what you want.

I’m really only thinking about this because I have to pick up my prescriptions— they’re still experimenting with how many antidepressants they can give me without making me detonate like a bomb— and it looks like a Hallmark card threw up all over the pharmacy. And I feel dirty. I stand in line in my skirt and sweater and long coat and tall boots, almost all my skin neatly tucked away, and I feel dirty. Ruined is a good word for it, too. The pills should probably be helping with that, shouldn’t they? I don’t have the energy to parse it out. The hum of the fluorescents and my constant accompaniment of white noise are drowning it all out. I give up. I fucking give up. Oh, well.

---

Have you considered, my therapist asks, that you had a traumatic birth? When I don’t say anything, she continues: from what you’ve described, the static in your thoughts and that you don’t really remember sound… I don’t know, it just made me think of birth-related trauma. And it’s been like that for as long as you can remember, right?

Yes, I say.

Do you know your— your birth story?

I was choked, I say. Strangled. The umbilical cord wrapped around my neck and I was dead, but I came back. I’ve been told that my skin was blue and my eyes were red, but that could also be from how fast I came out— apparently, it took like five minutes for me to leave my mother’s body once she started pushing.

On the other side of the screen, I can hear her writing something down. That sounds like it definitely could’ve been traumatic, she says. Maybe we should look into that.

Right, I say, and we say our thank yous and our goodbyes and I close my laptop and watch the information— that very early in my life it might have already been too late, that I could’ve just come out all twisted up and crooked— scatter like buckshot. I find a grain of it, roll it around, cover it in nacre and turn it into a pearl. There are so many things that could’ve caused all the dead air in my head. Maybe it was this. It could go either way.

Later, in the kitchen: my therapist says I might have birth-related trauma, I tell my mother.

She sighs, not bothering to look up from the pan she’s scrubbing out. It wasn’t even that traumatic, she says. Your heart barely stopped. The doctors untangled you and you were fine.

I don’t say anything. I know that the narrative in her head can’t be changed without evidence that I don’t have. There’s no point in wasting breath on arguing.

I watch as she shifts on her feet, trying to get comfortable. She broke a toe again recently, and I know it must hurt, but she refuses to rest it. And you were such a happy child, she says, tone bordering on mournful. So sweet and cuddly.

Right, I say. It’s not that I don’t believe her, because I know there’s some truth to it, but it’s nowhere near the full story. Selective hearing. A perfect child— no perpetual lying, no violent outbursts, no pulling out other kids’ teeth on the playground— means that something went wrong, and if something went wrong, it can be fixed. Or something like that. I’m not privy to the reason why the narrative exists. I’ve been told any memories of my childhood are none of my business.

And what else is there to do? I walk out of the kitchen because I don’t want to be there anymore. The clouds have turned the sky into a flat white sheet. If I could, I’d float up and wrap myself in a corner of it, but I can’t. I can’t do it. I hold my little pearl up to the light, considering it, turning it this way and that way. Maybe. Maybe. Then I put it in my jewelry box— all the other little pearls I’ve agitated over and stored away— and I don’t think about it again, because I’m a big girl and I know when something’s just not going to happen.

---

I know when something is going to happen, too, and that’s something older than big-girl-ism because I never had to learn how to do it. It’s always been there. You find yourself sharing a dream with someone, predicting neighbors’ deaths by accident, seeing moments of the future while asleep— sure, why not? The universe and the human brain are strange places. The world will come into you if you leave yourself open to it, because belief makes almost anything possible. Yeah, sure. With all the weird, unexplainable things that have happened to me, it’s impressive that I’m somehow still a skeptic.

My parents leave for a four day couples’ counseling retreat. I have a dream that I don’t remember, but I know what it means— I’ve spent a decade watching a long train coming and now it’s almost arrived. There is going to be a shift. No future is entirely set in stone, but the divorce of my parents has just locked itself into place and nothing except for a miracle will pop it back out of the joint. I couldn’t give less of a fuck about their relationship or any desires to ‘keep the family together’, so good riddance on that factor, but there’s a material change coming with it that I know I’m going to hate. Housing, finances, emotional needs. If my father makes me drag him out of his darkness and act as his sole light, I’m going to hit him. At least my mother isn’t interested in enacting a kamikaze routine.

It occurs to me that sometime soon, I’m going to see my childhood bedroom for the last time. I’ve lived in this house for twenty years. Eventually, I’m never going to be able to come back to it. My blood under the floorboards. My drawings on the walls. All my secrets tucked into loose wall panels, built-in drawers, written on ceilings and then painted over. The feeling of the house— and the feeling of my entire life, pretty much— will become inaccessible, put on the market and sold off. What is it about permanent goodbyes that makes you hold on even harder? When my first dog died, I hid his shed fur in my pockets for days. Didn’t tell anyone. Didn’t let it go. What can I take from this house except for fallible memories?

Okay, I decide. Nothing has happened or even been confirmed yet. Feelings are also fallible and shouldn’t be taken as fact, even if I tend to be right about these things. I observe the emotion from afar, see that it’s a big, choking wallop of grief, and say okay. I am alone in the house. This is a relatively secure position. I will give myself 24 hours to walk headfirst into the storm, and then I’ll release it and it’ll leave. It will almost certainly come back, but the important part is that it’ll leave for now. So that’s exactly what I do. I wait until noon and then let it hit me.

This kind of sorrow looks like scrubbing the kitchen from top to bottom, stress baking, smoking on the porch, laying down in the grass and letting the rain hit me, smoking again in the bath while I wait for my teeth to stop chattering— it’s fucking cold out and I don’t regret getting myself rained on, but I’ll be damned if my bones didn’t feel frozen for a long time after— scrubbing the bathroom from top to bottom, laying on the floor and listening to the heating creak to life, doing enough food prep to last me the entire time my parents are gone, barely remembering to eat despite that, opening every single window in the house once the rain stops, and then sitting in bed in my great-grandmother’s fur parka as the house slowly cools into oblivion. The sun set a while ago. I don’t wear the parka often because it’s over seventy years old and I worry about fucking up the beading on the cuffs or irreparably dirtying the fur, but it feels apt right now. Don’t ask me why. The whole point of this exercise is to follow feelings without trying to rationalize or explain them. Feeling wanted something cold, full, clean, and nostalgic; I gave it cold, full, clean, and nostalgic. The storm will be satisfied.

I don’t fall asleep with the windows open, but it’s a near thing, and I don’t bother turning the heating on. When I wake up the next morning, it’s raining again and the house is so cold that I can see my breath in the air. It’s like she went to sleep right beside me. She’s my friend and I love her, and when I wake her up again, it’s very gentle. We listen to the rain and the hum of the city together. I still have a few hours until I officially have to leave the storm, and I spend them eating real food, because the only protein I’ve eaten in the last few days has been peanut butter, and listening to a David Bowie record. The end of Rock ‘n’ Roll Suicide almost makes me cry; Five Years the second time around definitely does. It’s not surprising.

My parents come home a few days later. The shadows that typically ride on my father’s shoulders aren’t there, or at least aren’t as strong. He’s polite to my mother in a way he isn’t usually. I wonder if I might be wrong about the divorce, if they’ve somehow decided to stay together and stick it through, until I see my mother. She moves like she’s chainless. That, more than her actually telling me that she’ll be divorcing him (which he doesn’t know yet so he can keep working on himself without getting eaten by darkness), confirms it for me. She asks me if I have any questions and I say that I don’t. Everything will be revealed at the right time.

So yes, there is going to be another storm. I’m not worried. I know I’ll survive it— I was born to live through these sorts of things, even if I really was born crooked and somehow got ruined and dirty along the way. Yes, there is going to be another storm, and it’s going to be terrible. Aren’t I lucky that I’m so good with rain?