vore-right sweven
my mama, existential bears, and cherry blossoms.
On the full moon, my mother and I go out and tag everything we can with the stickers that her friends made. She’s not my enemy. I know I’m only half-alive because I can’t remember why I ever thought that in the first place— I had reasons, I know that, but I can’t recall what they were. Maybe she was cruel. Well, so was I. Now she’s probably the only friend I have, which is a little sad, but this is a good time to be pathetic, isn’t it? Twenty-one and floating through the world like a drowning bug. It’s got to be a little sad before it can get better.
There’s a stop sign on each corner of this intersection. My mother unfolds the old stepladder we brought with us— most of the paint has been eaten by rust, and it lets out an awful wail every time it moves— and gestures to me. Up you go, she says, and I do. She hands me an anti-ICE sticker. I put the sticker on the stop sign and get down. She folds up the stepladder and off we go once again, onto the next stop sign. Traffic drips by. It’s quiet at this time of night. We aren’t talking much because we don’t need to. I keep looking up at the dark sky; it can’t decide whether to rain or not, and neither can I. I’ve got a whole vault of words inside me, ones that wouldn’t necessarily ruin our relationship but would certainly shift the energy between us. Or they wouldn’t. I don’t know what’s worse. I suddenly feel very young.
There’s a fire hydrant beneath the final stop sign. I tell my mother not to bother with the stepladder. She sighs and pulls it out anyway. You know, she says, you’re really the one that won’t do well in the world. You’d think it’d be your sibling— they’re so nervous all the time, so chatty— but it’s really you. You don’t have any self-preservation.
It’s not unkind. She’s saying it factually, almost bordering on concerned. And she’s right, too, because this is something much bigger than trying to balance on a fire hydrant to put a sticker up— this is years of not wearing seatbelts and walking down dark alleys and generally doing what I want, consequences be damned. It’s not that I can’t conceptualize danger; it’s that I don’t think I care. I don’t know why that is. Maybe I don’t think I can die. Maybe I just have such a strange concept of death that the gravity of potentially dying can’t reach me.
I promise I’m smarter than I look when it comes to that sort of thing, I say.
I’m not worried about you being smart, she replies. I’m worried about you not giving a shit.
We walk towards the main road— a congregation of high-visibility telephone poles and signs awaits. Every time I walk next to someone, I feel like we should be arm-in-arm. Every time my mother is nice to me, I want to call her mama even though I’ve never called her that, not even when I was a little kid. I watch her slap a bright blue FUCK NAZIS sticker on the back of a pole. Yes, that’s my mama. There she is. Even when I wanted to be as far away from her as I could, I still thought she was terribly beautiful, like a Valkyrie or an Amazon. I know that there are places in my heart that will be a child forever and this is one of them. It’s fine. I accepted a long time ago that even if I grow up, I’ll still never be a Grown Up.
Two days later, I tell her that my therapist has recommended that I find an inpatient program and stay there for at least a month. She has questions, of course she does, but first she smiles at me without really smiling and says, oh, I always thought it was going to happen to you. And I guess that’s my mama. There she is.
The new physician has an office in a beautiful, old building and reminds me strangely of Paul McCartney— it has something to do with the tilt of his feet when he crosses his legs, I think. He wears an untailored button-down shirt with fitted, tapered slacks and patterned socks. There’s a fluidity to him, too; it’s just enough to make him seem displaced in the stolid polished stone of the building. With all of that happening simultaneously, the lines of his body feel vaguely anachronistic, for lack of a better term. He seems like a fish who lives in a boat. I am not as suspicious of him as I am of other male doctors because I see him in soft, fleshy scales when I close my eyes.
Paul McCartney tells me to imagine encountering a bear in the woods. Here’s what happens, he says. Your body recognizes the threat and immediately readjusts to accommodate it. There are physical changes that happen— things like your digestive system, which requires a lot of energy and blood to run, are less prioritized while things like your large muscles, lungs, and heart get more blood flow so you can fight or escape if you need to. The more evolved aspects of your nervous system are also less prioritized. The parts of your brain that deal with nuance and social connection stop working at full capacity. Your perceived options narrow down to fighting, fleeing, or freezing. That’s why, when people are under stress or dealing with trauma, we see symptoms like anxiety, depression, stomach issues, isolation, black-and-white thinking, etcetera. And we’ve built this world so quickly that we haven’t adapted to it yet. There is no living person who is not overwhelmed by it, but some people are just more sensitive than others. Evolution has designed us to be safe; safety means recognizing that there’s a bear in front of you. But the bear never goes away, not here, so we can either curl up and let it hurt us or we can try to manage.
He sighs. Uncrosses and recrosses his legs in the other direction. One patterned sock in a slim loafer floats over the other and lands pointing towards the ground. There’s a big window to the right of the armchairs where we sit, and I watch the light ride along the reflective leather of his shoe. I wonder if he can see where my eyes are. I’ve got sunglasses on, but that doesn’t always mean I’m hidden.
We’re not trying to fix you because it’s not about that, Paul McCartney says. There’s a specific reason you evolved this way— it’s counterintuitive to try and deprogram millions of years of human experience. The goal is to give you a toolbox to make that bear easier to manage, because there is a bear, but that doesn’t mean you should have a terrible quality of life.
He stays in his chair. It’s not about where he is physically in the room, although that is a factor— he’s just not trying to push himself outside of the bounds of his chair. I don’t know what words to use to make it understandable. His scales flutter like tiny wings but they stay close to his body. There is no vortex or aggressive, penetrative force. He’s just sitting in the chair. He only shifts within himself. I don’t know what to say. I don’t know what to do with my hands. Every time he asks me a question, I can tell that I’m hitting the ball way too hard but I don’t know what else to do if I’m not swinging that bat with everything I have. So we sit across from each other in these matching blue armchairs— my mother sits to my left in a spare office chair, silent and bearing witness to everything I’ll probably forget— and volley questions back and forth. Question, answer, follow-up question, answer. He asks me if I’m happy with being that way, I say yes or no, he leaves it alone. He’s not even trying to sniff me out. I don’t know what to do with myself.
When the appointment ends, my mother and I walk down the endless marble staircase and out into the street. It’s a whirl of life. It’s everything I don’t like but probably need. I can hear dozens of layers of alarms and sirens and car horns overlapping, curling into each other until everything is atonal and numb. Light flings itself off the windows of tall buildings. It smells almost unbearably of exhaust fumes. And I can’t tell you what’s coming over me— there’s something heavy and weightless, like drowning or jumping off a cliff or dying in a dream, and it’s a curtain closing on my head. The end. Exit stage right. An invisible tether must be pulling me toward the car, because I’m not really walking. I might be a balloon tied to nothing in particular. Sometimes I wish I could be awake but then I change my mind.
And there, at the crux of it all, is the bear. The unbearable bear. It sits across from me with its mouth open so wide that I can see the ridges of its throat, salivating at the opportunity to take a chunk out of me. I’m not mad about it; I know it’s not personal. The bear is hungry and I happen to be right in its path. No, I’m not alone on the path— I’m far from the only person here— but the bear is very, very hungry, so it’s just going to eat us all. There’s nothing to do. It’s stupid and sad and terribly frustrating and I want to sit down and cry or drive very fast or bang my head against a wall until I can’t see anymore. Manage or not manage. Cope or die. I wish it could be that simple for all of us. I really do. My soul feels achy and tired. It’s probably because wishes actually are horses, and as someone with a bad habit of begging, there’s a whole herd of them running on my heart. They sound like roses being burned alive.
A man is sitting on the curb near the car, his head in his hands. His coat and headphones look expensive and well-loved. He’s not crying; he just stares at the ground like a dead soldier, hard mouth and empty eyes. I see it on him like a stain. He could be my brother. He is my brother, in feeling if not in blood.
All these darlings, I say to my mother, and now me.
You’re not making much sense, honey, she says kindly, and we leave it at that.
Here’s what I do— am doing— will be doing: I’m touching things with my hands whenever possible, because I think I forgot how sensitive fingertips are. The only things more sensitive than my fingertips are my lips and my tongue, which are so responsive that they can feel the pores in my skin, so obviously I’m also using my mouth when I can. I quickly notice that my hands are perpetually clammy. Most of the time, I can lift a piece of paper just by putting my palm on it for a few seconds, which is an exciting discovery. I write poems about nothing in particular just because I can. I try to play jazz standards on the piano. I make a new mixtape. I draw a red angel on a playing card— the Ace of Diamonds, which means something different in my head than it does in reality— and use that as the cover art. And I don’t go out very often, but when I do, I try to pay attention. The cherry trees are blooming. The flowers are thin and fading because it’s far too early in the season and they didn’t have enough time to ripen. A streetlamp blew out a few blocks down, and someone replaced it with a big floodlight that leaves a pool of gold cooling on the sidewalk. I put the knuckle of my thumb in my mouth and trace the bend with my tongue. I guess I’m alive.
Mostly, I’m cold. I couldn’t tell you why. I know that feeling for me means sensation more than emotion, but it’s still a strange way to be in the world— strange, of course, doesn’t necessarily mean unique. There’s no new way of feeling, after all. In the meantime, I’m reaching for language that feels right, which means I end up quoting a lot of poetry. I suppose what I’m really trying to do is live like a toddler— God knows I’m putting enough random objects in my mouth to accomplish that— and that means I’m rooting for description in its battle against efficiency. I’ve found that Dorset1 is good for this. Several of the fairytales I read as a child used Dorset words, so I make an effort to incorporate more of it into my thoughts. Berries become blood beads. Being left alone is being loneleft. Cobwebs are wevvets, so of course spiders are wevvet queens. It feels like a feeling and I can’t help but love it.
I’m stumbling around with my sticky hands and big eyes and constantly chattering teeth no matter how many sweaters I put on. I’m throwing away the words that don’t say what they mean. I’m eating a lot of peanut butter. It’s not hard at all to feel very small, as if I’m inside a massive, beautiful snow globe or at the foot of an ocean. I want to swallow rocks like a loon; I want to get the world inside me, or to get myself inside the world, or some secret other thing. I think the Dorset term for that is ether-hunger. Apparently, it’s common in dying people. It means nothing good for me.
Basically, I’m frightened. I think. It has to be the cold. I walked into the night in my new hand-me-down dress and it didn’t even feel like anything because it was already in my bones. I’m totally surrounded by precious stones, you know. Milchi pearls cover me entirely. I’m a lucky, lucky girl. And how long will it be this way? How long is the beauty going to last? Will they discover my gemstones and put me on medication that takes them away? Most of the songs on the mixtape I made are about feeling bad and wanting to change and self destruction— all of them except for the last song, which is just a love song. Because I wanted there to be hope. Because I keep putting things in my mouth, hair clips and bits of skin and the edges of bottles, successfully childlike. Because I’m probably frightened.
Oh, well. I could talk myself to the end of the world trying to unheal some ultimately irrelevant cosmic truth, but there will be time for conversation later. Things are shifting on the border of feeling. I know they’re moving around outside of me, just beyond my reach. I’m not worried. It’s different than being frightened, so I’m not. Don’t look at me. Don’t touch me. Don’t ask me why. I’m biding my time until the bear comes— he’s the only one for me. I feel very cold. Not long, now. I’ll be less scared and less reckless and less distant in the next life. For now, there’s a rock in my mouth and shining objects being held in my head. I’ve got my headphones on; here comes the love song at the bottom of Pandora’s Box. Unray I for en. Unray I for en.
Wikipedia’s glossary of words in the Dorset dialect— a top tier Wikipedia article, frankly. There’s some really good ones here (especially the ones pertaining to sheep).