I feel the slow seeping, the pallid slip of a silhouette on the window, like three hundred spiders bursting outward from some unseen campground. I swirl into a blanket, tuck the edges in around my toes, feel the thunder distort my chest, my breathing, my heartbeat. Heartthud. Heartfall. I spend thirty minutes consulting a knot in the wood of the ceiling. Darkness creeps in all around me and I taste blood in my throat, feel my eyes get heavy. I wonder about unhappiness, about writing, about separation, and about the inevitability of the severance of my level mental state. How long have I kept this at bay? How many months, how many years?
Today I needed a bit of scratch paper to jot down a bank routing number. In desperation, I pulled out a journal I failed to keep for more than a month in the fall of 2006. There was a sketch of my first boyfriend there, with the caption: What I like about you: your unwavering prejudice in my favor.
Unwavering prejudice in my favor. Nick Carraway said that of Jay Gatsby. I didn’t even make it up.
I sat there on the phone with the bank teller, who kept reading off numbers and I kept writing Your unwavering prejudice in my favor, until she hung up on me and I had to call back and start the whole ordeal over. Spiders were skidding out from every page of every word I had ever written. Menaces, dirty-limbed and mangy, creeping up along my forearms and spine like little marauders of faithless and brute intellectual superiority. Faithless and brute intellectual superiority. What a lifeless marmalade of insulting crap.
I don’t wonder if I am feeling tortured, or lost, or distorted. No. Instead, I feel myself conceding to the other side of me, the one which does not smile like a cavalier, whom doesn’t toss out jaunty phrases of half-navigated wit. No. Instead, the side with pulled apart hangnails, like open coffins, stony and bare, sitting cross-legged on the floor and proclaiming in horror, “She wants every minute! She means to take it all!”
And with blurred and feverish vision, I’ll stalk off into neighbor’s garden, peevishly pulling at vines and brambles until my mother finds me, hours later, in the front yard with scrapes all down my thighs, on my back and reading some book while clutching a fistful of what looks suspiciously like Poison Oak.
“What is that?” She’ll ask. And I’ll stare.
It will look like rain for the fourth day in a row. Heat lightning will stretch its skeletal fingers above our heads. The lunar howling of far-off dogs will follow her inside, and I’ll watch the distorted finger stroking above, the velvet of the clouds. And when the first raindrop falls, it will feel instead that I was catapulted into it, and that each subsequent droplet will shock me like some obstacle I could not avoid, and therefore deserved.
emollience
