Now, okay, I didn’t think that any of my projects in quarantine would be easy. But this one is something that I didn’t anticipate to be so hard.
I’ve been writing a memoir- a collection of short stories surrounding the most pertinent part of my life: grief. I’ve had to grieve and grieve and grieve, and then move on once again until I hit patch of redescribing pain. I had to grieve my autonomy and normalcy of good health- I had to learn to walk again, and went from being a kid to being a toddler again to becoming an adult far too quickly.
I had to grieve my first love when I realised love was not the only thing a relationship needed. Isn’t that always the way? You know something, like you can regurgitate the meaning of it, but you don’t need to think about it too much. Then, once reality hits, the cliche actually has substance. I had to grieve the fact that you can love someone so deeply and wholly, and know that they did you wrong.
I had to grieve and grieve and grieve when I was hit 3 times in a row with suicide. Below the belt hits without a referee to stop the violence. I wrote about what it was to grieve people that you thought would go on to be amazing presences in your life. And, that’s the thing, they are presences. But, not ones that you can touch, and hug, and love. Ones that you can think, and try to capture the memory of on paper, before their inkstained thoughts fade away in the wash of time.
I had to grieve my own innocence and my own security. Going from one toxic relationship to another, even worse toxic relationship. It takes away the idea that people who say they love you really do. I changed myself so fundamentally for these boys that when I got back to being myself, I felt like I was doing something wrong. Something Illegal. Taboo. I was told I would never be loved if it wasn’t by him. I was told I didn’t love him enough. The real issues were that:
He was a manipulative bully who wanted power.
I trusted him because he wasn’t always that way to me before.
I didn’t love myself.
I believed him when he was lying, and even when I knew it was false, I preferred to give him the benefit of the doubt.
My trauma did teach me that I am not at fault for the way people refused to love me. I will only be happy when I am happy with myself, and I am getting to that point. I’m making things and doing things and feeling better.
The issue I’ve run into this last month with my trauma is the fact that, in writing these short segments of grief, I’ve worn myself thin. I can feel my threads run and pull further and further apart, seeing how much light can get through the stitching before I rip. I’m having minor anxiety attacks from writing this stuff out. I don’t know if it’s because I am worried about people reading it and seeing something so personal. I don’t know if it’s because I can’t remember the parts that have hurt me the most. The brain is a brilliant and idiotic organ. I can remember the details of every night with my best friend, but I can’t remember how I ended up in the ER. I can’t remember the color of my wheelchair, and I can’t remember the faces of the doctors.
Last night, my mom found the hospital band she had to wear while I was admitted. I asked her where mine was. She said I threw it away when I was 6. I don’t remember seeing it or ever having it. I threw away part of what I remembered. I threw away the evidence of getting through this.
I’ve postponed my writing for now- I have around 26,000 words, and that is a really big achievement for me. However, I’ve felt sort of weird about it all. Since NaNoWriMo is all about starting on Nov. 1st with a fresh idea and writing 50,000 words by the 31st, I have been speedrunning through my past. I haven’t been writing at the caliber I know I can, or that I would be proud of. The words aren’t distinctive. The phrases aren’t right. It’s just as blurry as the memory itself. I want to extend my timeline into January- focusing on writing smaller amounts each day, but doing it consistently.
In this blog, I’m going to include a little excerpt from what I do have right now. This is about my hospital stay and what I can remember: The first time I remember falling into someone’s arms, without cause or abandon, it was 3 AM, and I was 6. Time seems to flow like water in a glass. I can watch it run over the sides, but as more falls away and covers my hands, I can tell you less and less about its shape and quantity. I think it was 3 AM. Realistically, it was anywhere between 12 and 3. After I had told my mother that I was ready to go home. That waiting in that green room wasn’t doing me any good, and that I was fine. I was fine.
Tell that to the doctor overseeing the entire emergency room. To him, I was a corpse with a heartbeat and a serious balance problem. When my mother and I were first admitted to the emergency room, we were taken back to have some basic tests done by a nurse. Or at the very least, if she wasn’t a burse, she was just someone who didn’t really deal with seeing a kid die right in front of her eyes. I wonder if it was one of her first shifts alone. Or if she was the type to hand off mortality to someone more experienced. She hadn’t dealt with death, because if she had, I wouldn’t have been able to make out my reflection in the whites of her eyes when she watched me. I wouldn’t have seen my long legs and skinny arms reflected in the brown of her iris. I would’ve seen a slight smile, and I would’ve watched the unforgiving knuckles of time crease a little deeper into her forehead. I would’ve seen calm and pity. I saw fear.
She said she’d be just a minute.
As everyone in America knows, if someone says,
“The doctor will see you shortly!”
It means the doctor will see you when he/she/they damn well please to. They will see you after a coffee break. They will see you after 5 or 10 others. They will see you when they see you. I never knew a doctor could run in that long coat. I thought they wore them for show when I was little, as a way to look professional and proper in front of all their other doctor friends. I didn’t know that people would sweat in those things. I didn’t know that white was the worst at hiding sweat marks. Giant stains of adrenaline and curiosity, I didn’t know that it would turn yellow.
Everything I describe to you has been run through years of the wash. My brain still shuts me out of what I can’t deal with. My brain still tells me no when I walk too far into the idea of death. I can feel the pressure of my own bones ni my skin, wanting out. I can feel that my side tenses up, like I’ve been laying in that damn bed for so long that I can’t remember what it’s like to stand. I can’t remember what it’s like to stand because I can’t. If I tell you what people look like, and those people don’t exist, don’t blame me. Blame the fact that I’ve superimposed less painful ideas into my gallery of death, and this is the first time I’m letting the public in.
The head of the ER came in. A tall, bald man, with brown hair falling around his ears. A beard. A rounded one, making his face an oval. A long nose, but so flat at the tip. Eyes that, if you saw them for just a moment in the fluorescent light of the hospital bed, you’d see they weren’t as brown as they were gold. A man who would be the first to tell me I was dying. A this point, I know I had had blood drawn and an IV in. According to my mother, I almost murdered a phlebotomist, but I remember it far differently. I remember that blood is more maroon than red, and the more that gets put into a syringe, the darker it gets. Like stacking paper. The more you put, the less light gets in. Even holding that paper blood well into the sky, with the clouds of beige ceiling floating with it, tapping it to get the air out, I couldn’t see through it. I don’t remember the phlebotomist. I think he was young and cute? Maybe I wanted him to be so he felt less like a blood theif and more like a hero.
But the ER man was different. I had nothing to fight. He had me stand up. Was I in scrubs or pajamas? Where were my toys? When did I get tubes in and did I really have them now? He looked at me, in the eyes. He crouched. When did he get to my level? Why won’t the room take a moment and breathe with me and not against me? Why are the walls taking all of the air before I get a chance to?
“Hi, Natalie. Can you do something for me?”
I nod.
“Can you close your eyes. Just close them.”
I close my eyes.
I fall.
He stands me up.
"Okay. Can you do it again?”
I fall.
“And one more time.”
I fall.
I can’t remember falling. I remember being caught, without cause or abandon. I remember being caught as if I fell forward, backward, and to the side. I crawled back into bed. Now, when I dance, I always jump too high. I jump so much higher than the instructors do. I, for a moment, tell gravity to push and not pull. Sometimes I think my body forgets to fall because it doesn’t want to be caught again.
“She’s relying on visual cues to support herself.”
“That’s why I brought you in here, doctor, I didn’t know what it could be.”
“What’s wrong? What’s wrong with her?”
I knew something was wrong, but the problem was that I couldn’t tell them about it. I didn’t know how to say that I was unsteady and felt my legs wobble, but I couldn’t feel that I was feeling. I sat back. Sometimes I see the sheets as pale blue. Sometimes white, with little knotted flowers. Sometimes grey. I don't’ remember sheets being changed. I don’t remember people coming in to make it feel like home. I just remember being, and I remember changes. I don’t know how they both existed, or if one of them was just an idea that I had to make myself feel better. I just remember that somehow, in how I can see the projector screen in my head, that is the way it is.
Comments