THOSE WHO SUFFER LOVE
We spend all afternoon in a lesser department store, comparing overpriced toasters. She has to buy cheese knives for her mother, but I don't even know what those are. I just point out everything that looks like a sex toy, constantly question the necessity of egg cups. She is getting glamorous. I mean it, she looks really beautiful. I am getting more childish, and I've got pink hair and a mini skirt, and I've spent all night tearing my skin to pieces and haven't slept in a week and a half.
She's concerned, I can tell, when I talk about him. God, again. It's not like it before. I've been drunk four nights out of five. I go to therapy, come out full of sunshine. I have to renegotiate boundaries, but he feels safe and present again.
It's 3AM, I'm still drunk, well, not drunk, but halfway there, almost, nearly. It never makes me fall asleep, it just winds me up tighter. He brought me a bag of sleeping pills but they didn't work. I asked for a valium, but he knows better than that, and just bought me another beer.
Sometimes transitions feel really slow. I feel like I've been waiting. Things feel like they've just changed really quickly. Not into the next chapter, but maybe a prologue. We're almost there. Everyone is suddenly transitional, we all lost our grounding. The ground got pulled out from all of us. No grad school, no job, no girlfriend, and then me- No anything, really. I'm probably leaving the country again.
When I sit in therapy, I am the only one who can only talk about my relation to other people. I never talk about myself alone, just myself in relation to the people in my life. This always sticks out. I talk about James endlessly, mostly out of habit, and I talk about my mother. I cry because Kelly moved to Paris. I talk about sitting at Ross's kitchen table. I talk about feeling reconnected with Milena, I talk about my grandfather, my father, my grandmother, my sister. I talk about them at length. I talk about myself at length, but just my anxieties over them, and- more nerve-wrackingly- over people who have not yet become manifest. You know what I mean. They're still in the wings, but I can't figure out how to bring them out on stage.
I make dumb jokes that only the doctors think are funny, rattle with frenetic energy. I have both arms looped around the back of my folding chair, tapping on the metal arms, I fidget constantly. I have a paper cup of coffee with me, a bottle of diet coke, a pack of gum.
They never have any answers, but it doesn't matter.
I ask them how to fix me without opening the Pandora's box. They don't know. Sometimes I say really heavy stuff. I get averted eyes.
I walk home in the rain. Well, halfway to the bus, then I get off two stops early to buy coral lipgloss and a salad from the shops. My hair is slick to my face, my mascara is running. It was sunny when I left, I should have figured.
I go home, strip off several soaked layers, crawl into bed. It's only five o clock. I don't sleep, but sit, itching and impatient, waiting for what I do not know how to beckon in----