dead fingers

One thing is sometimes I need to shut everything out. I don’t do a good job of keeping unimportant people at a distance and all of their demands pile up until I just close entirely down.

I don’t like not sleeping well of course. But when I am tired there is safety in it. When I am well rested and very relaxed I sometimes get vivid and uncomfortable physical sensations. The feeling of some sort of inanimate and cold object, like a dead human hand, being pushed inside of me. It doesn’t hurt so much as burn, but more importantly, leaves me feeling inexplicably devastated and alarmed. So the calm is broken. I tell myself it is not important, there is nothing really happening but when it happens it seems the realest thing of all.

It doesn't bleed into the other parts of my life but stays contained, anchoring my other secret world through shame and grief. I don't talk about it because I don't want it to define me.

Eicophobia

I am not a fearful person?
Mostly friends ask me if I thought through what I was doing because it seemed risky to them. I answer yes - I’ll go anywhere alone at night in any country, repel cliffs without a proper harness, ride a bicycle hundreds of miles with no helmet or light and dart through traffic using only my peripheral vision.

How surprising and messy it is then that I am the most fear-filled person of all.

Because I am persistently afraid of my home. Not of houses or your home.
Mine.
The home I live in.

It is not something I think about. I did not, riding the subway home this evening think, OH FUCK NOT HOME. Rather, I was looking forward to returning to some work and eating some frozen yogurt (vanilla).

I wish it was something I thought.

I push through my front door and put on my indoor flip-flop shoes. Slowly the burning ache in my back, gone for most of the evening, hums awake. I put away groceries. My eyes and temples begin to sink and grow with my heartbeat. I boil a kettle for tea and put away dishes. I have to stop for a minute and work hard to find a full breath.

What, I thought, do I do. Where, I wonder, do I go. Because anywhere I go, if I stay there long enough, becomes home.

And then I remember living in my car long ago as if it is some type of answer and not a cause.

Wait to Weight

Here’s a secret: my father isn’t dead. He is waiting for me. He is a presence I carry around with me and when something good or bad happens he sees. I can’t see what he looks like. I can’t hear him. But he is always around, on my periphery.

He is waiting for me. He has been waiting and waiting.

My mother is Jennifer Connely’s nose and cheeks and Barbara Hershey’s hands and chin.
She is pieces of actresses from horror movies I find comforting to watch and think about.

He still waits. He told me to wait for him. He would never let me go. No matter what. And so I wait too. We wait together in orbit of each other, close but not seeing.

I can’t make us stop waiting. I can’t disassemble my Hollywood mother. But I can do other things.

I can run every day. I can stay thin enough to see all the ribs join my sternum. I can excise all the variety and excitement out of life and eat, drink and fold in exactly the same ways for a decade.

When the wait is over, when my mother is an average woman. When.