alza's ramblings

I find myself thinking about the past,
the memory of being trapped in the pit of my stomach,
a white light shining from above.
Like a room for interrogation, with questions
from me, to me,
“Why did you let it happen to you?”
Layers and layers of scar tissue compressed into a tight ball,
I pick at it, making sure it still hurts.
“Does it hurt? It should.”

My depression is like a tsunami:
a thick liquid engulfs my chest hungrily, choking my airways.
Molecules of vitality stay trapped behind an iron fortress.
They fight to get to the surface,
but the last time I was safe
I was 3, in mama’s arms and no one could touch me.

I forget about the resilience built into human beings all too easily,
evidenced by
my joy in dancing with boundless energy,
playing make-believe in trees,
sharing a laugh,
living.
I find comfort in coming home to myself every night,
knowing that I’m safe here, with me.

Tears hold my cells like hair frames a feather.

Fissures snake through ice,

and a piece of chalk breaks on the blackboard of my heart.

No matter, the music I hear crystallizes uncertainty into joy, joy, joy

Like a precipitate from solution

Or an artist’s vision executed perfectly in form and significance – difficult but not impossible.

Thoughts of a girl with Bulimia

Reflections are peculiar. You believe that the person staring you straight in the face is your own self. If you raise your hand, you expect your other self to raise hers too. You expect consistency. What happens when your reflection begins to ignore you?

An observer cannot tell if a person’s silence and stillness imply that inner life has slowed down or whether it has become engrossingly busy. You may say that I do not speak much, but I disagree. I speak captivatingly, but no one bothers to listen. I do not often speak with words. I speak with the movements of my body, with the lack of any words at all.

If you believe that speaking with words so very little is unhealthy, I can assure you, my mind has a voice that doesn’t shut up no matter how hard I push it away.  My life consists of a battle between a feeble inner voice that chokes and splutters forth weak words, and a dominant voice that doesn’t like to be questioned. My reflection has more control over my life than my physical body.

The reflection I see in mirrors, windows, and glass doors changes in shape, size, contrast, brightness, and colour, depending on the circumstances. My reflection is viscous, and mutable in its physicality. But when my reflection speaks to me, she has nothing new to say. Her thoughts have no meaning to me; they are thoughts that exist in a prearranged cycle: “You’re no good”, “You’re stupid”, “You’re fat”, “You’re ugly”.

Particular patterns of thought are attached to particular movements and activities. It is impossible to approach such a movement or activity without dislodging an avalanche of prethought thoughts. Thinking the first thought triggers the entire circuit. It’s like a sickness, first a sore throat, a stuffed nose and then a cough. These thoughts must have had meaning once; they must have meant what they said, but repetition has blunted them. They have become background music, a melody of self hatred.

I don’t know what beauty is anymore.

I sat on a long legged, cushion topped chair and watched two men bring their drinks together with a touch the way people do, and I saw them laugh as their drinks dived into the others’ glass. I thought it was beautiful. I don’t know what it is about laughter; it is an extraordinary thing to watch the force of it, the way it takes over a person. Laughter, I think, comes from the heart. I believe it arises from the heart because the heart is the origin of uncontainable feelings. One has to do it till they are done; it expends something out of the system, the way crying does. Laughter is more effortlessly exhausted, however.

There are hidden meanings beneath the surface of life, everyone is aware of that. There is cruelty, dread, regret and guilt, and so much loneliness. One may know a thing to its depths, and yet be uninformed of it. A woman may know her son, or her father, and there still might not be anything more between them than affection, faithfulness and mutual lack of understanding.

I sit on the stout leather chair at the edge of my balcony. I wonder what my father does with his time. It seems like only yesterday he was delicately inspecting the petal of a dew-stained orchid. I remember his hands to be plump, but gentle, loving. He often wore a faded yellow shirt that seemed to have absorbed stains of red earth, paint, and food; they refused to be removed even after several washes. I have a clear picture of his dark brown hair. It seemed bronze under the sun. The sweat that lined his brow made him look older, somehow kinder. He would sing in that deep, slow, off key voice of his, while pouring water from a bright red watering can as carefully as he would if he were pouring tea into a small mouthed cup.

On a particularly joyous day -the eve of my mother’s birthday- my father worked in the garden. I being all of thirteen years was his personal assistant. There stood a beautiful little bonsai tree, about one foot tall at the centre of the garden. He pruned it with utmost care, and so much focus and deliberation, that even when large droplets of rain began to fall he paid no heed to anything but the tree.

My mother was gifted the dwarf tree on her birthday.

I realised that my father knew almost nothing of my mother. He gifted her the tree with loving intention. It perhaps did not occur to him that mother hated nature, and it was he who loved it. Mother accepted the gift with a smile that did not reach her eyes. I long for a deep, fulfilling love yet I do not believe such a love exists save those in stories.

She was beautiful. Her hair the colour of ravens and her eyes aquamarine blue. Unlike mine, they had the warmth of a lucid blue swimming pool and wetness that licked your skin. Her skin was pale white, shocking against the gloom of her hair.

“Mother,” I said. Our eyes met, she smiled. Brackets on the sides of her mouth, a dimple on her right cheek, she was beautiful. The scar above her lip, she never smiled with her teeth. She didn’t like the way it looked; she resigned to a half smile, lips firmly shut. Her soft, sad, blue eyes held all the questions I wanted to be asked, but I wrapped my arms around her and buried my face in the crook of her neck.

“What is it?” she whispered.

“Come home,” I replied. It was a means for momentary easiness, temporary happiness. Mother never did come home; I knew she never would.

“I’ll be there before you know it,” she said.

I told her of the white wall in my toilet. “The upper half is painted with a startling tone of white, the lower with cream yellow. Can white really be startling?”

“Of course.”

I did not tell her that the light switches had their backs to my wall with dresses flowing outward. I did not tell her of the blood smeared above them. I could not find a suitable euphemism for blood. Can there even be a euphemism? I wore more than two but not many costumes just so that they would look at me. My body hurt.

“Mother, I don’t know myself anymore.”

“‘Depression’ is so underrated. Do you have any idea what it’s like to not want to get out of bed every morning, not wanting to go and deal with all the bullshit outside your bed? Do you even know what it feels like to feel completely alone while you know there are millions of miserable people just like you? How about what it’s like to be completely repulsed by things you used to love? To feel completely lost in the dark and not really knowing if there’s a way out? To not have the strength to feel like you can make it through the whole day, let alone the next one, without breaking down? To not be able to explain how you feel at all? To have everyone constantly asking if you’re okay until it gets to a point where no one asks, making you wonder if they don’t notice or just don’t care? To have no energy or drive to do anything? To feel completely worthless? To hate who you are and how you look? to feel like you have control over nothing? To know you don’t belong? To feel trapped inside a world full of ugly things but being scared of what’s on the other side? To be hurting constantly? To know there’s no one to save you from the way you feel? To know the only one who’s really hurting you is yourself?”

I was young, disheveled, not out of habitude but sentiment. People said too much and I heard too little. Burying my face in my silver, velvet bedcover gave me an escape. At a first touch it felt cool against my skin, but the heat would catch up all too soon and suffocate me the way my parents smothered me with guilt, and my friends touched me with deafening silence.

I’d felt this way since I was seven years old. I remember sitting in darkness, picking at my toenails and thinking, “I don’t feel very nice.” Summers were lonely; I ate, slept, and didn’t think much. The days ran into one another. My mind blotted out everything that used to matter. My biggest preoccupation was that I hated myself, and while I could elaborate on it, I don’t want to have my melody of self-hatred staring back at me in words.

It happened sometime in June. Everything unravelled before my eyes; everything fell apart. The pain of feeling nothing was replaced by the pain of seeing my world collapse. It only took one phone call to make me wish I could stop the whole ordeal of living. I know they say that good emerges out of the bad , and that no rough patch lasts forever. But there was me. I had lived a life so full of hatred, a life so wasteful.

I pressed the red button on my phone with the force of feeling so immensely disconsolate. I saw a thin, white towel sitting on the brown wicker chair near my desk. I did not give myself time to think twice, but rushed over to the towel, and grabbed a fistful of it. My heart ached in my chest. The pain travelled. It glided from my heart to the pits of my gut to my head to my heart again. I buried my face in the whiteness. The smell of detergent stroked my memory, yet the feeling of nostalgia never came. I let out a large sob, letting it shake my shoulders.

My decision was not well thought out. I decided it was the best step to take, and refused to think of it any further. I carefully lowered my palms from my face. Feeling more determined, I walked forward, and prevented the privileged access of any other thought. I raised one foot, and let it sink into the silver bed. My heel sunk deep into the depression; I stood up tall, and placed my other foot on the efflorescent silver. I lifted my arms above my head, with the towel clutched between my palms. The fan was too far up. I jumped off the bed, and hurried toward the book shelf. I yanked out several books at once; they fell on the floor with a noise loud enough for me to worry that I would wake my parents. Every book was on the floor except for one that I had managed to grasp. The title read “Gilead”.

The narrator is a very ill child. I haven’t specified the sickness because I feel like that would take away from the story.

      ICU means I see you. Nurse Mary tells me that this is a place for people who are hurt badly. I sleep a lot and when I don’t sleep Nurse Poophead pokes me with injections. I always shiver and cry when she puts injections. There is a tube coming out of my hand so Nurse Mary says I can’t get up because the tube will come out. “How should I do bathroom then?” I ask her, and she says “You’re wearing a diaper.” I hate wearing a diaper. Only babies wear a diaper.

     The nurses are mostly tall and mean. When I tell them there are frogs jumping on my bed they don’t take the frogs away. I hate frogs because they’re so yucky and scary but I also can’t push them away because if I move very much it hurts. Sometimes ants crawl on my hands and legs and they bite me but the nurses keep saying there’s no ants in my bed. 

     Dada and Mama are next to my bed when I get up sometimes. Dada brings orange ice cubes which are actually orange juice that he put in the fridge. When I was small me and Dada used to make so many flavours of ice cubes and they used to hurt my teeth and head when I ate them. Now he only makes orange ice cubes. It tastes like orange tastes after I brush my teeth. I don’t like talking because my head pains when I talk. I can’t move also because then the room moves. When I want a bite I open my mouth and Dada gives me a bite. Once when a black dog bit me it pained but now it pains more than that.

    I don’t eat food or drink water and I feel pukey mostly. I tell the nurse, “My teacher says that if you don’t eat you will die.” The nurse says, “See that tube on your hand? It gives you all the food and water you need.” There is a bag of water that the tube goes into but there’s no food in the bag. The nurse thinks I don’t know but I actually know. The nurse takes out the tube from my hand and I close my eyes or tears will come out. Then she puts the tube in again and I tell her I don’t like it. She doesn’t take out the tube so I cry loudly and say she is mean.

   When Mama is here she keeps crying and going outside. I ask Dada why Mama is so sad and Dada says she’s not sad she’s happy. Mama always says that I am her best friend in the whole world and we tell each other secrets. Dada isn’t Mama’s best friend so he doesn’t know she is sad.

    When Dada is only there I say, “Why does it pain?” “When can I go home?” “It smells bad Dada; there are frogs on my bed and the nurses don’t make them go.” “The nurses are rude and I hate them.” “You have to stay here Dada or I’ll cry.”

    Dada says he will be next to me always so I’m happy and go to sleep. I wake up but Dada is not there.