Memoir section 22: "Winter Light"
Dec. 6th, 2012 01:40 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
violetcheetahThe last section:
The first change I noticed was when the guilt went missing. It was a normal morning, waking, lying for nearly an hour under the covers, my eyes open, wide, staring in fear at the door I would have to go through when I got up. I don't remember if I was crying, just that I told myself to stop it, get up, get it over with, stop being stupid and lazy and self-indulgent. Michele was at work — it was probably 10 in the morning — and I stood in the kitchen trying to decide between cereal and toast for breakfast. I didn't want anything, was never hungry, only ate because if I didn't my stomach burned. It didn't burn now, but it would in an hour if I didn't eat soon. I weighed the two options, tried to figure out which was least unappealing. But I dreaded both, not being able to quite taste them, chewing and swallowing something I couldn't taste. I had to eat something, but I couldn't eat anything. I was frozen in place as the world spun past me; I was tired and slow and stupid and I couldn't grab onto a solution. I was crying, too hard to stand, so I sat in the middle of the large kitchen, unable to even crawl to rest against the stove or fridge or cabinets, adrift in the middle of the sea of tiles, pathetic, a child having a meltdown in a grocery store, snot running over my lip, why was I doing this?
It hurts.
The yelling in my head paused. The sudden silence made me think I'd burst my eardrums by crying so hard.
I hurt. This was true. This was real. I wasn't pretending; I wasn't trying to get attention. It hurt, just as sharp as a sliver of glass in my foot. It wasn't melodrama: No one can will themselves to walk with glass inside. I wasn't doing anything wrong. It was obvious now; how was it that I'd never seen it before?
I crawled the five feet to the stove and sat against it. When I could stand, I got Cocoa Puffs from the pantry and poured milk over them and chewed and swallowed. I didn't try to taste them; it wasn't important now.
A few days later, the words started returning. It was a month into the term, and I had written nothing for my picture-book workshop. I had a story, something that had been in my head for seven years, but when I tried to put words down, it always scattered into disjointed bits. I had had the blank file on my computer for months. One chore I tried to do every day was open a Word file, just open it and look at the text or lack of text. I had stopped pushing to actually write anything, or edit, or even read a paragraph and understand it; I just opened the document.
On this day, I woke up hearing a sentence. "Long ago, the trees stayed green all year." It didn't excite me; it was just a sentence, bland and familiar, repeating in my head like a lyric from a pop song. Nothing special, but better than nothing. I lay in bed for a while like I always did, but I wasn't thinking about the long day spread before me. I wasn't really thinking at all, just saying the sentence in my head until I had to concentrate to remember that it had meaning. I got up without thinking about it. I made toast, just butter, no jam; I didn't notice whether I could taste it or not. I went to the living room and sat and opened my laptop, reflexively, forgetting to dread the motion itself or the emptiness on the screen. I typed the sentence. Then I typed, "They kept their leaves throughout the cold winter."
I wrote about a late spring and a late planting, something I'd never known was in the story. I hadn't known the elders worried as early as the summer, or that they pretended things were fine when they knew the little girl was listening. But I had always known what came after: fear, begging, sacrifice, grief, the certainty that all is lost. There is always that certainty before the whisper of hope, and then the glorious rebirth. I had always known the trees would return in the spring. Today I wrote it. I didn't feel it, but I wrote it anyway.
When I stopped, I felt flat again, dead. I started to reread it, but the words were as lifeless as I was. I closed the laptop and fought back tears and fought the urge to delete it all. They were words. It was a complete assignment. It didn't matter if it sucked, it was complete. I kept the laptop closed until night, when I wrote to my shrink about writing, and then more.
i feel alone. not lonely, but cut off from everything, from people and from meaning. like purpose was a person. im afraid that its always going to be this way, feeling alone and meaningless. im afraid of another day.
im afraid that i mean nothing. im afraid to think about it or feel it because i might find out im right, that im meaningless, ill know it for certain. i know you say it wont kill me, but im not able to believe you all the way. if i know it certain enough, i might kill myself.
I was shaking, terror crawling over me. I might kill myself. I might die. I didn't want to die. I didn't want to hurt like this, but I didn't want to stop being alive, I wanted to revise this picture book, make it better, it could be good. And the novel, I couldn't just leave Jake and his sister where I'd left them. I wanted to write something that would bring hope to someone as hopeless as I was. I wanted to make someone feel something, feel alive. I wanted to know if the violets had lived, and that would be half a year from now. I didn't want to die without knowing.
The next two weeks were like that all the time: not just hurting, but seeing that I was hurting. I watched myself from outside like I always had, but something was different. I tried to explain to my shrink, "She's still a character in a movie, but it's a well-written movie, or directed well, or something. So I forget it's a movie, and I hurt with her."
"You empathize."
"But that's stupid. People don't empathize with themselves."
He shrugged. "Ehn, it's a start." My eyes jerked up to his face. He was struggling to hide a mocking smile, and it sliced me like a razor across my breastbone. I yanked my gaze away, but something about his eyes drew me back. It wasn't mockery he was hiding: It was joy. He was genuinely pleased. Watching his face, I suddenly remembered the phone call weeks before, his voice saying, "I'm proud of you." Now I put my hands up to hide behind, but I was smiling, too, and then he laughed, deep with delight. I kept my hands up, but I laughed with him. It had been so long since I'd really felt him in the room with me. Since I'd been in the room with him. With anyone.
Time stopped hurting. It still took conscious effort to enjoy things, but if I concentrated, I could feel a looseness in my chest. Even better than moments of pleasure, though, I went stretches of time without feeling anything in particular. I was afraid I was cheating, dissociating, avoiding feeling, but there was no avalanche of anguish afterwards. I swept my room. I made a skirt. I wrote another picture book manuscript. I went from 10 or 15 hours at work a week to 15 or 20, occasionally 25; instead of crying when the printer jammed, I muttered litanies of curse words and threats while rebooting everything. I worked on another chapter of the novel, even though I didn't have to for a class. I still slept 10 hours a night, but I got up as soon as I woke up, because I was bored lying in bed.
The clocks fell back so I had an hour less light while I was awake. The sun was paler, but it seemed to glow bluer than it had in summer, cold and melancholy but less heavy, not dirty.
Then one night the weight returned. I was sitting in the chair in the living room, writing an email to a favorite professor from when I was an undergrad, turning a complex thought into words, and suddenly the light crushed me. My heart stopped. I looked around, and the room had the familiar, horrible tea-stained pall. It wasn't over. I wasn't fixed. I was back where I started, and I could not do it all again, could not pull myself back out a second time. I looked up at the overhead light like I used to when it first started, when I had thought the dimness wasn't coming from inside myself.
The light fixture held four 60-watt bulbs; only one was now lit. I stared until I burned a white spot in my field of vision, but it was only the one spot. The darkness wasn't in me; it was up there in three burned-out light bulbs. When I started breathing again, it was with a wheezing, hysterical giggle. My eyes watered, and I braced for the coming sobs. They never came, just more laughter, hot and real. In a few minutes I would stop giggling, get out the stepladder, and change the dead bulbs. And then I would get back to the email and finish my thought.
The first change I noticed was when the guilt went missing. It was a normal morning, waking, lying for nearly an hour under the covers, my eyes open, wide, staring in fear at the door I would have to go through when I got up. I don't remember if I was crying, just that I told myself to stop it, get up, get it over with, stop being stupid and lazy and self-indulgent. Michele was at work — it was probably 10 in the morning — and I stood in the kitchen trying to decide between cereal and toast for breakfast. I didn't want anything, was never hungry, only ate because if I didn't my stomach burned. It didn't burn now, but it would in an hour if I didn't eat soon. I weighed the two options, tried to figure out which was least unappealing. But I dreaded both, not being able to quite taste them, chewing and swallowing something I couldn't taste. I had to eat something, but I couldn't eat anything. I was frozen in place as the world spun past me; I was tired and slow and stupid and I couldn't grab onto a solution. I was crying, too hard to stand, so I sat in the middle of the large kitchen, unable to even crawl to rest against the stove or fridge or cabinets, adrift in the middle of the sea of tiles, pathetic, a child having a meltdown in a grocery store, snot running over my lip, why was I doing this?
It hurts.
The yelling in my head paused. The sudden silence made me think I'd burst my eardrums by crying so hard.
I hurt. This was true. This was real. I wasn't pretending; I wasn't trying to get attention. It hurt, just as sharp as a sliver of glass in my foot. It wasn't melodrama: No one can will themselves to walk with glass inside. I wasn't doing anything wrong. It was obvious now; how was it that I'd never seen it before?
I crawled the five feet to the stove and sat against it. When I could stand, I got Cocoa Puffs from the pantry and poured milk over them and chewed and swallowed. I didn't try to taste them; it wasn't important now.
A few days later, the words started returning. It was a month into the term, and I had written nothing for my picture-book workshop. I had a story, something that had been in my head for seven years, but when I tried to put words down, it always scattered into disjointed bits. I had had the blank file on my computer for months. One chore I tried to do every day was open a Word file, just open it and look at the text or lack of text. I had stopped pushing to actually write anything, or edit, or even read a paragraph and understand it; I just opened the document.
On this day, I woke up hearing a sentence. "Long ago, the trees stayed green all year." It didn't excite me; it was just a sentence, bland and familiar, repeating in my head like a lyric from a pop song. Nothing special, but better than nothing. I lay in bed for a while like I always did, but I wasn't thinking about the long day spread before me. I wasn't really thinking at all, just saying the sentence in my head until I had to concentrate to remember that it had meaning. I got up without thinking about it. I made toast, just butter, no jam; I didn't notice whether I could taste it or not. I went to the living room and sat and opened my laptop, reflexively, forgetting to dread the motion itself or the emptiness on the screen. I typed the sentence. Then I typed, "They kept their leaves throughout the cold winter."
I wrote about a late spring and a late planting, something I'd never known was in the story. I hadn't known the elders worried as early as the summer, or that they pretended things were fine when they knew the little girl was listening. But I had always known what came after: fear, begging, sacrifice, grief, the certainty that all is lost. There is always that certainty before the whisper of hope, and then the glorious rebirth. I had always known the trees would return in the spring. Today I wrote it. I didn't feel it, but I wrote it anyway.
When I stopped, I felt flat again, dead. I started to reread it, but the words were as lifeless as I was. I closed the laptop and fought back tears and fought the urge to delete it all. They were words. It was a complete assignment. It didn't matter if it sucked, it was complete. I kept the laptop closed until night, when I wrote to my shrink about writing, and then more.
i feel alone. not lonely, but cut off from everything, from people and from meaning. like purpose was a person. im afraid that its always going to be this way, feeling alone and meaningless. im afraid of another day.
im afraid that i mean nothing. im afraid to think about it or feel it because i might find out im right, that im meaningless, ill know it for certain. i know you say it wont kill me, but im not able to believe you all the way. if i know it certain enough, i might kill myself.
I was shaking, terror crawling over me. I might kill myself. I might die. I didn't want to die. I didn't want to hurt like this, but I didn't want to stop being alive, I wanted to revise this picture book, make it better, it could be good. And the novel, I couldn't just leave Jake and his sister where I'd left them. I wanted to write something that would bring hope to someone as hopeless as I was. I wanted to make someone feel something, feel alive. I wanted to know if the violets had lived, and that would be half a year from now. I didn't want to die without knowing.
The next two weeks were like that all the time: not just hurting, but seeing that I was hurting. I watched myself from outside like I always had, but something was different. I tried to explain to my shrink, "She's still a character in a movie, but it's a well-written movie, or directed well, or something. So I forget it's a movie, and I hurt with her."
"You empathize."
"But that's stupid. People don't empathize with themselves."
He shrugged. "Ehn, it's a start." My eyes jerked up to his face. He was struggling to hide a mocking smile, and it sliced me like a razor across my breastbone. I yanked my gaze away, but something about his eyes drew me back. It wasn't mockery he was hiding: It was joy. He was genuinely pleased. Watching his face, I suddenly remembered the phone call weeks before, his voice saying, "I'm proud of you." Now I put my hands up to hide behind, but I was smiling, too, and then he laughed, deep with delight. I kept my hands up, but I laughed with him. It had been so long since I'd really felt him in the room with me. Since I'd been in the room with him. With anyone.
Time stopped hurting. It still took conscious effort to enjoy things, but if I concentrated, I could feel a looseness in my chest. Even better than moments of pleasure, though, I went stretches of time without feeling anything in particular. I was afraid I was cheating, dissociating, avoiding feeling, but there was no avalanche of anguish afterwards. I swept my room. I made a skirt. I wrote another picture book manuscript. I went from 10 or 15 hours at work a week to 15 or 20, occasionally 25; instead of crying when the printer jammed, I muttered litanies of curse words and threats while rebooting everything. I worked on another chapter of the novel, even though I didn't have to for a class. I still slept 10 hours a night, but I got up as soon as I woke up, because I was bored lying in bed.
The clocks fell back so I had an hour less light while I was awake. The sun was paler, but it seemed to glow bluer than it had in summer, cold and melancholy but less heavy, not dirty.
Then one night the weight returned. I was sitting in the chair in the living room, writing an email to a favorite professor from when I was an undergrad, turning a complex thought into words, and suddenly the light crushed me. My heart stopped. I looked around, and the room had the familiar, horrible tea-stained pall. It wasn't over. I wasn't fixed. I was back where I started, and I could not do it all again, could not pull myself back out a second time. I looked up at the overhead light like I used to when it first started, when I had thought the dimness wasn't coming from inside myself.
The light fixture held four 60-watt bulbs; only one was now lit. I stared until I burned a white spot in my field of vision, but it was only the one spot. The darkness wasn't in me; it was up there in three burned-out light bulbs. When I started breathing again, it was with a wheezing, hysterical giggle. My eyes watered, and I braced for the coming sobs. They never came, just more laughter, hot and real. In a few minutes I would stop giggling, get out the stepladder, and change the dead bulbs. And then I would get back to the email and finish my thought.
