Some losses are so big that you can’t even cry. Or you cry and you can’t feel. Or you feel but you can’t compute. If you compute you wish you were too daft to see the thousands of connecting consequences. Some losses are so big that they defy the logical steps of grieving and you jump straight from shock to insanity. In the past eleven years – seven years – six months – three weeks, all of the above, I have vacillated between all states of grieving. I held what I cherished, or the idea of it at least, in my hands and watched in slowly leak between my fingers until all that remained were the sticky remnants a death I couldn’t delay. Talking about it fixes nothing. Neither does spending money, but lately I’ve chosen the latter. I’ve given up on a human who failed me and taken to things that can’t.
I can afford to do that these days, medicate myself with mustard tunics and television stands. I can level this back-country carnival of emotions out on my credit cards, and watch me. My creditors thank me for it, actually. Every day a new credit card offer arrives in the mail. I am beginning to wonder if they know something I don’t. Can they see that there are more spiral cut french fried roads in my future? If I load my wagon down with enough crap, I might just stay on the road, eh? I’d buy an anvil, but I already have one.
Maybe that’s it, an epiphany in the midst of my meandering thoughts. I have carried someone’s baggage, since I was a teenager, before maybe. Every man I’ve ever dated loaded down my wagon with so much that I never had a void to inspect. Before those men it was my dad and before my dad I lived without care. Now that I am loosed of their things, their sufferings, the constant gut-punching of their acrid existences, I am left feeling like I’ve lost something integral. An arm? Can you buy an arm on Amazon?
I’m in a type of neither-world. This is not the place you go after death, nor is it the place you go in life. It’s the place where you sit quietly on the porch, your PTSD slowly inching away but still well within biting distance. This is the place you go for neither joy nor sadness. I just accidentally inhaled cinnamon, but in this place, your senses are just a hair above mute. Mace me and I may blink. People have tried to join me here, but the door isn’t well defined. You can be a foot away, but you cannot sit with me in the neither-world. It takes years of sifting through garbage days, finding things less redeemable by the minute, for you to reach the bottom where your hopes and dreams have withered into some perverse monument of what will never be. You find your joy, a mangled twisted mess of corrosion. You toss it aside, you lift your dead dreams away, cast to the heap, and then suddenly you have found the floor and in it a door to the neither-world. It takes all remaining strength to wrench the door loose. You claw at it, the beds of your nails bleed, hands crack, face contorts and it is not until your tears have swept away the seal of dirt that the door gives way and with it, your ability to feel anything.
I don’t really know what to do here, though I’ve been here before. Every face looks strange, every word seems empty. I am perched high above my life, now seeing how small it all really is. Someone out there is looking for me, but I can’t be found. Someone is calling me, but my voice has taken leave. I suppose I am the undead, and it feels dangerous.
Some people don’t know what they want, so they spend years wandering down every alley looking for a thing they might not recognize. Some people want what they aren’t willing to work for, others what they don’t understand and couldn’t appreciate. For me, it’s so simple. All I wanted was to have, as an adult, the family, the home, the type of secure cloaking that I didn’t have as a child. I wanted a quiet study, a neatly decorated hearth, warm sweaters, a man who would grow with me, or better yet, a man who would inspire me to grow with him. I wanted that for my children too, to avoid instilling within them a sense that everyone in the world is unreliable. I guess I want magic, but the kind found in cozy low lit corners instead of well choreographed movies. And even as the undead, I still believe.
I don’t know the way out of this place. I’m feeling blindly for the door, calling out silently to all things for a way, a psychic embrace, a tether to the outside. To my hearth.
The Reprobate's Guide to Pancakes 