"Portions for foxes"
The beginning of this week is largely lost time for me, a handful of days that I remember in disjointed moments, shutter-flash images of places I went and things I saw. This happens sometimes: I focus more on the inside of my skull than the outside, and they switch places in my hierarchy of realities. Here are a few Polaroids from that stretch.
Driving down the steep road into Chagrin Falls, which is like entering the setting of Calvin & Hobbes (which it is!) by way of a rollercoaster.
The enormous lakeside estates of Bratenahl, and the way that driving through them feels like entering another world entirely. There are signs identifying the servants’ entrances. There’s enough wild woodland to make you forget that anywhere else exists, as you wind past gatehouse after gatehouse. You could spend months there without ever leaving. I’ve never found the idea of self-imposed isolation particularly appealing, which is of course very ironic now.
The snow that fell on Friday, sticking on tree branches and rooftops, whiting out the sky as if it was November again. I love the snow; it’s one of my favorite things about Ohio. Winter is my favorite season, when everything is stripped down to essentials, bare trees and lake ice, and it’s easier for me to see the world’s bones, who people are in the scarce times, what is and isn’t true.
The house by very early daylight, as I walked around conducting my usual morning rituals and watering our plants, feeding the sourdough starter that lives on top of our fridge, measuring out coffee.
Thursday was where I started to lose the thread, following trains of thought a little too far and starting to lose track of the way back. Friday was when I started waking up an hour earlier than usual, which was already an hour and a half before the alarm I set as a matter of habit, and haunting my own mornings. On Sunday, rain rolled in to replace the snow, and I took an unexpected hour-long semi-nap, as often happens when the air pressure changes or when — as in this case, I think — I chase my own thoughts around in a circle for so long, and so upsettingly, that some area of my brain stem decides to try turning the computer off and on again, so to speak.
I know I did things in the meantime, because that’s what I always do. I wrote 2,500 words about — something. I read a few books. One of them was Northwood, by Maryse Meijer. There were some other books, which I won’t name because I didn’t enjoy them. I chopped a bundle of ramps to infuse oil, which will help stretch their season for a few extra months. Time passed. I waited. Eventually, I found my way back out.
On Monday, I realized that it was my abuser’s birthday. They are still alive, and no longer sick. This is ironic, because they are 65 now, just one day into being part of a more vulnerable age group. How I feel about that is complicated, needless to say. I have spent so much of my life hoping that this person, someone who has demonstrated an inability to change, will nevertheless find it in themselves to do so. Other people have told me that my abuser knows what they did was wrong, and regrets it. Allegedly, anyway: I’ve never gotten an apology myself.
Once, when I was trying to work out whether or not I ever wanted to speak to my abuser again, Dylan asked me a particularly useful question, which was: What would you want from this person in order for that to happen?
Normally it takes me a few minutes (at least) to figure out what I’m feeling, especially when it’s a matter of what I want. This is one of the most lingering aftereffects of my abuse, that I had to teach myself not only how to discern what I want but how to want in general. It’s a complicated mental trick that I can’t explain now, because it’s impossible to describe, beyond language. It took a long time, and I’m still not great at it. I still find myself wanting the way I did as a child, when it was acceptable because I was much smaller and easier to physically control, before it became an undesirable symptom of my (equally undesirable) increasing autonomy. I still have difficulty taking my own wants, as opposed to needs, seriously.
“What would you want in order to have a relationship with them,” Dylan asked me, meaning what conditions would I need fulfilled in order to believe that I could approach this person in good faith, and in order to demonstrate that they were doing the same, and the answer was twenty fucking years of my life back.
My abuser loved (and still loves, I assume) poetry. At their behest, I remember reading some of the work attributed to Omar Khayyam (translated by Edward FitzGerald) when I was still that child with a wide-open heart.
The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,
Moves on: nor all thy Piety nor Wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,
Nor all thy Tears wash out a Word of it.
We never get time back. It passes and it is gone, and this has been the same for everyone who has ever lived and it will be the same for everyone who ever will. I am still angry about those decades, and I will probably always be angry about them, and none of that will bring them back, or buy me more time to fill in their place. Sometimes it feels like I spend just as much time as I’ve lost trying to piece together those missing weeks and months and years, trying to figure out who I was then so I can see whether I’m the same person now. It’s important to me to live in a way that does justice to whoever I was. As hard as it is for me to be kind to myself in the present, I have much less difficulty loving the person I used to be — the person who survived long enough for me to be here, right now.
I always wish there was some way to talk to whoever I used to be. Not just EMDR, which I haven’t done but purports to give patients the ability to reenter those places in their own mind where traumatic memories play over and over again like multi-media exhibits in a museum and re-experience them from their vantage point in the future, but something a little more literal. (Personally I already find it all too easy to slip from the outside world into the inside one.) I always wish I had been kinder to myself.
The answer, I know, is to take steps so that some future version of myself has fewer regrets about what is the present now, but will one day be the past. The wheel never stops turning; the moving finger never stops writing. The camera keeps clicking. If you listen for it, sometimes, you can hear the faint echo of the past getting further away and the future getting closer, one moment at a time.
—R.