FIVE

I’ve a long history of putting my thoughts to paper on my mother’s birthday.  Ten-twenty-three.  When I was a child, I could not, for a time, remember if it was the twenty-first or twenty-third.  

“Just remember turd,” she said.  “Twenty-third.  Rhymes with turd.”

So, I suppose, began the poetic aspect of my career in words and letters.  

This year, particularly plain in my mind is the suicide note I wrote on ten twenty-third of 2014.  It was a laundry list, really, of all of the people who raped me and all of the ways she gas-lighted me into believing it was okay.  I’m being very, very, literal here.  It was full of white-powder Heroin and misogyny.  Those were the “olden” days of street drugs, though, and only the misogyny was spiked with Fentanyl then.  Still, to this day, I have never had anything as good.  

I dream about it.

On good nights.

The place was an abandoned funeral home in Utica.  I was down to my last gallon of drinking water from the Dollar General a few blocks away.  There wasn’t any food; and, the things I did to fill my time, I did not want to do anymore.  I was sleeping on an ancient piece of foam rubber on the floor with the Amish country (made in China) quilts I had bought for myself on a holiday with other social workers who counted the ability to purchase such things as measures of their success and belonging in a certain, lower, strata that, nevertheless, included such things as memory foam mattresses and running water.  Another life.  I was already dead.

“What’s your favorite number?”

“What?”

“Your favorite number, shit-for-brains.  WHAT IS IT?”

“Nine?”

(Innocuous enough, like the last name of my sweet, naive high school boyfriend, who, naturally enough, turned out to be gay)

“NO IT’S NOTYOU DUMB FUCKING BITCH.  It’s FIVE.  Your FAVORITE MOTHER FUCKING NUMBER is FIVE.”

Many days, I would go up to the third floor.  There was a room up there that was almost pristine within the general decay of the place overall.  A white limestone fireplace was on one side, and an oriental rug with bright colors was in front of it.  It would have made a beautiful sitting room in a real place to live.  A floor to ceiling window looked out on the street.  I could sit in front of the window all day, feeling like I really lived in this place.  I watched the traffic, and the homeless folks with their large plastic bags, and around three to three-thirty, the school kids.  On very rare occasions, one of them would look up and see me, then grab the arms of their friends and point upward, mouth in a wide O.  They would quickly look away and run, assuming, mostly correct, that I was one of the ghosts known to haunt the towering structure on the corner with the peeling gray paint.

Other times, I would go to one of the cemeteries and photograph the tombstones of the old Italian families that had settled this crumbling industrial town in better times.  They were beautiful, really.  Some had fully detailed statues of forgotten patron saints on top of them.  One day, I took a photograph of St. Pascale looking as though he was pulling down the wrath of the ages from the sky with his upraised right hand and pointing finger.  Later, at the McDonald’s where I often went for dollar burgers and free internet, I learned that he is only the patron saint of cooks.

The twenty-third falls five days after the eighteenth.  October 18 has seemed like a bit of ground zero for much of this particular trip.  It was the anniversary of my first, disastrous marriage, which was the origin of the phrase “cunt face”, still reserved by me for those who revile me the most.   Make me feel like I am being ground into the cheap berber carpet of a midwestern college town apartment while you rip out pieces of my hair and slam your elbow into the side of my face, screaming at me that I WILL incubate your disgusting semen until it takes the form of your drippy nosed, grimy fingered, progeny, if that is your wish.  

Yes, if you make me feel like that, I will call you a cunt-face.  Your shock and revulsion at such a wantonly crude insult will (sometimes, momentarily) fill the the empty hole in the center of my chest. 

“IT’S FIVE YOU CUNT-FACED BITCH.  Your FAVORITE FUCKING CUNT-FACED NUBMER is FIVE, GOD DAMMIT.”

The eighteenth of October marks also the birthdays of two subsequent, significant, lovers of mine, one of whom echoes significantly less than the first husband.  The other one, well, he whispers low, but insidious.  

“You have a life, but it is not much of a life.”

“You could compete better in the job market if you were thinner.”

“I didn’t know you were THAT crazy.”

These days, mercifully, he is periodically silent.  

“WHAT IS YOUR MOTHER FUCKING FAVORITE CUNT-FACED NUMBER?”

I made my list of rapes on my mother’s birthday in 2014.  I added a few other assorted grievances and called it a suicide note.  I reviewed my exit plan.  I reviewed also my assets, which included the gallon of water, the Amish quilts, my ability to command words and make them do somersaults and hang from a trapeze if that should be my bidding, a working vehicle, and a possibly-working credit card, among negligible others.  Still, a lot of privilege to go before I walk directly in the shoes of most of my people.  I went up to the third floor and mentally checked the fuck out until twenty-five.

On twenty-five, the possibility of the credit card morphed into the reality of a full tank of gas.  I put my filthy quilts in the trunk and drove away.  Three-hundred miles and another tank of gas.  A real meal, for the first time in several days. God damned if I don’t still love Denny’s for their six dollar breakfast combinations that come with LITERALLY ALL THE FOOD GROUPS.  It was twenty-five.  It was one of those rare days when the ravenous hole in my soul was easily filled with protein, carbs and a huge glass of orange juice (THAT DID NOT COST EXTRA!).  

God, I was SO thirsty.  

It was twenty-five and almost twenty-six, and five-hundred miles totally, when I washed the mold of the abandoned funeral home and the grime of Utica’s dead factories off of my still-living skin in a $49 motel room.  

Turd.  Twenty-third.  Seventeen.

Yesterday, I did almost nothing.  I was good, settled among my pillows, reclined, medicated, connected slightly to the outside world.  I had the digitalized company of two women activist friends on and off throughout the day.  These women, one from the UK and one from its revision, New England, they are as fucking solid and enduring as St. Pasquale.  

Every time I tried to get up, the pain started a bit to the left at the base of my spine.  It radiated outward to the farthest part of my pelvic bone and hip joint before it took a sharp turn southward and landed in my knee.  From my knee, it followed gravity and continued into each small bone and joint in my foot and ankle, making me want to roll outward onto the side of my foot.  I felt and moved much like a hermit crab who has put herself inside a shell that is too heavy on one side.  When I could, I leaned my right side against walls and held onto things when things were available to hold.  

These days, the only thing I can sometimes do is make myself comfortable.  The piles of cushions.  The soft, worn, quilts, clean now.  Medical grade to smoke and some pills that become some powder that then becomes yet something else again, periodically effective against the pain, but not always, and never enough to let me walk completely upright with my head high when that particular pain comes.  It’s best not to try.  Sometimes, when I get the recipe just right, the voices completely and totally stop screaming at me how I’m wrong about numbers for a few hours.    

This is nobody’s cunt-faced recovery story. 

©2017 @MildlyDysthymic