They ask me, do I like it, about the teaching. I am somewhere past the borderline, unwilling to report yet another thing I do not like. Another thing that fills me with anxiety and dread. Another thing that exploits me and sends me to the edge of explosion each time a boundary is tested. I am unwilling to report it, so I have stopped speaking to just about everyone.
I still have the uncanny ability to parse things, and with an unvarying degree of accuracy. I know who has stopped texting me late at night because my behavior in that relationship passed the limit of what he feels he can handle emotionally and sexually, and because I have weighted the madonna/whore dialectic too far in the whoring direction, even though he wallowed in me as I did. And he knows that I know this, and have no patience for hearing his archaic criticisms and too-vivid descriptions of his nervousness around “our” boundaries, the ones that are really only his. To his credit, he is silent.
Early Fall has passed into late Fall in the space of twenty-four hours. On Saturday, seventy degrees and beautiful. I sat on the patio in the light for a few hours and stared into nothing. Sometime overnight, snow fell, bringing down one big limb and one smaller one in the back yard. I picked them up and snapped them apart for the trash that comes on Monday, thinking of the relationships I have snapped apart as casually because I can no longer tolerate emotional intimacy of any kind. In the end, they fill the barrel and I put on the lid.
On Thanksgiving, I see one of the last of my comrades where she lives, in a nursing home for those with “behavioral health” concerns. I put her there myself almost a decade past. It was a choice between this and leaving her to die on the street. I imagined possibly worse things than dying might happen to her if left on her own. Quite vividly, I imagined these things. It seemed like the best thing. Those were not the same days that I spend now. They were days when I lived as a strong woman, defiant of my labels, capable and ready to make the hard and awful choices between one evil and another for those too confused to choose for themselves.
In those days, I would see her, my friend and comrade, and we would talk. She would tell me of the CIA operatives outside of her window, and the helicopters, especially the helicopters, that were coming for her. She asked me if I saw them and heard them. I said that I didn’t, but I saw and heard other things and she agreed we both saw and heard things the other didn’t. She was unhappy in those days.
My friend, like me, does not speak much anymore. She rides a wheelchair because she has fallen so many times, and wears a blue foam helmet in case it happens again. She is medicated, heavily, with Haldol now, in addition to the antidepressants, sedatives and atypical antipsychotics she has taken throughout her life. She no longer tells me what she sees and hears. I wonder if it is because the voices and visions are finally medicated away, or if it is just because her words made no difference in her own life, and because there was no one, really, to tell. She will go with me to the day room and lay her head in my lap for a time now, occasionally recounting vaguely about a time she fell. I cannot be sure if she means yesterday or several years ago.
After a time that is different for us all, it no longer matters when we last fell, or whether we see and hear the same things as those both beside us and passed away. There is a Thanksgiving of silence and we are grateful, or we are not.
©2015 @MildlyDysthymic
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