Abandon Me

by Melissa Febos

  The morning that camp began, my parents sat me down in the kitchen. They knew. The Captain had heard me and found a mess in the bathroom. They didn’t know what to do. They wanted me to explain. How could I? Would I have said that I was hungry? That the emptiness filled me? That the sickness was a cure? That I was burning up? I was eleven. I had been fine my whole life. I had never asked for help. I was helping myself.

  Why? he asked. He looked at me in confusion, and something like disgust. I don’t think that I disgusted him. I think he didn’t recognize me, saw something in me that scared him. I think he meant, Who are you?

  I had no answers. I didn’t want to go to baseball camp, but they insisted. He silently drove me to a green sprawl of fields from which I could see the ocean. I got out of the car and stood in that field. I covered my face with my glove and tasted the palm of its leather hand. I trailed behind the herd of boys as they corralled us from one station to the next. I scooped up grounders and caught flies. I watched those waves roll endlessly in, smashing on the shore.

  When I got to the pitching machine, I lifted my elbow and squinted and swung. Ball after ball, I aimed for that shore, for the ocean beyond. Each ball was a piñata of my body. Seven points for seven sins and a belly full of temptation. I smashed it to pieces, all that sweetness raining down over us like confetti. The boys cheered. They called me Mrs. Babe Ruth. The Home Run Queen.

  13

  The Texas airport was the smallest we’d met in—a single baggage carousel, where I waited for her in a pair of bright green pants. I was nervous, afraid that when I saw her, I would feel nothing. It had become a familiar fear, one that I felt in every airport. I called a close friend—Amit—an Israeli writer whom I trusted to always tell me the truth.

  What if I feel nothing this time? I said. You won’t, she assured me. She was the only friend I talked to about my new love, and I asked her the same questions over and over—what if she leaves? What if I can’t take this? She won’t, Amit said. You can.

  In the rental car we kissed and kissed. She put her hands on me and my hips went rocking. She laughed, There go those hips!

  I can’t help it, I said. They are like those windup teeth, they just go, chattering across the floor. She laughed again. Exactly. She loved her effect on me. It was romantic, or easy to see that way. I had loved before, but I had never known this mechanical insistence of my own body. It was a physical reaction absent of sense or control, its inertia unbound by consciousness. The dog that will eat until its stomach splits. The car that will drive itself off a cliff. The anorectic. The addict.

  Halfway to our remote destination, we pulled over on the side of the road and made love. The sky was bigger than any I’d seen, and the setting sun had streaked it pink—bright veins of lit neon, splayed over the desert, my leg on the dashboard. As she opened her mouth on me, the sky blurred. She didn’t ask me why I was crying, but pressed her hands against my face, my hair, my shaking shoulders. I am in love, I told myself.

  No lover had ever left me. I had spent enough years in therapy to know this was not something to brag about. I was far from perfect. I worked hard at my relationships. I loved a lot, but always a little less than my lovers. In the beginnings, I always knew that if someone left, it would be me. It always was. I worried the riddle: if I never love anyone who can hurt me, they never will. But what if I can never love those people enough to stay?

  The Imago Theory of relationships posits that we are born whole and complete, but are wounded during early stages of development by our primary caretakers. Deep in our unconscious mind, we form a composite image of all the positive and negative traits of those caretakers. This is the Imago. It is the blueprint of what we are looking for in love. It is the person who is capable of healing us, and of hurting us the most. We will reenact our childhood narratives until, if ever, we get a better ending.

  I understood this theory before I ever read about it. I understood that nearly every article about “choosing” a lover, about cataloging the qualities you look for in a spouse, was full of shit. We are never looking for someone with a good sense of humor or who likes children. No one is “good” in bed. At least, these are not the things that make us love them. Falling in love is always the fear and promise of being hurt, of being healed.

  According to Freud, cathexis (translated from the German besetzung, by James Strachey) is the investment of psychosexual energy in an object or person. It is the teddy bear. It is the wedding ring. It is art. It is story. It is every symbol. It is the projection on the lover that we call falling in love. Freud posed cathexis and de-cathexis as natural and necessary parts of development. But when the ego, or some other force, interrupts or blocks the process, a person can form alternate dynamics—addiction, reaction formation, neuroticism.

  M. Scott Peck, in his 1970s bestseller, The Road Less Traveled—a prominent spine on my mother’s bookshelf—defines love as “The will to extend one’s self for the purpose of nurturing one’s own or another’s spiritual growth.” Our fantasy of love is mere cathexis, he asserted. Love is not a feeling, a fever, or need; “Love is as love does.”

  Every pop song on the radio is an anthem to an Imago—the compulsive, consuming, devastating, regressive, mad attachment that goes all the way back to the beginning of us, to our oldest need, when love really was the thing that kept us alive. Most of these songs are more aptly addressed from a child to a parent or a parent to a child: “Sweet Child o’ Mine,” “Wrecking Ball,” “Bleeding Love,” “I Can’t Live Without Your Love,” “When Something Is Wrong with My Baby,” and on and on. Abandonment by a lover won’t kill us. But it awakens the parts of us that remember when it could.

  14

  My mother took me to meet Jon once. In eight years, he had never called, never written or sent a birthday card.

  His life then existed in a trailer beside his parents’ trailer in Florida, which felt, in summer, like the inside of a fevered mouth. His mother, my grandmother, was a year from dying. A large woman, she sat in a chair in her trailer, lap draped in an orange afghan, smoking. Everything in the trailer was yellowed with smoke, even her face and hands. She coughed—part rattle, part roar from the sticky depths of her big body—as if something were being dragged, or fighting its way out, as if a crow might flap from her mouth. Her gaze never wandered. She offered me chips and candy, things my mother didn’t keep in our home, and she watched me eat them.

  I almost forgot he was there. A man dark as the Captain, but smaller, blurry around the edges. When they suggested he play me a song, he led me up the metal stairs into his trailer. Here, he said, and handed me a stuffed monkey. He played a song, and I waited for him to finish. I thought, I should not be in this trailer with this stranger, with this strange man. When he smiled, I wanted to leave worst of all.

  Before my mother brought us back north, we saw an alligator. I remember the alligator better than I remember Jon. The way it lay there in the swampy shallows. The blinking eyes. If a small crowd hadn’t gathered to point, it would have gone unseen. With its algae-slick scales, it was exactly what should crawl out of those waters. With no fence between us, no double-thick glass terrarium walls, I thrilled at the proximity. It was only a degree of hunger between those teeth and me.

  15

  I brought Carl Jung’s Red Book to Texas in my suitcase. The size of a serving tray, it weighed at least fifteen pounds and I joked with my therapist mother about my heavy psychological baggage. My own therapist was a Jungian and would sometimes offer quotes of his. They always struck me as true, so I’d started reading him, which I hadn’t done since college.

  In 1913, after he and Freud had a falling out, Jung exiled himself for seven years. He dug into his own psyche in what he called a “confrontation with the unconscious,” and faced everything: his demons, his gods, his wounds, and his desires. During this time, he recorded his findings, translated his emotions into images. It took him sixteen years afterward to create the Liber Novus, the Red Book—205 pages o
f calligraphic text and full-color illustrations. All of the images were drawn by Jung’s own hand. At first look I felt that he’d drawn them for me. There is the Hekatonkheir, the Centimani with his hundred hands reaching, bent over backward with a snake’s tail. There are ouroboroi and spiraled mandalas and moon-glowed trees. There is a monster hidden beneath a boat at sea. The Red Book is the basis of all Jung’s future work—his theories of archetypes, the collective unconscious, and active imagination. In Memories, Dreams, Reflections he says: “That was the stuff and material for more than only one life. Everything later was merely the outer classification, scientific elaboration, and the integration into life. But the numinous beginning, which contained everything, was then.”

  As Amaia and I wandered around that dusty little town, stopping often to eat and chat with strangers, I thought about Jung. I thought about going back to the beginning. Most people dismissed Jung at the time. They thought he had lost his mind. That he had just suffered a seven-year nervous breakdown. A nervous breakdown is a coup of the psyche—forces that refuse to be repressed any longer. I have found it true: that what the mind refuses, the body will eventually take. But Jung was not a victim of his own repressed psyche. He made a choice to yield to it. He knew that exiling oneself to the desert of one’s own mind was a necessary kind of madness. It precluded nervous breakdown. Jung wanted to teach people about the Self, and he knew that he had to face the darkest parts of his own if he wanted to show anyone it could be done.

  I was no Carl Jung. I was a thirty-two-year-old writer in a long distance relationship. Who spent too much time on Facebook. But I also knew that having gone to the darkest places in myself and come back, that having written that story, was the most useful thing I’d ever done. I wasn’t going to disappear for seven years. But I was gathering courage. I was preparing to face something that I knew was going to hurt.

  16

  I dropped out of high school after freshman year to be my own teacher. The first thing I assigned myself was Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States. I read Bartolome de las Casas’s accounts of Columbus’s colonization of the Arawaks and the Captain’s Taino ancestors. I read of Spaniards drunk on power, riding the backs of natives like horses, slicing off pieces of their bodies to test the sharpness of blades, and beheading native children for sport.

  My mother had told me that I descended from the King Philip tribe of the Wampanoag. The man the English settlers called King Philip was Metacomet, and he led the Wampanoag in 1675, when King Philip’s War began. His father, Massasoit, was the Wampanoag leader who helped the pilgrims to survive. I never read his name in any textbook, but there is a community college near Brockton, Massachusetts, called Massasoit.

  His son, Metacomet, grew up watching his people decimated by disease and suffer the betrayals and brutalities of the colonists. After years of trying to sustain good relations, he led a revolt that ended on August 12, 1676, when he was drawn and quartered, ending a bloody two-year war. His decapitated head was displayed in Plymouth for twenty years. The few remaining Wampanoag, including Metacomet’s wife and children, were enslaved and sold in Bermuda, or placed in other tribes as captives and tribal members. The Wampanoag tribe, as well as the Narragansett, Podunk, Nipmuck, and others, was virtually eliminated.

  There were bumper stickers in our liberal town that read NO WAR. Even as a child, I was struck by the naïveté of such a sentiment. Who wanted war? War was what happened. War had won us our easy lives. Bumper stickers were a spoil of war. The luxury of denouncing war was a spoil of wars won. But this was different. This was a genocide that had been erased—not a secret, but a choice. What, I wondered, if the Nazis had won? I would have learned their glory in my history books. I might never have met a Jew, as I had never met an Indian, though they were the namesakes of the streets in my town, the beaches where I swam, the villages that surrounded us. I lay in my room and cried.

  I knew that I wasn’t any Indian princess. I wasn’t even an Indian. But Indian was something that had been given to me from the beginning. Just a word, a container for me to fill, or to fill with me. I knew that that history was part mine. That there was nothing to trust in this world.

  17

  In 2010, two weeks before my first book was published, Jon sent me a friend request on Facebook.

  Are you yourself? I asked.

  Yes I am, he said. Man this is amazing I’m so excited.

  A few hours later another message.

  Hi monkey, it said.

  Monkey was also a nickname that my then-girlfriend called me.

  Did you. Know I have a monkey tatoo.

  Two days later he wrote me again.

  Hi milissa.

  He offered to have his sister, Joan, send me a CD of his original songs.

  I gave him the address of my post office box but never received anything.

  At first, I didn’t tell anyone about our interaction. I felt embarrassed for both of us. What kind of man behaves like this? I didn’t know how I felt, or if I felt anything. I feared that if someone pitied me then I’d start pitying myself. I had always framed my story as a triumph, a lucky turn to have found my true father at two years old. The book I was about to publish was similar—a dark story, a story of self-destruction that had led to transformation. This was my life. First dark, then light. But the dark was my first instinct, and perhaps my truest. My worst fear was that it would always find me, that eventually, it would win. I had been lucky. But if I felt it—really felt it, if I let it in, if I let him in, I might never find my way out of it again.

  18

  Kissinger wrote that “History is the memory of states.” If that memory were recorded in my history textbooks and on the plaques of historical monuments, then where, I wondered, were the memories of the dead recorded? Where was the history of the people who survived them?

  The French philosopher Theodule Ribot, in his 1881 work, The Maladies of Memory, claimed memory’s location in the nervous system, and thusly of material nature. Henri Bergson, in his rebuttal to Ribot—Matter and Memory—made a distinction between practical memory and pure memory, the latter of which trades in “image remembrance.” Bergson believed that the more a spirit draws from this true memory, and exists in an awareness of the past in conjunction with the immediacy of bodily experience, the more conscious she becomes. Impulsivity, according to the philosopher, is the symptom of a person trapped in her corporeal present, accessing only her practical memory. Despite their contention, both philosophers support what I knew empirically by fifteen—to exist in my body, and to hold the memory of my history, was to be searingly awake. I was not awake. I had exiled large swathes of my history, and been denied others. I had spent long stretches of time divorced from my body. I was a piñata, rattling with impulse and temptation, reacting to forces whose origins were mysterious to me.

  My therapist once said, When we don’t react, something creative happens. She meant that we get to fully experience what happens. When we observe how the world affects us and let our defenses rest, when we consider the context of our greater history, we have an opportunity to act from our higher selves and perceptions. Not reacting gives us the agency to change. Or, in the famous words of Spanish philosopher George Santayana, Those who cannot remember the past are doomed to repeat it. To repeat their same reactions to it for all time, despite even self-annihilation. It was a truth I beat my head against even as a child. Why did self-knowledge not stop me from repeating the same painful acts? Why this insanity as Einstein defined it—the repetition of the same act with an expectation of a different result? The bondage of reaction is stronger even than that of self-preservation.

  Santayana also said that history is nothing but recorded and assisted memory. And that when experience is not retained, as among savages, infancy is perpetual. I don’t think he had the addict in mind when he wrote this, but I know no clearer proof than of that savage state. I don’t think he had the erased history of the Indigenous American or their p
erpetual subjugation by a reactive government in mind when he used the word savage, but it is appropriate in ways he did not intend.

  19

  In the small Texas town, the trains ran all day. Each morning, we woke at dawn and sat in an orange chair by the window to watch the sun rise, spill its mad colors across that enormous sky. Every sunrise was a carnival of color, to the soundtrack of those trains. They barreled across the desert and their rumble in my chest, the bleat of those whistles, reminded me of the foghorns on the Cape. Whistle is too weak a word. When a human makes such a sound, it expresses only a few things: terrible grief, earth-shattering climax, triumph, or pain. Not broken-finger pain, but dying pain, child-birthing pain. That kind of sound is all body, all heart, out of mind. It’s ironic that both train whistles and fog horns should evoke such animal feeling, as they both exist specifically for their listeners. Here I come, they say. Get off the tracks if you don’t want my two-hundred tons of steel barreling into your chest. Steer your prow elsewhere if you don’t want to wreck against my shore. Not a threat, but a warning: I can’t stop myself, so it’s up to you, stranger.

  We ate buttery grilled cheese sandwiches from food trucks. We ate chocolates with molten centers and cayenne freckles. I gorged with her, and it was the only time I ate. I began to associate the feeling of a full belly with her. I also began to associate laughter with her. For all our intensity, we laughed a lot.

  In my twenties I lived with a man for three years who never laughed at my jokes, never picked up the thread and unraveled it with me, never reached the punchline that was more body than words, a giddy orgasm shuddering through us. How had I done it? It must have been an important lesson, to stay so long.