Poor Your Soul

by Mira Ptacin

  When Andrew kisses me or touches my shoulder, I tense up or squirm away. My body feels foreign, dried up and stale. But Andrew is calm. Andrew is peaceful. “Fuck you and your Zen bullshit,” I tell him from the bathtub. “Why don’t you cry? Do you not have feelings?” I shout that my vagina is a rotted tree stump.

  I don’t tell him this, but I hate him sometimes. Sometimes all it takes is his smile. Sometimes it is his snoring. But sometimes the hardness in my heart melts and I break down and apologize for my vehemence and seclusion. I do feel bad. Revealing my own tenderness feels like defeat, but the balm of compliance soothes my pain. It’s a track on repeat. I ask Andrew for forgiveness. Then I beg him to give me a solution, an answer, to fix it for me. They call it grief but it feels like insanity. “Make it go away,” I plead, but he can’t. No one can.

  It’s inevitable that it would come to this—that we’d start in the same place but finish differently. We always finish differently. This is how it always begins: sex. At night, there is this person next to me in bed and I am distracted from my sorrow. Then I start to feel something different, something more, something that is louder: his desire. His wants and needs. It’s an inaudible scream. It starts in bed, with Andrew touching me lightly. I fold up and turn over. Then he sighs heavily and that’s when my anger is triggered. He tells me he’s a man, that he can’t help it, that he needs it. That he has strong physical needs. “It’s just like hunger,” he says, but I can’t speed myself up. It is quite the predicament.

  It has been six months since we lost Lilly and I am just finally realizing what has happened, but everyone else has already moved on and this is how it always ends: I throw my rings at Andrew; he says, “I can’t give you what you need”; and I start dramatically packing my suitcase, always freezing once I reach the door.

  We try to keep going. My parents offer to pay for marriage counseling, so we go see a therapist. The first one cries when we tell her our “what happened” summary, so we try another therapist. Then three more. Each time, we have to tell them our story and it becomes an elevator pitch—the past becomes frozen in choice fragments—and each time, we get nowhere other than distorted. We stop marriage counseling and I start going alone.

  Her name is Camilla, a cognitive therapist, and a lesbian. She is tough on me. At first, our appointments are once a week, but soon she recommends I visit her biweekly. Camilla has me talk, stop, answer her question. They’re not pretty questions. They’re unsympathetic and feel a bit torturous; I wonder if she is actually bullying me, like a cat with a gimpy mouse.

  “What do you mean you were afraid of the abortion? Describe what you were afraid to see, describe it in detail.”

  I do my best. I include sensory detail, something my classmates would recommend in my writing workshop critiques when they had nothing more insightful to offer. Show don’t tell.

  I give her my secrets. I share my mother’s advice: keep your husband fed and well-sexed and freedom comes with that. We talk about the dreams I have at night. We talk about the girl with the broken foot. I tell her what my professor declared one night after a couple of cocktails at a book release party when I showed him a photo of our new dog, Huckleberry. (“So the dog is the replacement for the baby you lost.”)

  Camilla scolds me. “How are you not breaking this chair right now? Why aren’t you screaming and yelling at these people?” But I can’t come up with words to describe the feelings of cement feet and paralysis of the mouth.

  “I was just raised to be polite,” I tell her, my tone rising at the end as if I’m asking a question.

  I continue to see Camilla for months, earnestly working hard to create a solution to my emotional recovery, but as the months pass, the more I sense no end in sight. Nothing changes. I am fucked, and eventually, Camilla tells me there is nothing more that she thinks she can do for me. She diagnoses me as Clinically Depressed with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. She says she tried, she hoped I could get through it without medication, but my condition is not improving. With her pen, she scribbles down the name of an (expensive) Upper West Side psychiatrist onto a piece of paper, then wishes me luck.

  I am clinically depressed. On my walk home, I see the words in my head. By accepting her diagnosis, I feel like something has finished or started, I don’t know. I feel grouped, like a member of a category or a team, I don’t know. But now I can give my fever dream a name; what feels like a witch’s curse is actually medical, legitimate.

  “PTSD.” By whispering the letters out into the air, I am determined to open the festering cage of my heart. I will awaken whatever is dormant and still clean inside of me. “I have PTSD, I have PTSD,” I repeat rapidly and urgently, excited and eager to accept the diagnosis. I explain my diagnosis to Andrew the best way I can. “I’m not making myself be like this. I have PTSD.”

  But medication? I don’t want to take a pill unless it’s fun. I’m already a wife; now I am a New Yorker who takes a pill for my brain every morning? The idea seems too 1991, too power suit with shoulder pads, too cliché. I want to feel alive again; eager and adventuresome, like the girl I was at age five, twelve, twenty-five. I simply want to end my suffering. What if they don’t work? What if the pills aren’t making me genuinely happy but only diluting my grief? I am reluctant but I am desperate. I am desperate. I am desperate.

  A day or two before my intake appointment with the psychiatrist on the Upper West Side, I receive a call from a close friend. He has been calling twice a week after the loss of Lilly to check in on me. When I tell him that I’ve found a solution to my misery and explain where I’ll be going and what I’ll be getting and taking, he scoffs.

  “Pills? Come on, Mira. You moving to Prozac Nation now?”

  “I need to,” I tell him. “My serotonin levels are all jacked up. It’s clinical.”

  “You fool,” he says. “You ain’t no Girl, Interrupted. Why don’t you just go for a jog instead?”

  And then, in that instant, everything changes.

  In the beginning, I can’t run for the life of me. Not even a mile. I start off strong, following Andrew’s pace. I feel the burn, get a side stitch, and slow down. I power walk, embarrassed, then quit. I fault Andrew for going too fast, for going too slow, for breathing too loud, for not paying attention to my pace, and for all crimes against humanity. I quit and I tell him to go ahead without me before he kisses my forehead and jogs ahead. At first, his fitness makes me feel weak, and I am ashamed of my weakness.

  Andrew doesn’t give up on me that easily, and he doesn’t let me give up, either. Each run is as unpleasant as the one before it and feels unsuccessful, but we go again. And again. And again. Soon, we compromise and find a rhythm—he moves a little slower, I push a little harder. After a little while, I get up to three miles, then four, then five. Gradually, I stop focusing on Andrew and start paying attention to my own body, listening to my own body: my breath, my toes, my hips. I eat to fuel myself, not because I have to, not because it’s dinnertime. I set goals. I stop looking at my body and start looking at myself in the mirror naked. I walk around naked (in our apartment). I sleep naked. I run, and when I run, I pay attention to what I think is pain. I examine it rather than avoid it, and try to embrace it. It is not pain. It is just a feeling.

  I am in control of my distance. I want to see what my body is capable of, so I aim for six. I run on the streets of Manhattan.

  When I am running, I do not think. My mind becomes still, present, and I feel formless. I can feel my essence. It feels brave. Feisty, even.

  One day, I call my father.

  “I have a proposition,” I declare. “Let’s run. Twenty-six point two miles. In your hometown.”

  “Oh my gosh, Mir, I don’t know about this. Really?”

  “The Chicago Marathon. This October. Ten/ten/ten.” The race would be held on the eve of the thirteenth anniversary of Julian’s death.

  Stimulated and
bewildered, we break it down: We are not serious runners; we are not trying to win anything. We know that winning the marathon is impossible. But still, we can run. We know how difficult the twenty-six point two miles will be. We know how easy it might be to quit. We will get tired, our toenails will fall off, our bodies will cramp and tighten. The running won’t feel very good. In fact, it will hurt and will continue to get worse. Our bodies don’t want us to do this. We will run and our brains will tell us to stop. So our minds will have to be strong. When we feel pain, we will have to keep going. We can’t be afraid. We have to examine it. Push through it. We will learn to make good with our grief. We will run.

  My mother is not thrilled by the idea. She tells me, “He is getting old. He already works too hard.” But she doesn’t let him know this. She knows he has to do this. We begin the training across country and run in the evenings. During the day, while my father is at work, my mother complains to me, and when my father comes home from work, she is sweet to him. She vents about the challenge of finding enough protein-rich recipes for a vegetarian, but when my dad returns from his runs, she’s smiling and stirring a bowl of vegetarian chili. She makes a batch of trail mix, the American snack.

  My father and I train like prison pen pals. We share a progress chart and track our miles together while our spouses rub our feet and feed us.

  Soon, Andrew, Maybe, Huckleberry, and I move to Brooklyn. We leave Manhattan to be closer to nature, or as close as one can be in New York, and find a spot near Prospect Park. I run every day. Rain or shine, I spend hours at night running the park’s loop, passing Park Slope moms with SUV strollers, dog walkers with a spiderweb of mutts, hot dog vendors behind steaming tin boxes, Rastafarians in primary colors, curved cyclists zipping like sleek fish. I see other runners, too, and recognize the faces of the serious ones, the ones who are there every night, too, with the promises they’ve made to themselves, people with their own reasons and sorrows and goals. Their pain is painted on their face, the urgency of their hope is revealed in their gait.

  Andrew designates himself my “coach” and most of the time he jogs alongside me, carrying my water bottle, reminding me to hydrate and refuel properly. I tell him he sounds like Richard Pryor when he’s imitating how white people talk. “Reeefyeeewl properly, m’kay?” and he tells me to eat the sports goop, but I can’t; it makes me gag and reminds me of semen. At the end of every run, we do a “go big and go home” and sprint the last one hundred yards of the track. Every single time, Andrew leaves me in his dust. But by now I know I’ll never be as fast as him, and I know that’s okay. That I’m not chasing him; he is just showing me where I’ll be soon enough. When our runs are almost over and I’m convinced that I’m exhausted but I can still see the end of the road in the distance, I pretend it is the actual marathon, that I am running next to my father, and I imagine Sabina and Andrew and Mom and Jules and his black dog standing at the finish line, waiting for us, cheering for us. Then I feel a surge. I kick my feet and sprint toward them with something I didn’t know I had left.

  I am running ten miles, then twelve, fifteen. Now eighteen miles, and then I outrun Andrew. He rides his bike. I run twenty miles.

  A few weeks before the marathon, I receive a letter in the mail from my father:

  I have been running since med school, so since 1971, but not far and not often. When we all moved to Battle Creek is when I really started to run more regularly, three to four times a week—but only three to four miles at a time. And I have been a faithful runner in different countries (vacations) and all different times of the year. But I have never really studied running, never stretched, always had cheap shoes, just ran. I had thought about running the marathon occasionally but it always just seemed to be “way out there,” over my head. I figured it would take too much time and dedication to prepare for a marathon.

  Then, all of a sudden, I hit age 60 and figured that it was too late to even think about running a marathon. I was afraid that I would hurt myself, my knees. When you suggested that we run a marathon together . . . BOOM! I jumped at the chance. Suddenly, it seemed possible. We could do it together. I had new courage and motivation. I would never have done this alone. Period.

  It is time for us to pick a name. We call our team “Good Grief” and decide to wear yellow jerseys. October rolls around. We all fly to Chicago and meet at the airport. On the eve of the race, my father and I drive downtown to the expo center, where we pick up our runner’s numbers. The expo has the energy of the first day of school, free samples of caffeinated gels and cold compresses and nutrition bars and posters. I spot a line of people waiting to have their photo taken with a man I don’t recognize. A stranger tells us that the guy is Dean Karnazes, the “fittest man in the world.” The guy ran fifty marathons in fifty states in fifty days. Dad looks at Dean and says that when a man gets to be that strong, he stops getting his periods. We take a picture with a giant shoe instead.

  In the evening, I go for one last jog. The purpose of this run is to loosen up my muscles and get my blood flowing just a little bit before the big race. Even though it’s the last run, I don’t feel like doing it. Even though this is only a three-mile run and even though I know I won’t break a sweat, I don’t feel like doing it. This run is number 150 out of 150. Miles 471, 472, and 473 out of the 473 miles I’ve set for myself. With this run, I will have reached the end of my training. So I run.

  At 5 a.m. the next morning, the alarm rings and we walk to the elevated train that will take us to the windy city where we’ll join the rest of the thirty-five thousand runners and something bigger than ourselves.

  When we arrive, the sun has just risen and a cool breeze spreads the scent of Lake Michigan around Grant Park. We squeeze our way into the starting corral within the ten-minute-mile pace group. We all stand and we wait. We stretch our bodies. We hop up and down. Some people chat giddily, others stare straight ahead, unflinching. Some runners wear crimson, some green, white, navy. Some are fresh. Attractive, old, exotic, ugly, pigtailed, bland, talented, tender. Some are gazelles and some are aardvarks. There are fairies and caped superheroes, even an Eiffel Tower. We all come from different places, different countries, different families, but I begin to recognize the thing that we all have in common: we are tackling something tremendous.

  There is “The Star-Spangled Banner.” There is a gunshot. The wheelchairs take off. Then the elites. We are buzzing but we wait. Slowly, the landscape of human bodies ahead of us starts bouncing. The feet in front of ours start to shuffle and move, so we start shuffling and moving, and suddenly we are underneath a giant digital clock and passing the official start line. Dad looks at me, we clap hands, and we begin.

  The first pain comes quickly. Not even at mile two. It’s my breast. It’s from Dad—we are running side by side and he is swinging his arms as he runs, unaware that he is repetitively hitting me in the chest. We keep running. I look at my father. He is looking ahead, smiling.

  Mom, Sabina, and Andrew have stationed themselves along the sidelines with the thousands of spectators, but my mother has figured out a way to be seen. Top-to-bottom lavender. We call it the Elvis jumpsuit and she’s gotten it right, because we spot them at mile eight, then again at mile twelve: the lavender Elvis jumpsuit. They push us through mile twelve and will be waiting for us at mile twenty-two with the rest of the family: my sister, Sabina; my mother’s brother Matteo and my aunt Mary; my father’s sister and brothers—all cheering and hugging alongside my mother, who is jumping and waving. We will see all of them together. We are all in this together.

  We run through Boystown, a neighborhood draped with rainbows. A plywood stage topped with go-go dancers singing “It’s Raining Men.” We run. A Chinese gong band, a high school marching band, cheerleaders in uniform, a tattooed man wearing a snake, elderly people, salsa dancers. We pass pharmacies and churches, pet shops and hospitals, guitar stores and chain cafes. We reach West Melrose Street and Dad nudges me.


  “Look, Mir,” he gasps. “Your Mom and I used to live there.” He points to the left and I try to see which building it was, but we can’t stop moving. “Our first apartment. That’s where it all began.”

  My sister was conceived on Melrose Street. I was conceived in Michigan, apparently after my parents returned from a dance hall on a Saturday night. When I was in elementary school, before I even knew what conception was, my dad taught a sex-ed course to the high schoolers at St. Phil. He explained the mechanics of the penis, the complexity of the vagina, how conception really works. He talked about family planning and contraceptives. How condoms prevent the spread of disease. How to be safe and healthy. Since he was volunteering, he couldn’t get fired, but apparently after he mentioned the benefits of birth control, Dad was never asked to teach there again.

  When we were little, my parents were very involved in our schools. They often came to share what they knew so well: their expertise. When I was in kindergarten, my mother used to come to my class dressed as Albert Einstein. She’d wear a white explosion of a wig, don a perfectly ironed lab coat, and perform science experiments. She blew the world’s largest bubbles, made a tornado in a two-liter bottle, baked an apple pie with no apples and no oven—and it was delicious. I remember one experiment where my mother mixed together cornstarch and water to create a substance that was both stiff and molten: when you held it, it melted and dripped from your cupped hands. When you pressed and squeezed and tapped it, the liquid got as hard as clay.