by Trisha Cull
Twelve
Crossing Over (January 2012)
Look at the unity of this
spring and winter
manifested in the equinox.
– Rumi
A few blocks from my St. Patrick Street place:
I’m standing on a high lookout, up a dirt path that leads to a rocky hillside upon which is this cement platform with a railing around it. The wind presses my body backwards against the railing. The air streams through my hair. I look upon Victoria, across Gonzalez Bay with its beautiful heritage houses perched on cliffs all around, and to the Strait of Juan de Fuca, Port Angeles in the distance, the water gleaming grey-green, waves breaking in tiny whitecaps upon the scuttled sea.
Maybe the ECT is helping. I continue on with my treatments throughout January. Maybe it’s more than that, something I can’t quite put my finger on, some resurgence back into myself. I’m remembering who I am again. I’d almost forgotten.
And who is she who was forgotten? I look in the mirror, at my face, and try to see myself. Sometimes I say my name out loud. “Trisha?” And the world becomes surreal, because I have heard myself from within myself.
Who was I before? Who am I now?
I would like to think I still retain some semblance of innocence from girlhood; many say I have. I hope this is true, but I feel something has died as well, that belief that everything is going to be okay in life. The truth is things might work out or they might not. More than once every day I say to myself, Hold on, Trisha. Hold on. Surely it’s the surge to live in spite of various deaths that is the essence of existence. I am standing on this lookout, gazing at the sea, and I realize my stories have aligned themselves, that I own them, no one else possesses them, and I am here and becoming whole. I have found new structure to my existence, and perhaps this is the greatest personal development so far, because this structure allows me to focus on life beyond Dr. P.
I get out of bed late, after eleven most mornings, pull on some shabby clothes and walk over to the coffee shop across the street to get a double Americano. I go for a long walk in the afternoon, work up a sweat, let the last remaining bit of poison come out of me. I eat dinner, nothing fancy, nothing well thought out or grown up enough to be called a well-balanced meal, yogurt and granola, or a couple of rice cakes with cheese melted on top, three spoons of peanut butter.
My eating habits and my relationship to food are still a huge struggle. I’ve often thought over the years (but never said out loud) that this eating disorder, though dormant now, has been the greatest struggle of my life, more than depression, more than bipolar disorder. And while I know the bipolar disorder was influential in keeping the eating disorder going, the eating disorder nonetheless keeps me hostage. Every hour of every day since I was sixteen I have obsessed about losing weight, sometimes every moment that passes throughout the day. It’s the same now. I suspect it will be this way well into the future.
In the evening I cuddle Marcello on the couch. He grooms me, licks my face all over, and I feel like I’m in love with him but also in love with something broader than him; I am getting to love life, and I am falling in love with myself.
After dinner, I write.
The physical world has become at once soft and sharp. It is soft because it lacks the lustre of being in crisis. The days are ordinary. I am living, I suppose, like an ordinary person. Only sometimes do I long for the drama of it all, the razor blade stricken over thin skin. But it is sharp too. I am here now. I am calm and see the essence of things glowing around me. I blur my eyes and things glitter. I observe objects—a tree, a rock, the ocean—and feel their life force emanating from within them, and the life force flows through me because I can feel more than my suffering, because my body and mind are free of drugs and alcohol. My anguish for Dr. P has softened. I still tell him I love him, because I do, but there is so much more awaiting me.
I believe it is largely through walking, by keeping my body in motion, by venturing out into the world, that I recover. I walk past the Uplands golf course, emerald putting greens and fairways, the ocean beyond, old wealthy retired men in golf pants and caps, and I love watching them swing their golf clubs through the air and hearing the tiny tick of metal hitting the ball as the club connects. In this tick is my future, a sharp materialization of something from nothing, a tiny sound from thin air.
Then farther still, to Oak Bay Marina. I walk out on the docks when the gate is left open, survey the vessels, feel the warble of wood underfoot, the gentle slosh of the sea, and I feel buoyed, as if I am floating above the earth but firmly planted on the ground at the same time.
Did the ECT reset me? How it works is a mystery, to the medical profession and to me.
My body becomes soft and voluptuous. I can stand up without feeling like I’m going to pass out. I have colour in my cheeks and girth to my hips. I regard the weight with mild hostility but nothing like the violent aggression and disdain with which I have regarded my body in the past whenever I gained weight. I can stand it.
Caravaggio is gone and I grieve the loss terribly, but Marcello romps about the apartment. I come home some nights and he is perched perfectly in the middle of my bed as if he has been sitting that way for hours, waiting for my return.
Seven years old.
I find her in Grandma’s back porch upon a pile of laundry, eyes squinted tight as in sleep. The boy, Calvin, is with me. I want to show him my favourite kitten, only a few months old but old enough to dodge the neighbour, the army veteran whom I incorrectly believe is a “vet,” a veterinarian. Only this vet guts deer and moose and places the heads on the wall in his basement above his gun rack, or so my brother tells me. I have never dared to step foot inside that house. My kitten is big enough to run and scamper through the mean veterinarian’s vegetable garden, but small enough that I can pick her up with one hand to make her meow and spread her claws wide. I like to squeeze her and make the claws pop out.
“Oh, here she is,” I say, scooping her up with one hand.
Calvin sucks snot off his upper lip. It’s gross; he’s always doing that.
He’s a dirty little boy who goes to sleep with chewing gum in his mouth and wakes up with chewing gum in his hair. His mom, Hilda, is an evil mom. She scolds him, swats at him, comes at him with scissors. His dad is a grave, brooding man who drinks a lot. Calvin has weird hair, chunks missing in places the chewing gum has been cut out.
He’s a sad boy.
I will come to know this retroactively, his sadness; the boy who never has a chance, who one day years from now will die of a drug overdose.
Something’s wrong.
The kitten has become a strange kitten, heavier, cooler. Knowledge is verging. Retroactive coolness, rigor mortis, but oh… her soft fur.
The weight of her in my hand: is it my hand or she who is altered? I giggle, “Come on, kitty.”
I look out the dirty window above the dryer. The sun is setting. There’s a wedge of pink light on the side of the vet’s house. The first frost is coming.
Calvin stands there, hands stuffed in his pockets. He’s unimpressed. “Dumb cat,” he says.
I shake her harder, feel it now, a nugget in her belly.
The dryer is churning damp clothes, thump, thump, thump. The room is warm and humid, smells of Downy dryer sheets, Tide and Javex bleach. I love the specks of blue in the Tide. I want to eat Tide, even though I know I can’t, to dip my wet tongue into something soft as icing sugar.
Too young to be bitter, I know no better than to believe in this dream of the perfect family you see on commercials: crisp white sheets ballooning on a clothesline, green grass, a pretty house, a pretty lady and a pretty girl doing laundry in the sunshine, a crisp pile of white sheets folded in a wicker basket and a handsome man, a good father, in a suit and tie waving from the doorstep. “Honey, I’m home… how—are—my—girls?”
The kitte
n folds over the hard edge of my hand.
I say, “Oh,” then, “no.”
In this moment, time slows, then stops. The room feels small, the air thick. I feel the bluntness of my existence, though I am too young to understand it fully. Something like my life flashes before my eyes. My face feels hot.
Then I say it, the thing I will reflect upon my whole life, and I’ll never know why or where it came from, except maybe from my mother who is always talking about life after death, who is always talking about how hard her life has been.
“Uh oh, Trisha. Your life is going to be hard.”
I’m sitting on the shore of McNeill Bay, a block from my new apartment, with Caroline and Steve, my new neighbours. We’re smoking cigarettes. The ocean is a white sheet, glary and austere. My eyes feel sensitive and tear up, tears streaming down my face.
“How are you?” Caroline says.
I want to walk for hours, perambulate into myself, slow steady footsteps, until I am inside my skin, looking out through my blood into a faded pink world. I need the warmth of myself, the way a baby needs to be cradled inside a blanket, cocooned inside its own warmth. “Fine,” I say.
I am alone.
I say I am “fine,” and wonder what this means, these four little letters. I think about the barriers within me that I have built against love, love for myself, for family and friends, for men, and I realize I have only halfway been loving people, because I was not wholly there to give the love. I realize I have never really been in love with a man, not Leigh, not Dr. P, not Richard up until now. But rather, I have been clinging to them so that I would not fall, so that my life wouldn’t fall apart, because I was terrified on my own, a tiny pinprick of light in blackness with no planets or stars around. I have been a man’s prize and financial slave. I have been obsessed. And now, I am my own damaged person. But I am who I am.
I am so tired of spinning my wheels since I was sixteen, always feeling like a failure, spurned by a fierce desire to do more with my life, to become more of all the wrong things (successful, famous, wealthy), when I should have been working on the basics (self-forgiveness, self-soothing, self-love), nurturing myself emotionally and physically instead of starving myself of love and sustenance.
I have been starving in one way or another for more than twenty years, either through self-hatred or bulimia, that disease that makes you want to rip off your skin and slake the fat and muscle from the bones, leaving only white shining bones behind. In her memoir Wasted, Marya Hornbacher describes a girl who set herself on fire. She says she understands this compulsion. I have also understood this compulsion. You set yourself on fire and leave a blank space behind where your flesh used to reside.
“Fine?” Caroline says. “That’s good.” She has been a good friend, supporting my breakup with Leigh and my new relationship with Richard. “You take all the time you need, sweetie.”
A freighter glides past, snail’s pace, or so it seems from here, far off on the horizon. I think of oil spills and dead whales, seagulls’ wings tarred, seals washed up on the shore, but then there’s a glimmer of light on the horizon, pink clouds as the sun goes down, casting shadows on us, relief from the light.
The world feels beautiful in this moment.
I am beautiful in this moment too.
Clinical Note:
Erotic transference: she claims to obsess less about me now due to the ECT and having a lot to do, such as work, writing, visiting with her sister. “I have always obsessed about someone in my life,” she says. “Now it’s you.”
When I’m not out walking, I’m often in therapy.
Dr. P and I fall into a new rhythm.
“You have to admit, somewhere inside of you, there is some desire to be with me. There must have been a time when you were tempted,” I say.
“Temptation is one thing,” Dr. P says. “It’s what we do with that temptation that matters.”
“So you have been tempted?” He smiles, shakes his head, rubs his eye with his pinkie finger. My need for his love has transformed itself, at least somewhat, into something intellectual. I long to understand the nature of my relationship with him now that I know we’ll never be together romantically. I long to understand if ever there was a time, even years ago, in the beginning of our therapy sessions, in the period of enchantment we called it, that he wanted me or at least fantasized about being with me. I feel like this knowledge would be enough to satisfy me. But he just won’t give. “Maybe there’s hope for us in another life?”
“You need to believe that,” he says. “It sustains you.”
I nod, look at my hands. I note the fading scars on the interior portion of my right wrist, then the dark red welt higher on my left wrist from where I sliced down hard this past time before being admitted to the hospital.
There are many scars on my wrists, seven or eight on each wrist but many finer scars outlining the thicker ones where I struck down again and again trying to hit the same mark.
But the shame is softening. I have entered into a phase of self-forgiveness.
Calvin wants to go home. I am mad at the kitten but at the same time feel I have done something wrong.
It’s shame blossoming into sadness so sad I can’t bear it. And so I don’t. I push it away.
All my life I’ll do this: bury it, hide it, push it away.
I say, “Kitty?”
In the place of it will be a mode of emotion resembling but never equalling pain: an ache for something that never was; a splinter in the numbed palm.
This is not the kitten I promised, not the one I bragged about, the one I proclaimed was mine and mine alone.
“What’s wrong with it?” Calvin says.
Something is different about the world. I’m flushed. The window in the screen door, the autumn sky, tilts back and forth, a porthole on a ship at high seas.
I’m a little dizzy.
“I think she’s dead,” I say. I’m holding a dead thing for the first time ever.
Calvin goes to grab her, but I don’t let him. “I wanna see,” he says. But he is a boy, and boys hurt little things: hamsters, birds, kittens, the newborn baby chick stolen from the incubator in the classroom and squeezed until its body cracked and its head fell limp. Boys tear the wings off crickets.
I say, “No!” I say it hard. I will not let him kill her even more. I say, “Maybe she’s really okay after all.”
“I’m going to tell,” Calvin says, and darts back into the house.
I sit down in the pile of laundry with the kitten clutched to my chest. I stay this way for a long time, but no one comes. So I pray, under my breath the way Grandma prays under her breath at church, her lips moving ever so slightly. I pray to God, the father, but I get this wrong. “Forgive me father for I have sinned,” I say. All priests are men, and all priests are different versions of God. “I’m sorry,” I pray. “Please make her live again.”
I feel something under my thumb but inside the kitten; a hard thing, like a pellet, inside a soft thing. I look out the dirty glass window again.
There’s the first faint star: the star in the violet dusk, the star that is not a star but a planet. I smell the sweetness of grass, leaves and earth. Rotting fruit underneath the tree, an apple lodged at the back of my throat.
I am walking one night with Anna, a girl I met in Dr. P’s therapy group. We are drinking chai tea lattes from Starbucks. I loved Anna right away. She wears cool retro dresses, flashy tights and black combat boots. We stroll along Dallas Road, look out at Port Angeles glittering across the strait. It’s pitch black on this road at night, except for the occasional street light. Here is the scent of wet grass, dew, salt and mist in the air. My hair goes curly in the rain. I hate it. The asphalt gleams. One particular bush smells of vanilla, we’re not sure why. Traffic moves slowly across the water, a tiny lit-up caterpillar crawling along the horizon. How slowly the
cars appear to move from this far away, a thin ribbon of light moving through darkness.
Anna has scars too, physical and emotional. She was diagnosed as borderline years ago, but with the help of Dr. P, other doctors, her husband Grant, family and friends, she has fought her way out of despair, self-injury and alcoholism.
“Are you afraid you’ll ever do it again?” I say.
“What?” she says.
“Hurt yourself?”
She pauses. “I hope not.” And I understand that this is the best we can all hope for, to not hurt ourselves again.
“How long has it been since you had a drink?” I say.
“Eight years next month, for Grant and I both.”
“That’s awesome.”
Can we also hear the drone of traffic, muffled by water and distance? Surely we cannot and yet I feel the hum inside me, the vibration of life, the vibration of me. This is the sound of where I have come from, the sound of where I am and where I have yet to be. I can do this. I can live. I can be happy. Content?
It is truth humming inside me.
I turn her over to expose her belly. I can’t find an entry wound. Has the flesh already closed around it?
All my life I will retain this notion of having overlooked something important—an entry or an exit wound, evidence. It must have been there.
“You’re dead,” I say. I say these words in a room containing only me. But she is still here, in my hand. Surely, she is not gone.
The dryer thumps to a halt. The machine makes its last few sounds—those ticks and clicks—its minutiae of self-remembrance, its cycle complete. Now remorse. I push it away.
Bullets are hard.
Love is liquid.
There is only space now, and the room fills with light.
When we say guts, what do we mean? I have never been able to tell. This swell of interiority will always bother me, its vagueness. I draw the kitten close, breathe into her fur, whisper, “I love you. I love you. I love you,” and move into the process of remembering myself.
