mechanisms are rusted

dr. f is questioning me. her little smile, meant to be encouraging, only seeming serpentine. truly, she is blank to me. she is a stranger who questions me as though having stopped me on the street to fill out some bogus questionnaire. i have opened up to less.

she begins with the common: "how are you / how have you been?" and closes with "you know, it's okay to tell me that you're not." her open concern is not something i find attractive. she reminds me too strongly of this girl i once knew, this girl who fell asleep on my bed watching television while i sat and typed on the computer. maybe she was waiting for me to join her and just got tired of being conscious. eventually i joined her and woke up in the miasma of her copper hair. i smelled her shoulder - lavender. lilac. hibiscus. some flower. i remember turning to the wall and crying as quietly as i could for no reason. i have learned how to be very silent with my emotions, experience them as shallowly as possible, like breathing with a monster or a serial killer in the room. i have always fancied that in the event of such a thing happening, i'd be the one to survive. the ultimate irony is that when it happens, i'll be killed first due to hubris.

you can never adequately prepare to avoid destruction.

i am hemorrhaging in her office today, near tears for the second time. my stomach is a bottle, shaken until furious, the muscles knotting around the glass, threatening to shatter the shuddering container - i will never be whole. i will never be fixed. i now have two houses to burn down - the one i grew up in and the one which squatted next door like a malevolent toad in the woods: its blinking, uncaring eyes. its disgusting, uncaring eyes. golden globes of what can only be described as hate, but which the toad knows not how to feel. i never look her in the eyes - she is always so placid. she asks me what my view of counselling is, what i intend to get from it, and i know it's because i haven't been taking her suggestions, i haven't tried to change. what am i afraid of is a question she will ask.

so today, she asks how old i feel. i tell her i haven't moved a second past 17, and she nods, understanding that my development must have halted at that age. what happened at 17? she asked me what i did. i was in theater. i was in chorus. i spent as little time with my family as possible. my real family was a collection of words on a glowing screen, but each with enough of a pattern associated with them so as to signify personality. all of us, avoidant dogs foaming at the mouth, sniffing one another tentatively, barking wildly at the slightest motion. up til all hours of the night with this swarm of letters. but something else happened at seventeen, something i stalled out on, and have been spinning wheels in the muck ever since.

[XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX]
[XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX]
[XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX]
[XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX]
[XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX]

a father is supposed to have his son's back. is supposed to be the hero-image. is supposed to be something on a pedestal until his son's roughened hands tear it down, blow it up. then climb up the ruins to stand there in his place. the sun shines all around, all around.

later: the perihelion of him to me, the dangerously loose swing of his proximity to my orbit. i can't remember his face anymore, but i remember his bald spot and the flash of refracted light off of his horn-rimmed glasses. his disingenuous, sloppy smile that i have no doubt inherited. the hole in the side of his head, leaking whispers like a busted radiator. his watchband as he played a game of chess with me. therapist watching from her chair. i can't remember what she looks like anymore, either. (once we sat in a pine grove and i planted small cones into a carpet of moss - small, twisted minarets that she swore would remain forever and which i knew would be gone within hours - )

i rushed out of her office directly for the bathroom. it's those brief moments of panic which cause me to detach from the mechanism of paranoia & hyperawareness - panic at a near-atomic level, white-hot terror in my very marrow. it's that old serial-killer business, the old monster-in-the-closet business.

("i know you have a tendency to avoid," she says as gently as possible - "and that's okay ... but know that i'm always going to bring you back")

get somewhere safe. the bathroom, old haunt of mine from family dinners in bygone years. crouching, retching over the toilet, dinner's meat stuck somewhere between mouth and stomach. praying to a god i don't believe in, my face turned to a delta of tears and snot - praying that it would just go down ... or, in worse times, come up. sometimes pretending, because of my mother's harried pounding at the door - "ARE YOU OKAY DO I HAVE TO TAKE YOU TO THE HOSPITAL!" - come out, pale & shiny with effort, nodding, but minutes later, after blankly chewing another piece of dinner-gone-cold, rushing to the bathroom again, hawking up strings of milk and spit.

the bathroom, then, septic white. thankfully, a stall, though disgusting with public use, and the old retch - although now i can't tell if i'm pretending, avoiding, or if this is real. coughing up strings of something - nothing. shudder against the wall. stare at the pieces you have just ejected from yourself, floating in the bowl.

it's earth day, although we all know that earth day is every day. should be a national holiday. proclaims the man with the bullhorn in the square. revs the priuses all around in hearty accord. i am hateful to them and their cause. they are blank-eyed and won't get out of my way. they amble around as if stoned. i am stoned but i walk with purpose, wheeling my bike alongside. it is warm out today. even the wind has tried to calm itself a little, tried to warm to the cheek of the sun, of the sky.

"how much of your life, do you think, is fantasy?" she inquires. she doesn't write anything down. i stare at the books on the shelf: i can name them all, now. "CHANGING FOR GOOD," "EMOTIONAL INTELLIGENCE," "THE POWER OF NOW (by Eckhart Tolle)," the DSM-IV ... others. i stare at the books. in rare moments of rawness, out the window at the blocky Oakhurst plant. the boring, shiny cars creeping up to the stoplight. the blinds are uneven.

i have a cigarette before i get on my bike and ride up the hill.

i am surrounded, now, by shitty art and those whom i keep myself deliberately peripheral to.

this isn't home, either.

FIELD NOTES #1

my mother was
always angry because she felt
denied of something on a far deeper
level. her bitterness
soaked her at the
root & discoloured
her heart.

in this way i am
recurrently possessed
by sudden rage -
i feel
the same liquid
sloshing in my gut,
the same hoary frost
over my heart,
creeping down my
arteries -

>>

my father spent
most of his time
sitting in a cave,
highlighted by its
weird greenish light.

i became obsessed
with the theory of
black holes & watched
the sky over our
house for any sign
of one. i saw many
things, but failed to
find even a clue.

(how was i to know
that deep in our basement,
lurking a box marked
"OLD CLOTHES," was the
seething singularity
that i sought?)

after the hurricane
came, there was no
trace of my father.
we searched for days
among the splintered,
fallen trees. in one -
a hornet's nest - my
first sting, between
thumb & forefinger.

shadow tells his story.

i know it has something to do with my dad. at the core of it, i know in my twisting, febrile gut, that it has everything to do with that man. i feel like entropy, like the negative side of someone else, and in so birthing me he saw his own shadow slide out of his wife's womb. my mother tried to love me like a three-dimensional kid, but i was just too elusive. at nighttime, i would disappear entirely, into my room behind a locked door, staring at a bright light, wishing myself to exist.

i spent most of my time thinking about Love, love and what it means. my mother said "i love you" to me and i discovered i did not, in fact, Love her back. i did not feel about her as i did my departed father, who had himself turned into a shadow and fled. i reasoned in the sheets that love opened the door to reciprocation; in fact, demanded it, and so my mother was eagerly knocking by Loving, but i was disgusted by the urgent rhythm of her rapping, chose to remain silent inside. eventually, she'd go away.

winter came, and i nearly froze to death.

i came to know a ghost who had the same name as me, but i cannot say we were ever friends. eventually, the ghost left and another came. sometimes two at a time. they never stayed for long, although whether i drove them off or if they left of their own accord i have never discovered. i took to reading, a passive, greedy voyeur of the lives of others. i had to stop to go to school and dinner. i started choking on the food during dinner because i chewed so rapidly. this, of course, in order to escape the thick silence of the dinner table. agonizing. it was high noon for a shadow like me, squirming and agonizing in a black puddle directly under their feet.

one night the house burned down and i was set free. i wandered like a dust devil on the sides of highways. travelled. saw nothing.

i never tried to find my father. he existed, out there, somewhere. i pictured him old and balding, ugly. aviators, since that's all he ever wore in every Polaroid i ever saw of him. a goofy, doughy face. the unpleasant roundness of having let-himself-go around the middle. caved-in shoulders. a hole in the side of his head. for a time, he moved into his parents' house, which happened to be the house next to my family's house, distant only for a small swath of pine and birch trees. in the winter: small flashes of the siding through the bare boughs. that was as close as he got to my memories. i pictured small, run-down apartments, everything always dingy, dull, drab. off-yellow walls. a beaten, defeated refrigerator. maybe an old pack of cigarettes - where else do i get this filthy habit? - maybe a typewriter. the curtains are pulled - heavy, yellow muslin. the sunlight barely filters through it. dust in the air, mixed with small dots that glint or gleam.

i came to a small harbour town just past the millenium and decided to hunker down, head against the blast. winter came, and i almost froze to death again. summer was a kind thaw - even the spring, though blustery and brusque in its manner, was a relief against the unforgiving chills of winter. i found some more ghosts hidden in the corners of this town. they were so talkative i could barely stand it. sometimes they talked when their mouths weren't moving - but i could still hear them.

then, one day, the streets filled up with them - everywhere, passing to and fro - so many that i thought i was the one in the wrong.

i still am not convinced.