Being present–artist, partner, dreamer.

 “I don’t even have time for a boyfriend,” I sigh over my steaming lavender earl grey.  “I just want someone to think about when I’m walking to my car.”

The winter hits me from a different angle every year, like a predator that studies me, and evolves with me.  A shell breaks around my crown.  A vibrating fractal that snaps as I push through it.

A year and a half into therapy, we finally get into my brain patterns.  Headspace has come up for me before, but it’s time to tackle it now.  My emotional back is sore.  I’m supposed to want to be in the present.  And I do.  I think.

My therapist is like a fairy in a cave, with a soft glow around her as she shows me around dark corners.  I unroll the parchment and draw another angle on the map.

Your greatest strength is also your greatest weakness, she says.  An artist daydreams, dissociates, floats off into the clouds.

“Elisabeth?  Earth to Elisabeth, are you there?” my second grade teacher asks me while I’m thinking about boobs.

“Are you dressed yet?  We’re late, Bissy,” my parents patiently urge while I think about the saddest Disney deaths.

“Anyway, that’s why I can’t sleep with my neck exposed,” my friend concludes, merging onto I-465 as I’m sailing between Canis Major and Canis Minor.

Don’t even get me started on where my head is when I’m in love.  Eros almost had me create a baby with a narcissist.  I was lucky.  Many artists are not so lucky.

Where even is my head in this blog post?  Does it even make sense?  I can’t tell if it makes sense.

I shoot uncomfortably back into my body as I cross the street, and then I immediately leave again.  I move out of people’s trajectories too late, reading my surroundings as if they’re a dense victorian novel, sometimes spinning around several times in the same block.

I wake up, unable to tell where my depression ends and his begins.  Love was a syrup; now it’s a paste.  I push my head side to side, but can’t see anything.  I reach out to stretch, and feel my body shoot inward toward a black hole.

I walk toward a tree trunk, smell the cinnamon bark, sink my fingers into the rough soil.  I creek with the branches.

Everything is moving, not just me.

   

Sometimes I need to wrestle the spirit that keeps me alive to the ground, and tell her to wait.  Sometimes I need to squeeze my brain back into myself, or bash it against something outside myself.  I can’t always tell, because just like everyone else, my angels and demons are the same people.

The black chaos that emerges from me in the form of words is the same chaos that makes reading too difficult to be a pastime.  The neurological patterns that make listening easy and relaxing are the same patterns that make talking a mental workout.  I fall into therapy roles the same way I sink into a couch.  And I can stay there too long, and lose my mind.

“So anyway,” he says, after ten uninterrupted minutes, “I think part of my damage is that the people who have always held sway in my life have insinuated to me that I’m never enough.”

I tense.

“Hold on,” I say, and take hold of his hand.  “Can we talk about…can we play tennis soon?  I want to see the direction that a ball goes when I swing at it.  From 50 different angles.  I want to feel physics the way a dog does when he chases a rabbit.”

“Oh, um, of course my love,” he says with stars in his eyes, and I run my hand over the couch and feel the microsuede texture that’s supposed to keep my cats from scratching it, but doesn’t.

In which I procrastinate on sending out poetry

I write good shit, because that’s what I like to do.

I like it when people read my shit, I like it a lot.

But this whole be-a-commercial-success thing, I dunno.

I’m a bit like Emily Dickinson in that I struggle with the outside world.

I grew up under benevolent eyes. I was almost good enough.

My father got me two kinds of gifts for Christmas–

classical music CDs from the discount bin

and a book that would help me with a school project.

Maybe it’s why I can’t stop dreaming about college.

It’s the same dream every time.

I’m going through those 4 years, again.

Yes, I got my degree.  But I’m getting it again.

Because I didn’t absorb it the first time.

Because I dared care about other things the first time–

My pleasures, my toxic relationships,

a new magic I was trying to use as it was using me–

I wrestled with entities separate from books and ideas.

I word-vomited banal generalities for all my papers,

got a lot of C-’s. But showed up enough 

to stretch zombified fingers across the border of B-.

And that means, in my comfortable shame, 

that I wasted my education.

But midway through every dream I look at the calendar

and realize I need to be at work.

That I don’t need validation as long as I have money,

which I am now earning on my own.

And I wake up in a world far less stimulating.

No Old Testament Literature, no French,

no Psychology 305.

Just a freezing dark room, a harsh lamp, 

a podcast about a world I can’t change,

and a pair of legs that will start working soon enough.