Dark Houses

I tacked a quote on the bulletin board beside my desk today. The quote is in a place that all I have to do is look up and it’s there. Those clear and precise black words on a white page manage to convey everything about me in fourteen words. That’s all it takes.

A few years ago, after my high school graduation, I went to Fairbanks Alaska to spend some time with my aunt. There were several reasons that I went. One very good one was change. My parents hoped that they would put me on the plane and when I returned to them in a few months time I would be different. I would be a changed person. A changed human being and that somehow along the way I would have left some of my darkness behind.

I had been living in a dark house. A house so dark that pitch black night needed a couple candles and a reliable lighter to keep the darkness at bay. And if I had admitted it to myself then I wanted a change too. I wanted to be reborn in my skin.

Alaska changed me. I don’t think you can go there and not come back a changed person. But my mom’s family, my aunt, uncle, and cousin, changed me too. When I stepped off the plane and came to face my family weeks later it was as a changed person. I wasn’t completely reborn but I had been given the first glimpse of a life that was so different from the one that I had been living. I had been set on a new path.

I read a book while I was there, a mystery thriller that I’ve forgotten but in the front of the book was a quote. It’s stuck with me since I first read it. I’ve wrote it into journals and I’ve tacked it beside my desk. It follows me and reminds me. It haunts and comforts me.

“It’s not having been in the dark house
that matters, but having come out.”
– Teddy Roosevelt.

The Killing Kind

It’s so hard to quench that desire.

People talk about their vision going red. “Seeing red” they call it, as if they are looking at the world through a blood red haze instead of those rosy pink glasses. Where can I find a pair of those by the way? I might be willing to sell what's left of my soul for a better outlook on the world. I don’t see red, I don’t become unfocused. Just the reverse happens for me, to me. Everything becomes crystal clear and magnified. And it burns.

I can feel it aching to be released.

His mouth opens like a flower blossoming, the words spilling forth like poison from a poison pen. They are arrows tipped with Amazon poison and each one is aimed at a body part, mostly at what’s left of my heart.

He is so like me. We could stand side by side and you would see that we're related. I have pictures of when we were children in my house. He was a brother who’s nightmares I used to scare away, a brother who was in every way the best friend I could ever hope to find. But the anger inside of him is atomic, explosive and is always boiling beneath the surface like a dormant volcano. He’s schizophrenic and it has gone untreated for over a year.

I can’t remember the last time he spoke to me without anger in his voice.

I wish it was easy. I wish it was harder. He makes it so easy to hate him and I hate myself for that. He makes it so easy to justify my desire that he would just disappear. A knife in his hand scares me more than I will ever say and one day I expect to visit my parents house only to discover their dead bodies.

Sometimes I wish he would free us from his pain. And sometimes I wish I would just give into that crystal clear desire to be the instrument of that freedom.

Old Name

I kept the name like a badge. Armor. A shield against the unknown world of the recently divorced. I don’t know what I thought I needed protection against or why I felt that I had to carry your name with me into the dark.

It’s been months. In the cold of January a judge dressed in black congratulated me by my maiden name. He sat like a dark crow behind the peeling lacquered stand; dark hair and dark eyes. He said a name that, though it had been buried, was more a part of me than your’s had been. This one, the first one I had had all my life. Your name I borrowed for two years, almost three and now I’ve given it back.

The new driver’s license and eventually the social security card, a new bank card; all these eventually will be washed of that name. Married name. Maiden name. It shouldn’t matter but it does. I understand now why some women don’t take their husband’s name. Yes. It does make you property. It makes you more a part of them then you will ever be yourself again.

Plus if you never take the name when you get divorced you don’t have to worry about changing all your information.

Waiting Room Silence

The silence is thick. The kind of silence you read about in books and wonder what it might sound like. But silence is the absence of sound and this is not that kind of soundless quiet. This is the silence of a doctor’s waiting room.

The muted sounds of a telephone, the somehow delicate tap of computer keys, and hushed voices. These are the sounds that crawl across my skin like spiders, placing each light foot between the hairs on my arm. I would brush the silence away, shiver at the sleek black bodies if I dared. But I don’t. I sit silently, patiently, waiting in a room that is meant for waiting.

When my name is called unseen heads will turn to match the syllables with the lines of a face. Behind their eyes a brain will turn with questions about why I am here, waiting like they are waiting. Are they wondering what words might pass tense lips behind closed doors?

I am the Mouse

A white bellied mouse flew through the air. While a glossy black grackle stood panting in the heat, beak open and expectant, tail feathers cocked at an angle as it watched the mouse land. The bird seemed greedy to me as it stood there, waiting for the mouse it had tossed to fall back to earth. The mouse landed and tried to bound away but the grackle followed, sharp beak at the ready.

I watched the bird repeatedly toss the mouse into the air. It would lay still for a moment, its small body rising and falling with panicked breathing before gathering the momentum to try one more break for freedom.

I told myself I was going to get out of the car. I told myself that I would at any moment push open my door and rescue the mouse. It was only a small life, a life that most would not have even noticed. But I waited too long. I held my breath and watched the small creature move once more before it lay still in the heat.

I looked at the gas station parking lot, the cars stopped at the intersection, all the people that hadn’t seen. I should have made the effort.

Letter to a Divorced Man

I dreamt of you again last night. As if I could ever really escape you. You hunted me through my dreams like a stalker, a killer wishing to peal my skin away from bone to see what kind of woman I was underneath.

I already know what kind you think I am, some selfish creature that was born and will die only wanting to watch you suffer. I was a monster in a human dress and I swung my hair out to send my scent floating on the air. You always said I smelt of vanilla and mint, a taste of heaven as your lips crushed mine. Such bruising force and passion in your touch, such desperation to tattoo your name onto my pale skin. I was already so marked up when you claimed me. One more scar wouldn’t matter.

I believed that you were the only man who could ever love me. I wanted to hide from the world in your love, be protected by it and encased in it like a doll behind glass. A butterfly pinned to a board and mounted on a wall, a trophy of sorts. Did I make myself out to be a trophy wife, was that the secret that I kept looking for but could never uncover? I don’t know anymore.

I’m looking back and wondering what happened? I’m lost in the anger of dissatisfaction and resentment. It takes two and you lay all the blame at my door. You say I fear commitment, that I don’t have it in me to commit to someone for the rest of my life. I want to be mean and say that maybe I just didn’t have it in me to commit to you.

It was you.

I want to scream those words, have them rip my throat as they escape like a thousand biting bee stings. They would hit you like shrapnel, the words tearing into your skin just as they tore my throat because it would hurt me to say them. You don’t believe me; you don’t think that a monster like me can feel. Yes, I am that heartless being you describe me to be. I am anything that you say I am.

You say you saw me more clearly than anyone else. That you loved all my faults, the things that drove you crazy, the things that have driven people away from me screaming at the top of their lungs. Yes, I know I have those. Mostly they are things that are just me, things that I can’t change even if I wanted to though I’m trying to improve myself. I’m trying to be a person that isn’t so hard.

I feel as if I’m just starting to grieve for you. I don’t think that I did before. I was so blinded by anger and frustration that I forced myself to do anything but feel. I pushed myself to limits that took me beyond the things hovering in the wings waiting to take me. They were so patient and when I was done making a fool of myself they took me under their wings and showed me what I had been missing. The pain I had tried so hard to avoid was only more intense for having been postponed.

So I’ve been blinded. Blinded by myself playing pretend like a small girl, wearing a mask made of the face I thought I wanted to have. The one beneath waiting to be unmasked, waiting to bloom tears and pain for you. The man I loved. The man I still love.

I feel so much guilt for you. I feel responsible for you. For you and about you, I feel as if I should fix everything that I have done. But you have to own your own mistakes, your own problems. As much as I love you I cannot be blamed for all of our problems or yours for that matter. You cannot lay everything at my door and call me a heartless selfish woman.

You have made me so unhappy. I could accuse you of the very thing that you accused me of, wanting to watch me suffer. But I don’t want to watch you suffer. I don’t want you to be in pain. I don’t want you to be unhappy. I say these things and yet you don’t believe me and there is nothing I can do to change your view of either me or the situation.

That last e-mail has haunted me; crept into my thoughts and dreams, my days and nights as I have struggled to just be. We are divorced. I have been repeatedly told that I shouldn’t be talking to you or seeing you or having anything to do with you. They tell me to say ‘no’ in the firmest tone that I can muster. A final slamming door, the closing of a book at the end because we have reached our end. Now I don’t have to since you have done that for me.

This is the end and I don’t want it to be this way. I don’t want you to feel as if I did this only to hurt you, to harm you, to watch you suffer. I can’t be with you again. I don’t want to be with you again. You don’t want to be with me either. I feel as if I need to defend myself from you, you attacked me in that last e-mail and didn’t want to give me the chance to defend myself. You felt I had no right.

You accused me of wasting your life. You have no right to accuse me of that. Of being wasteful of the love you and I shared, the problems that we could and could not work through. We were not a waste and I would never accuse you of wasting my life.

I have run out of things to say and yet I feel the words bubbling up through my skin, breaking on the surface that you claimed was so cold and hard. I am sorry even if you don’t hear it.