Plastic Utensils in the Crazy Cafe

How to make this fun.

I met Adam in East General. We were both there for failing at suicide. It was an instant, artificial bond.

People are better than themselves under psychiatric supervision. There is catharsis to be wrung from crisis, and you’ve just been rescued, finally. It can become an addiction, especially if your abusive father was a pediatrician.

It’s a mistake to look people up you met when you were both on tranquilizers. Maybe this seems obvious to you, but I was seventeen, and white supremacists had just tried to burn down my group home.

There is nothing quite like a pretty homeless girl to change a sad Samoan into an exploitive drunk. I was trying to sleep on the floor when he said “I usually jerk off to fall asleep, but since you’re here…” That was as romantic as it ever got.

I left when he sold me to his friends for a case of beer.

My housing worker said he was once homeless too, classic grooming. Now I wonder if it was even true, but back then it just made it worse that someone who knew what it was like would mount my face while I slept. He had a sofa and there were no shelter beds, apparently for months.

He acted like we had just embarked on a forbidden relationship, when in fact I was being repeatedly raped. He said he could lose his job, and I guess my role was to protect him. He was taking a risk, and this meant I was worthy of trust.

I was fantastically manipulable.

I finally found, through the clinic that treated my chlamydia, a cheap place to stay. I started working at Simply Delicious, whose uniform was a t-shirt that said “coffee slut.” Feminists would protest outside, and I wanted to scream that I worked for tips, but instead went chronically hungry.

My worker would do what he called “check-ins” which involved a sandwich and a fuck. He found condoms desensitizing, as did my new boyfriend, so eventually I became pregnant. My son looks like me, I can’t say who his father is.

I made the mistake of telling them both. My worker rightly said I couldn’t narrow it down. My boyfriend said he would take me to court and force me to have an abortion. I went back to the clinic to confirm this was impossible, in response to which he attempted to procure an abortion with violence.

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Lockdown Ends

It was easier before, when it was just him. Now she’s gone too and dead is plural, a phenomenon not an incident.

I was set to write these memoirs. Years of details like the light in a room, where it came in from, above my head or at eye level. It makes a difference when you’re staggering upright from unconsciousness.

I let them lie in their respective mortuaries, not the ones in the cellar of the ICU, but that which I built because I never got to know them. I let them rest in how the shreds of what I remember are like waybills in the rain bleeding phrases.

I mourn her voice. It was sure once, then thirty-two years passed and it grew tremulous. Maybe his was similar, or where it used to shrilly scold became mellow with the decades.

I mostly imagine the tubing, how it snaked from them and drained them measured into canisters. How much of their own breath and fluid remained by the time the machines stopped?

I dream lately that I’m lying beside her, in another, identical bed. Our matched blue gowns are a covenant, the whisper of the oxygen explicit. She’s been pulling the mask off, so they give her a tonic in the drip. She subsides like sun setting on deep water, and I watch her white hair float around her like the tentacles of ocean life.

His end was prone and he was chemically paralyzed. His cells were winking out by constellations and dialysis conferred its own futility. He died at midnight so I’d have to set two days aside a year. August will be here before the lockdown ends, and there’s no dug grave to lay my ancient anger in, just a jar Fedexed to Douglas from the crematorium.

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Me in Middle Age

This is not the lump in my neck. That is in italics like I slant sideways to hear the results. I stay that way and my son doesn’t ask, just makes me tea.

This is me in middle age, a squatter greyer rendering in dull pencil. I hate people who remember me when I was vital. I feel like a fraud without my vigour, like they paid for a live show and only got monochrome stills.

If you saw me with a buggyload of discount produce you’d laugh. I must be lying when I mention platform boots. It’s someone else’s script I’m reading off when I insist I used to sparkle.

Fifty pounds of me is extra, one third my weight. It started when he went to Sweden, and I stopped getting out of bed. Now he’s back but it remains, a reminder that without him I’m wasted.

Mother. I have played at wife, muse, nurse, but never had to play at this. The instinct came with me into the world like how to breathe, and even though he’s six feet tall he still needs me for the cynical sense I make of things.

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Milk Door

Part of me is still that shape, but there’s another shape beneath it now. Beneath my clothes, my bones. I feel strange in this old bag with it.

It didn’t grow. I woke and it broke on me, a stillborn morning. It was failing vision, like me down here in the basement waiting for a few weak rays to finger through the blinds.

It was your absence without GPS, come to me from out of nowhere, gone back again as cataclysmically.

You want it black. You want it hard like circumstance were a shopping list, a box you click on to choose the colour of your life. I call that a luxury, a shortcut to depth.

I don’t have things, but my wont is not you sobering suddenly on a musty couch in some man’s garage. It’s a slow leak, a way of whittling down my walking stick until I fear my very weight will break it.

That isn’t sexy to you. You wouldn’t get a tattoo of it on your neck or pay someone to paint it on your fake nails.

Your mother lays sunken in your absence, hasn’t washed her hair since you left, is forgetting sunlight, has to squint to reach across the threshold and winkle the mail out from the milk door.

I had you once. I didn’t get you back. The person on the bunk beneath me, whose breathing I listened for to help me sleep, was a girl who told welfare I abused her to get housing.