Trace

I often wonder how much of ourselves we can leave behind?

Science tells us that our body relinquishes cells at such a rate that by the end of seven years it will have discarded and replaced every singe piece of who we were

Every molecule.

In  this drug-like half-life what can we hope to hold onto?

So many memories have shifted within me these last few months. Fragments of circus printed summer dresses; dark hallways and frosted doors; and those first feelings of shame and disgust in the difference and weakness I made my strength

Perhaps those walls within I built myself

Cell by cell within my bodily prison

Is it always the older cells that fade?

I remember when I first learned about chemical absorption and the process of our bodies breaking down the substances we consume. I remember too reading an essay by a friend talking about the halving and halving of things into smaller and smaller increments. We do that so naturally with so many things.

Like the neat little piles of Coke on the patterned kitchen plate

The daylight-bright phosphorescent lightbulbs always make life look so surreal

It tasted bitter

And I felt if anything more of a reality

I had less access to my thoughts; my mind

And that is me

Dancing didn’t have the same high

I remember; although it was like being barred from what is internally and inherently so much myself

Life is enough for me. And more so when I can truly feel it

I remember the hours I spent scraping through skin and the slick ooze of epidermal fluid

As I fought to feel

What of the fragility of our tender green new growth?

The vulnerability

Stripped bare by kisses and love

Fearing it cannot last. In more ways than one

Though it’s evolution came so naturally

Of the innocence before acts?

What traces remain?

As each day we gain more and more understanding and fight with every cell

Not to make the same mistakes

Hurt the same hurts. As we always do and always did

To fear pain is rational

While the chemicals clear from my system

The fear is much harder to lose

I’ve taken it so long it is a part of me

 

Growing from Miniature

I am reading a book of essays

Small Acts of Disappearance

One meditates deeply on the process of miniturisation

How much more power we have over a world we can roll around in the palm of our hand

It reminds me of the story of the young Krishna who showed the universe to his mother through an open-mouthed gape

He revealed the worlds beyond our world while for a time I shank, huddled and to frightened to speak

It’s been strange these past few months realising just how much the world had shrunk around me. How insubstantial I had felt as things slowly fell apart

The year it’s taken me to resurrect my fragments and rebuild

But then I always did like the perfection of tiny things

I always did like to build and write and collect my own stories

Reading through a collected book of poems by Yeats I found

The Coat

And remembered the winter I spent stripped bare

Memorising it. More for it’s permission than for it’s warmth. Physically I outgrew and shank back into that place several more times before reaching this point where I stand now

Realistically there is no surety here either

Perhaps only in the solidness I am slowly gathering

Things are still so very fragile. But perhaps life is too?

I’ve had remarks on how healthy I look today and today I feel it too

Perhaps it’s not strange that to get here I have outgrown so many perceptions

Only to find the coat I so longed to fit was an ideology all along

Not an item capable of holding physical limitations

A Coat

By W.B. Yeats

I made my song a coat

Covered with embroideries

Out of old mythologies

From heel to throat;

But the fools caught it,

Wore it in the world’s eyes

As though they’d wrought it.

Song, let them take it

For there’s more enterprise

In walking naked.

 

 

 

 

Deescalation

The come down from a crisis is brutal

Everything feels so clear and cold. But with no feeling

When it’s happening is worse because everything is just happening

Falling, falling, falling….

Tonight I’m watching “Donnie Darko”. The scene about the Lifeline and it’s 2D perception of motives as being divided into Love and Fear. The accusations of a lesson missing the whole spectrum on human emotions

Emotions and their motivations and subsequent actions are so much more complicated. The story becomes so much more complicated by daylight. I’ve heard from the police- twice; I’ve spoken to those who were there.

It’s not your fault they said. But I felt so responsible. I led them there

The nightmare of not knowing; outside in the dark

The slight give of the rungs of the metal gate as we climbed. The window as we worked it open. I opened the door. We checked through every room. I couldn’t face what I might find if I did it alone, but still I led him in. Our conscience is clear- he’s right, but the potential for repercussion

She was inside all along; she hid

“If you hurt my friend I will come back to haunt you. Don’t break her heart”

Like I’m some fragile creature, incapable of knowing

Some ethereal fairy

Like the terror of not knowing if you would find them dead in the half-darkness

A pool of vomit and pills

I’d already checked that morning for places capable of holding a rope and noose to find none

What’s “right” is not a law; but it is my moral compass. What’s right to me

And the conflict when that risks anyone else

It’s a curse to appear so fragile

There is so much I carry. I feel guilt that others carried for me the fear I had for them

I wonder at how hours and moments can shatter the perceptions others have of us

I wonder if their view or mine is more accurate?

I wonder if I see them as they see themselves?

 

Which Way Home? What is Home?

A feeling built inside me this week

The web started a week ago as I finished my training for foster care

I had to write about my life so far. The places I have come from and overcome

Perhaps to an extent what I still struggle with they need to know too

I have written what I know. I want to find ways to make where I have come from useful

In honesty. I think I can. It’s what I don’t know that frightens me

Lots of disjointed images and feelings. Some I know

They are the familiar fragments. I understand that childhood is made up of pieces

Umbrellas and sunshine; bedroom curtains and the pictures I saw in wall-shadows

Others

The fish tank in the old hospital waiting room

The green damask carpet in our old lounge room

Screaming and flailing. Feeling in that moment I could never get away

It’s difficult to remember what you did not have the language to describe

The feeling of wrong-ness

The feeling was me

The frosted glass on the front door

The bathroom in our old house. Sitting in there one day tearing the vinyl on an old stool

There was a strange, numb, “nothing” I remember feeling but not quite understanding.

Everything felt so vivid but disjointed. I would have been about four or five

The dim light on the boxes in my father’s office. The deep chocolate brown face of one of our old cats

The patterns on hospital curtains

Chairs in so many offices and faceless specialists

There was not a place to record these things in my story. They just sit inside the semi-darkness of my memories

I feel numb and empty

But at the same time there is this screaming ache inside

About eight years ago I had a dream

There were two young girls in a bathtub. A man came in.

I saw through his eyes

He did something to the girls in the bathroom

What he did is a blank

I spoke with a friend into the early hours of Sunday morning

The dream came up then

I was a little blonde girl once…

I vaguely remember the changes, but not their reasons

It might not be me…

It might be…

I know I feel so very fearful of the unknowns in my story

The places I do not know

Vulnerable in these maybes and what might have been

I’ll probably never find out from my family

I wonder if this is why for the longest time I could not be touched or held

Or if this was just the person I became through my

“Difference” from others

For a brief time this feels like the undoing of so much I have fought for and won

On Thursday I sit for the first of four interviews with Pathfinders

After that, with my checks completed (all I’s dotted and T’s crossed) I am a foster carer

I feel so unready with this uncertainty. It reminds me of a song by George. I first heard it at sixteen and felt it’s words so deeply though I’d never let anyone that close

I didn’t think I could

I pushed so many people away while I wanted so much to be able to speak

Before the silence choked me and I ended up crumpled in a corner unable to let the words out

In so many ways I’m so far past where it was ever mapped that I could reach

I’m here for a reason, a friend said

And I believe that. It just feels so frightening to be beyond any of my wildest guesses

In the last months

Since Simon left

I have rearranged my life

Stone by stone. Like my garden, slowly but surely it is growing

I long for at least a little certainty though. Somewhere to call home