Becoming Ishmael

When you’re sitting on the table in a yellow kitchen, wine glass in hand, days and weeks and months away from the incredible pressure of a never-ending game of mental chess, when you’re laughing and falling in love again with someone who resembles sunshine and it feels as easy as breathing, it can be a simple thing to forgo remembering what it took to find your way there. The time before this, the time before Now, the time where the lights for the plants showed purple on the walls and the silence of the snowfall in the night was a singular peace in a tableau of gray skies that permeated more areas of your life than just the weather.

Shadows dance behind us all, no matter the light ahead.

Don’t get me wrong, spending an unthinkable amount of time in the jaws of a beast does teach you an array of invaluable lessons: how to pass the time in the halls of your mind palace; how to explore your passions for excess dopamine; how to amputate a limb so you don’t lose everything else, too. I think the worst part about After is knowing that learning these things the hard way is the only way. It’s a lonely way. The memory becomes a mirror in which you can only be a silent reflection, screaming at the self that lives outside of this framing, who cannot see behind the glass. And you cannot stop it from happening.

I still hear the dull roar of water hitting the plastic shower liner and the fiberglass bottom below me when I get anxious. I close my eyes and feel myself rested against the far end of the bathtub, an endless flow of scalding-hot water cascading over me, rooting me to my physical being. I used to worry, at the worst, if my mind and body would fracture from one another soon, if one day not so far ahead of my rear-view, I’d see photos of myself in the Before-Time and have no more ability to make contact with that girl than we do with anyone in Heaven. I’d breathe in the warm steam around me, tune out the noise of the TV from the other room that marked the presence of the problem, and slip into the momentary comfort that was the monotonous beating of thin plastic with water. Chaos was a comfort when it came in the form of DIY green noise and porcelain-white light leaking into my vision as my eyes fought the wetness around them. The heat of the spray acted as a replacement for the warmth lacking in a life I’d attempted to build with a man who had more in common with the tomb raiders of Egypt than anybody I’d ever imagined would share a home with me. The shower noise filled my newly-hollowed parts like Carneggy Hall– with perfect acoustics.

When I was a sophomore in high school, I took a philosophy class that discussed Ishmael and the perception-based concepts therein. Often since, my mind has drifted back to that imaginary, caged tiger, pacing back and forth behind bars that are thick and metal, completely encompassing, an obvious obstruction to the large cat and its natural inclination to be unfettered in its movements. The words of our instructor will live alongside this memory forever, echoing down like they hid the opening to a subcutaneous tunnel; “At least the tiger can see the cage.”

I’ve never taken a biology class, or been educated in the area of natural science, without the frog in the pot being brought up as a point of reference. Though I’m quite sure it lacks scientific or historical bases in the 19th-century areas of study, the tale carries itself through time as a truth that no one feels the need to question, and I understand why. In even the most well-respected, highly-achieving curriculums, without a doubt, that dying frog carries a truth we cannot easily explain through a different medium. The circumstances of their slowly warming waters carry too much weight to discard by way of un-tested truths. I think about that frog, floating carelessly in its habitat, legs behind itself as it spins in slow relaxation, the current of the pond as its only source of direction.

Did you hear the match strike, or the lighting of the stove?

I know the frog did.

At twenty five, I stood in horror off of the busy, beaten, downtown path, and I watched the world around me move in slow-motion. The figures in the crosswalk carried themselves in blurs– college girls in their bunny ears, moving with a quickness, long hair tossed behind a shoulder, puffs of vape smoke, their male counterparts doing their best to keep up as they chirped between one another over the sounds of the city. They looked excited, exhilarated, hungry for life. I hopelessly stood by as more groups of twenty-something year-olds, so similar to myself, frolicked in the freedom of the night. I watched these clusters of positivity over his shoulder, my eyes wandering back to them each and every time his conversation didn’t demand their focus. That should be me, I thought. That should be me. I made the choice to be here then, but I am trapped now. I created this prison, brick and mortar; I provided the supplies for him to build it around me in every truth I ever told him, in every lie I didn’t. And I can never go back.

At last, I could see them around me: the thick, metal, unyielding bars of a cage that this man had built to entrap me, beginning the day we’d met. The sorrow in my chest was almost enough to spill over the tops of his walls, to flood the streets in one roaring wave like a tsunami; the shock wave had finally moved through my oceans and carried the water up to this unnatural vibration. As I watched the other girls strut the streets with their friends and their freedom, I wondered if they could see the tide shrinking back around their ankles, if they could hear the roar from beyond the visible horizon. Did the Earth shake beneath their feet, too?

The frog– drifting in the warming water, eyes closed, thinking that the heat that gathers around them is nothing more than the sun on its skin– will surely die. In confusion and in pain, only at the last, will it fight. It will kick and hiss and burn its skin on the edges of the pot as it attempts to propel itself anywhere else, trying to escape this liquid hell. As the temperature rises deep within its core, and the world begins to blend together, going fuzzy, the frog will breathe in the hot steam and its eyes will fight the blinding white light of the laboratory. For the first time, and the last, it will know the difference between this, and the true feeling of the sun. It will know that the warming water was not, in fact, a simple pleasure in life, or a gift from the universe, but a slow and morbid ending, designed specially for them and their ilk. Its eyes will go cloudy as they slip into oblivion, as unaware of their having left their body as they were of their original placement inside of the pot. No one will hear them go, and the data of their demise will be collected by a simple man who fully intends to kill as many more of these creatures as it takes to reach his agenda. The desperate confusion felt in the final moments of the frog’s life will never cross the scientist’s mind, and the low screams of protest from the beautiful amphibian that had, once, only wanted to lay in the warmth of the sun, will slip from memory, only a footnote in the pages of his report.

The tiger, pacing back and forth in its cage, will never resolve its singular question of “why?” Entrapped, now, by its own nature and its own anxious existentialism, as well as the bars, it will stare out beyond its enclosure, discomforted, acutely aware of how unnatural this is, these circumstances. They have to be, right? Why would this feel abnormal if it was beneficial, if it was best? Wouldn’t it feel differently if it was meant to be? Its mind will twist from an inability to recognize more than the bars, but the reasons for them. “Why?” Why? Back and forth, to and fro, a monotonous, but comforting, movement, turning panicked at the end, an attempt to provide calm that would not be necessary if–

why are you doing this?

Now, when I open my eyes in the morning, soft, yellow light greets me. I let out the dog, make her breakfast, and sip fresh coffee from a mug I was gifted so early in the Before-Times, it almost feels the same. I’m watching the steam rise from the cup and curl up, up toward the sunshine. He asks if I’m hungry yet, and if I’m warm enough. There is a stillness, like a moment left out of time, meant solely for the purpose of breathing in freely, safely, my own way. There are no chains strapping a suicide vest to my little frame anymore, nothing stopping me from feeling the safety of my own body. There is no weight shackling me to the proverbial ocean floor, to watch helplessly and in horror, again, as a tsunami appears on the horizon. Now, I am the girl gang in the crosswalk, their vape smoke on the wind, the curls of steam from my morning cup.

And yet, in the darkest, most animal-istic spaces of my mind, there is still an enclosure around me, I am still being watched from beyond it. I am pacing the boundary, a tightness in my chest, attempting anything comforting to quiet my spirit. When I am there, the blinding glare of white light reappears, the hot spray of the shower, the drum of the water on plastic. I see the fat, white, State-police envelope, like Ishmael’s books, slid between the spaces of my prison walls, meant to free my mind, yet those walls, I swear, could be crushing me soon, beneath their weight, the weight of him. I feel the sickness creeping in again–a most unnatural sensation– and the grievous weight of an existential question, one I could never hope to answer myself.

“Without that beast, was there any hope for me?”