I am one kind of alive
I keep having this dream that I’m on a plane that’s crashing. Sometimes it’s a massive Boeing jet tumbling into the Pacific. Other times the plane is small, a single-engine Cessna careening into an abandoned sugar mill in Ohio. Outside it’s dark but the lights from the plane illuminate the surrounding fields. There are fires here. Passengers stumble around cloaked in smoke and burns. We are singed, yet we survive. It’s only after the crash that I realize I knew the plane was going down the whole time. When I finally wake, what remains is the grass burning beneath the engines. I hold out my shaking hands in the dark and they smell like metal.
If you had met me when I was 16, 19, or 24, and asked what I wanted to be when I grow up, I would’ve laughed and said, not my mother. I regarded her in the simplest terms: uneducated, unsophisticated, a festering wound in constant need of dressing. My mother was a woman who wore foundation two shades darker than her skin, a mask. Only her neck betrayed her paleness. No, I didn’t want to be her although we were often mistaken for sisters. No, I didn’t want to be her when everything I have ever written, in one way or another, is about me writing my way back to her. Forever wanting to be the small child threading my hands through the thicket that was her dark hair. No, no. Instead, I would be soft-spoken, educated, never in want. I spent much of my life drawing an invisible line in front of me, a chasm neither of us could cross. It was only after her death did I realize that I am more like her in ways than we are different. Years ago, during an argument with my father, he cut the engine and winced. You sound just like her.
Never cry, never be vulnerable, never trust anyone, never love so much that you break. When I was small, my mother placed a brick in my hand and taught me how to build walls. Never did I consider that we were already broken and these walls were about preventing us from healing. After a while, you get used to the cuts and the pain that stems from them, so if given the choice between the known and unknown, you take a barrel of salt and pour it into your wounds because that kind of pain is one you’ve become accustomed to bear.
A year after she died and the year I fell into a deep, suicidal depression, my therapist asked me how I felt about her passing, to which I responded, relieved. Over the course of several months that answer changed shape and form and although there were so many red, aching parts — the seemingly endless revolving door of violent men she brought into our home and her bed, her cruel silences followed by words that have left scars that only I can see, the drugs, the denial, her strong hands tightening around my wrists, the lies and the leaving — I remember that this was also the woman who gave me a heart that still beats. Sometimes I wish things could’ve been different. If only we hadn’t clutched to our hurt so hard. If you ask me now what I think about my mother I would use the word survivor. Even after her death, she was a woman who endured.
This morning I cry out: hold on! I’m on a plane again and I brace for the inevitable impact. I sit up in bed and I think about the one summer where she was a waitress in a luncheonette and brought home $10 a day in tips. Our refrigerator developed anemia. That was the summer when we were inventive with a hot pot, bags of potatoes and sticks of butter. That was a summer where I laid out all of our belongings on a sheet in front of a store on Thirteenth Avenue. Made in Taiwan figurines in the shape of children and galloping horses; that framed picture of a few stemmed roses in a vase — my mother was angry about the things I had sold until I showed her a small wad of dollar bills. For two nights in a row we feasted on chicken legs from the bodega. With potatoes, of course.
While I was convinced we’d have to live out of boxes in back of the C-Town — our eviction situation was that precarious— my mother was fearless. She always had a plan that would turn the lights back on and remove the eviction notices from our door. Was she ever afraid then, or decades later when she lay dying of cancer? It was as if fear was the one emotion to which she was immune, but maybe I’m wrong. Maybe she was better at wearing her mask to a point where you couldn’t remember the face underneath. The finality of death renders all these questions incomplete.
While it’s true that I have many of things my mother never had — credit cards, cashmere sweaters, trips to India and Japan (the only time she’d been on a plane was a trip to Disney World) and an ivy-league education — in so many ways she was stronger. She had less than with which I started and we never lost our home. I was the owner of finery while she was the purveyor of game plans.
Two years after my mother’s death I saw a psychic because I live in Los Angeles now and I want answers. I’m not a believer, but the psychic said, your mother is with you always except for when you write. She wants to give you your space. Only recently do I understand what she meant and sometimes I cry over the memory and loss of her, and the one unselfish gift she gave me — permission.
Two years ago I wanted to kill myself. I ordered box of razor blades off Amazon and spent most days, at home, nicking the inside of my thighs. Target practice, I said, laughing out loud in an empty home. Daylight had become an assault and I cocooned myself in my bathtub believing it to be a grave. Two friends saved my life and I got therapy, a Wellbutrin prescription, and after six months, my life back. During this time, I asked friends for money, and to this day that act still brings me shame. Although I know there’s nothing wrong in asking for help, a pill and a series of hour-long sessions can’t erase history.
But for a year I felt something resembling happiness. There were no planes, only sun.
Then the losses trickled in. I published a novel no one read. I fired my agent because, even after a decade, he still didn’t understand that I was the kind of writer who wrote small, dark books that people read. I lost a major project (and my main source of income) because I’d done the thing I’d been afraid to do — I spoke out about how I was being mistreated. One of the first words I learned as a child was “difficult” and this was how I would end up being characterized. When I endured years of verbal abuse from one boss and assault from another, I was considered a team player. I was promoted and excelled. The moment I finally made respect and integrity a priority was the moment I was considered a liability.
Now I regret saying anything at all.
I take my pills. I run on flat pavement. I watch horror movies with friends. I leave the house to remind myself that daylight does indeed exist. I watch videos of minor animal triumphs. Watch that shetland walk with his new prosthetic hind legs! Watch the feral cat find her forever home after years of torment and abuse! I watch more animal triumph videos. I read books. I abandon social media because I can’t cope with the endless tickertape of rage and pain. I meet with recruiters who tell me that I’m so good on paper. I send dozens of emails that go unanswered. I do the things I know I should be doing in order to survive. I don’t reveal too much to the people I love because they automatically return to the year I wanted to take my life (parenthetical: when one takes a life, to whom or what do they give? I think about this sometimes) and they don’t understand that I’m not the person I was then, but nobody really listens. The days repeat themselves with minor variations, and sometimes I wake and wonder which day it is to realize it’s one day closer to the 1st, to the rent I can’t afford to pay, the bankruptcy lawyer I can’t afford to pay, and the life I so assiduously built for myself coming undone.
This wasn’t supposed to happen. I wasn’t supposed to fail so frequently, so publicly. Yet here I am explaining the definition of unemployment to the IRS. Here I am posting notices on Facebook for everyone to see — can someone foster my cat for a few months while I sit in another country where I can live in a hostel for $10 a day, wondering how I’ll ever piece my life back together again? I post sad status updates no one responds to and then I delete them. I’ve become proprietor of the phrase, I’m fine, which is my mask, and the moment I set it down, the moment I lay out my situation — loss, bankruptcy, failure — I receive three emails to join a religion and two from strangers promoting their $20 door fee gigs (but I’ll comp you a drink, they say). I delete the post and crawl under the covers and wonder when I gave myself permission to fall spectacularly to shit.
When will the wounds ever close?
Last night I board a plane in my sleep. The stranger next to me tells me she’s frightened of flying. I tell her about this trick I’ve learned. Write your name over and over with your non-dominant hand. At first it feels foreign and your name resembles you in kindergarten. But then you adjust. You learn how to shape the letters of your name with a hand that is closer to that which is familiar, that which feels like home.
I am big and puffy and take up three seats because I’m wearing all the pretty things I own. It’s funny, really, watching a woman strap a blender across her chest while wearing two pairs of kitten-heeled shoes, but in the dream I’m just a woman with a lot of unchecked baggage. The air outside gets choppy and the girl starts to write her name and she asks if I use that brand of blender often because she’s considering an investment. Not so much, I say. There are only so many smoothies and soups you can make. Why bring it then, she asks. I tell her I like the idea of using it more often.
I get up and walk sideways down the aisle wondering if all of me would be able to fit in the bathroom. Would I need to put the cast iron pan and Adrienne Rich in the overhead bin? Suddenly, the air goes from turbulent to oxygen mask and I could see the girl holding on to her pen for dear life and I can’t make it to the bathroom or back to my seat, so I clutch the back of someone’s seat and scream at the girl writing to keep writing her name while we brace for impact.
