59
Here are my problems as told to me by my therapists and my parents:
If I’m not drinking coffee then I’m drinking whiskey or beer. I don’t hydrate properly. I eat poorly, sporadically, sometimes in huge quantities of fast food and sometimes not much at all. I really need to eat more protein. And I need to be drinking soy milk, not almond milk, for its nutritious properties and calorie density. If I’m going to drink a protein shake, don’t use it as a meal replacement, but drink it after your workout. I need to stop skipping meals and eat every 2-4 hours to keep up my blood sugar. Stop carrying around glucose tablets and start carrying around handfuls of nuts. I don’t practice my coping mechanisms properly.
Less weight training and more cardio. I need to stop spending money on drugs. While they can’t tell me “not” to do cocaine, it perhaps isn’t the best thing to mix it with the antidepressants and the benzodiazepines. I need to go to Alcoholics Anonymous because I’m upsetting the people around me by drinking.
I’m not operating on the fundamental axiom that I’m a good person, as is prescribed by cognitive behavioral therapy. I’m focusing on the macro and not the micro of the situation. I need to stop gesturing so much with my hands and talk louder. I need to stop complaining about my girlfriend because she has done wonderful things for me. I shouldn’t have thrown my pills out when I was about to swallow them all and commit suicide - now the therapist has to write a new prescription. I need to get out of the house more. I need to get out of the house less. I need to be present and gone at the same time, like a kind of walking human mist. I need to carve myself into something that’s functioning and acceptable, and only then will my depression disappear. I need to take more pictures. I need to take the pictures and print them out and put them on my wall so that I can tell myself every day that I’m valuable at life.
I need to stop walking across the parking lot. I need to put down the gun and the whiskey. I need to not take those keys out of my pocket. I need to not blare dubstep so loud from my radio that my eardrums shatter. Oh god, what are you doing. I need to stop going 110 mph down the highway. Oh god, someone could get killed. I really should turn down the dubstep and listen to NPR or something. I should practice my coping mechanisms while swerving through traffic, chugging on my bottle of whiskey, and waving the gun at passersby. Don’t drink and drive. What the fuck, Autumn, seriously? That’s not even a road. I need to get back on the road I need to calm down it’s getting dark the land is splayed out like a neverending palm. I need to stop looking at how beautiful the light is, mottled like lace across the dashboard, stop crying, go back. I need to go back and think about what I’m doing. I need to go back and check to see if I actually ran over that dog.
I need to turn the headlights on it’s too dark to see. God I can’t see a fucking thing. I’m going to drive us both off a cliff. What the fuck, Autumn? What the fuck. What the fuck!? This isn’t like me. I don’t even know who I am. I’m hoping I’ll be defined by the ways in which I handle the fundamental truth that I’m a good person and restructure my entire life around slow-drifting sands of illogical conclusions deemed necessary for an enjoyable life. I mean, I really should understand it’s easier to treat the symptoms and not the cause. I need to understand if I eat more protein than eventually I’ll have the strength to assimilate my bad childhood into its proper emotional context - which includes forgiving my parents for being so goddamn horrible and placing the burden of their sins onto myself. I really should slow down, especially on this cliffside.
I can’t see a fucking thing.
I need to stop coughing up blood. I need to breathe for a few seconds. I really shouldn’t panic in a situation like this. I really shouldn’t laugh in a situation like this, when I looked back and saw the dead body of my therapist flung through the window, it’s an inappropriate social response to my situation. I need to pull the broken shards of whiskey-soaked glass out of my arm, dripping with blood, and crawl out of the car into the ravine. I really should stop laughing. I need to write all of this down in my journal when I get back. Journalling is the best way to process these kinds of things, after all. Then I need to take a bath with epsom salts. Maybe go to the hospital.
I really need to forgive myself for murdering my therapist. There’s no use in rehashing the past, after all, and I am a good person.
And I can’t see a fucking thing.
60
“Do you sonder?” asks the underage girl with dust in her eyes, to the man who slammed her against the woodshed and pushed her panties aside and fucked her.
She made no attempt to resist, except perhaps in the squeezing of her knuckles, in the sighing, gasping, shuddering breaths as he rattled her insides. And she wondered if the boy looking through the window would use the sight of her being fucked as a part of his fundamental character development, maybe become overprotective of women or his sister, or if he’d block it out of his mind, with her wrenched red eyes and bird scratches, until years later when he raised his fist to strike his wife, and saw her eyes widen and her body seize and became overwhelmed with disgust at himself, became heavy and sore as a great electric wave passed through him, straight through the hole that the underage girl created, and he’d hate himself without ever really understanding why.
61
[redacted love letter].
62
“Redacted love letter?” Robert said, in his usual caustic way, when he read that previous section. “You should put that down as reason #3 for why you’re a literary coward.”
I’ve come to realize the closer something is to me, the more difficult it is to write about. Only with the proper amount of distance from a thing can I construct a narrative that’s satisfying to me. Otherwise the FICTION is confused with PROPHECY. The NARRATIVE becomes ALTERNATE MEMORY. When I write about the present moment, it’s like swimming upstream in blood, trying to make sense of processes that were never meant to be written down.
It’s as if publishing a love letter to someone I’m currently in love with would ruin the feelings of love, categorize them, earmark them. I don’t trust my words enough to describe what love means to me, and maybe I never will.
Note: This is part of my Psycho-Surreal Memoirs Series. You can find more by looking through my feed. They're designed to be able to be read in any order.
You can find me on Twitter, Facebook, and my website. You can also buy one of my books here.
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