Bluing Deadly
I listen to the same xm radio station as my oldest brother, the last remaining sibling with whom I maintain infrequent contact. The other two siblings of mine have earned the right to be on my bad side—which, from their perspective, probably comes across as absence. No contact with them is more than enough for my nervous system. I know better than to reason with the unreasonable.
The pain in my stomach has no words to go with it. I could try to fit it into some of them but know that there will be something missing—an absence. It’s heavy, dark, bruised, bleeding internally. It’s also more vast than the reaches of my psyche. My body knows more than I do about what’s happening.
The river outside flows continually northward as my cat whines in need of attention. I consider running each word I write by Claude whose validation I seek as a companion who cannot harm me like a human. The one-sidedness of artificially intelligent conversations appeals to the wreckage of my relational systems. Disorganized attachment is the result of inconsistent presence and absence.
I turn to you and freeze as you cry for the pain I cannot reach. He holds what I cannot touch and stays when I leave. He’s not dead and that’s my favorite thing about him. Now the dead stir in the reaches at the periphery—a tingling at the back of my neck and head as I wonder whether Grandma is holding me there like the psychic said she was and like my mother prays she does. The presence of her absence from this earthly plane is incomprehensible to my nervous system. I must believe she’s there so that I am not overtaken by despair.
A client once said their tears were crying and asked me about mine so I said there were enough oceans in the world already.
I can’t tell Grandma about what my uncle did to me. I didn’t tell her what my sister did either—how she bled onto the beige carpet while turning blue and it was up to me to tell her colonizer to call an ambulance. He had failed my sister’s test by leaving when she told him he should—or maybe he passed the test? He called me angrily at 2am and told me to go to her room, so I did and saw her there—dying, cut up and losing life force quickly as the bottle of pills disintegrated within her stomach. I kept asking her if she knew who I was as she came in and out of consciousness. “Of course I do!” she beamed before fading away, bluing deadly like the characters I now tend to create when video gaming.
Well now I’m hyperventilating and my heart is pounding. How are you doing? Are you still with me, or are you leaving? Now I want to vomit up the dinner my husband made me—or, rather, the poison that lingers within me. How are reptiles affected by the poison they carry? Is it a burdensome ache for the sake of protection or a site of seething strength?
I turned on my parent’s bedroom light for a moment while my sister was dying but couldn’t bear to break the news that an ambulance was coming to take their daughter to the hospital again. The first time this happened I was broken open by the sweating jar of cold mayonnaise sitting on the kitchen counter—my mom’s empire left untended as she rode to the hospital with her dying daughter. Her daughter wasn’t actually dying this time; she just said she was. This second time she actually was dying and I am confronted by it whenever I glimpse what lies beyond my chronic hypervigilance.
My dad was upset that my sister’s colonizer didn’t tell him the ambulance was coming. My mom scrubbed the blood from the beige carpet where a mysterious stain sat for years. “What’s that stain?” asked my sister and my mom gasped before saying she did not remember.
I had no idea I was going to write about this today. I began with the most present wounding—the disinheritance—and this is what came up instead. Wonder if I’ll publish it. Wonder if you’ll read it. Wonder if I’ll breathe deeply again or if this suffocating despair is what I will continue to expect. I would not know what to do with myself if this suffering were absent.