Falling
I live on the third story of a five story building
and I won't lie about how often
I feel like "falling".
"Falling" understates the problem.
There's more to it, obviously.
Maybe "falling" onto a sword like in Roman times
or "falling" into a busy street.
"Falling" face-first into deep waters.
Falling very unlike the angels;
graceless, I'm not a hero, I'm not going to swerve up at the last instant.
I tell myself this, sometimes for comfort,
as shame and disgust pool beneath the goosebumps that rise
when I hear someone yelling across the room,
when I stammer,
when people turn and look at me as I take a seat in the room.
I feel like falling more often than I feel like flying;
the adverse implies more hope than I've learned to discard over the years.
There's gravity, there's conditioned sobriety,
there's whispers, there's laughter I haven't joined in,
all telling me falling is more worth the effort.
To be fucked:
Putting down my phone after sending that essentially fatal message to my friend: I have a scar that's hard to hide and I'm afraid they'll see it.
I knew what they'd say; it's not healthy, they'd say.
But I'm fine, it's fine. I'd show you but I don't think you want to see that.
I've normalized it and they don't know that but they don't need to. I'm sitting on the foldaway couch back home and holding myself together, my hands shaking and my knees drawn up and the blankets sliding off me as I shake--maybe this is the come down--I'm hit in the chest with ice and shame. I'm fucked.
I forgot my knife in my dorm before coming here, I send over text.
It's 2 AM and I'm sobbing with an urge so bad I can't satiate it with long nails and scratching. I'm fucked.
Language Barrier
English isn't my first language. Knowing that, I raise some eyebrows when people discover I chose to major in it. I have a grasp on it now that prompted the steady loss of my native language, a loss I only comprehend when I hear the way I anglicize my r's, my d's, my s's, and z's in my native language. But before I could no longer roll my tongue and speak line after line of fluent foreign words, I had a narrow vocabulary and pounced at the idea of learning new words. The only person there to help with that was Mom.
Mom, what's that in English? Ant.
Ant? Five-year-old me could deal with that.
Cat? Clock? Newspaper? Denim?
My second and third grade teachers read and reinforced and I clung onto tendrils and snippets and murmured conversation that maybe I shouldn't have heard.
(As a side note, it didn't take long to learn what vaccine and immunization meant when I read it on a sign at the doctor's clinic.)
The learning continued for years as I tightened my hold on the English language and simultaneously loosened my proficiency with my mother tongue. When I was eight: Mommy, what's a genre? Mommy, what's a chandelier? Mommy, what's a thumb tack and how is it different from a push pin?
I started watching the news more frequently when I was nine, flipping between small town evening reports and 24/7 politically-fueled anchors repeating and rereading the same stories. I learned to change the channel when they warned "graphic content" (normally followed by an image-collage of dead bodies and bleeding people) or "advisory warning" (when pictures of flooded houses, burned down buildings, hurricane damage, and tornado carnage flickered a slideshow on-screen). When I was nine I learned to just keep changing channels. The first few times, I evaded temptation and spared myself the perturbing revelations of "grown-up" news. Yet, I simultaneously learned to keep watching regardless of warnings and "not suitable for younger viewers" flashing across the screen for long enough that a combined sense of dread and thrill danced through my chest. At nine years old, I became desensitized.
When I was ten I asked "Mommy, what's pornography?"
At eleven: Mommy, what's rape?
At thirteen: Mommy, what's making love?
Mom answered every question as well as she could. Apparently, "cat", "denim", and "thumb tack" weren't enough for me anymore. I needed to know everything and anything, despite how unprepared I was to learn it or my mental inability to understand the implications these words carried. I made my mother define them no matter how ugly and foreign they felt in my mouth. At ten and eleven, I could not fathom the history behind social taboo, dehumanization, and objectification. I could not predict the horror and disgust those words would bring me during my adolescent years, when I learned and watched and read more than I would have thought possible.
At fourteen: Mommy, what does it mean to hurt yourself?
As it turns out, I didn't need anyone to teach me about that one. I learned on my own.
Broken Things Don’t Need Fixing Either
They think he takes the sunrise for granted. He's seen it too many times before.
He has, that's true, but he saw it when his eyes flickered open and he found himself on the floor, body thumping the aching aftereffects of an overdose.
The shelf-stockers at Safeway laugh a little when she comes every week and spends fifteen minutes pacing the freezer section before loading a basket with Marie Callender's.
And she hears them, thin hairs pinched between the goosebumps forming on her arms and blood rushing up her neck. They don't know she'd forced herself ten pounds below healthy last December. No one mentioned recovery came with binges. She shimmies down to check-out in her size M leggings.
Despite enviable grades, he finishes last on every exam, time limits burning at his heels as he sits alone in huge lecture halls and scribbles like mad. The prof arches a brow when he hands in the test and his classmates stare when he comes late to class.
They don't know that OCD exceeds "germaphobia" and folding things into perfect halves. They wouldn't believe it if he said he had compulsions for breathing, blinking, and walking. They'd laugh if they knew he checked all the outlets, the windows, and the stove before leaving the house.
We're all broken. The children think lack of Wi-Fi ruins the world. The high-schoolers try to believe everything's fine, while their classmates gouge holes into themselves and tear hair from their scalps. The college kids know everything's gone to shit and they fade, skimming existence, wading through party scenes and orgies. The adults cover it up well, working full-time and dancing with alcohol, their audience the bleating of daytime Soaps.
We can't always see it--the depression, the eating disorders, the anxiety, the addiction--but damned if it's not there. Maybe it doesn't make sense--he's too happy, too thin/fat, too successful, too on top of his shit--but being broken isn't supposed to make sense. People shouldn't crack, lives shouldn't twist, being born shouldn't be a crime, being human shouldn't mean pain. But we live in a world where they do, it is, and it does.
We'd all like to think everyone else has their life under control. We've constructed a stigma around "broken things". After all, who wants to be broken? We spend our lives sprinting in the opposite direction, trying to get further and further from a broken truth.
But we're all living, breathing examples of broken things and living, breathing examples that broken doesn't mean bad; broken doesn't always need fixing.