embrace me, my irreplaceable you.
01/18/03|3:45 p.m.

The only people outside today are the agoraphobics.

Ok, I admit it; I mostly just liked that as an opening line, but I do swear to Kermit there's some truth in the statement. I've been, erm, in bed with a low-grade fever^ and a sore throat, and yesterday, I used that as an excuse to not do the whole go-outside-and-stay-there thing. Today, I've felt better enough that my boredom from lying in bed has pushed into action, occasionally even multi-tasking (and though I'm starting to feel a nap coming on now), I decided to bundle up my little self and hit the streets.

I was cute. I'd shorn my hair again (as of this afternoon, listening to the Smiths, and rolling my eyes a little at the way I love that I do things like cut my own hair while listening to the Smiths), had on my green cords and an underground shirt Sarah bought me on a trip she took to London. To this I added, my coat zipped-up (which means it's cold outside) with my Silje-angel-pin still on the lapel, and my Spongebob aviator cap. The cap was a good idea. The coat was a good idea. A scarf would have been a remarkably good idea. (Why on earth does the girl who constantly constructs scarves never wear them out into the wintry weather, hmmm?) I knew going down the stairs that I was about to do a good thing, and the tiny bit of snow coming down aided the optimism. Understand, it was just enough snow for the wind to whip at my poor exposed face. And though it wasn't Wisconsin-cold, or even New-York-cold (except for the block I walked against the wind) I did consider whether I really prefer frostbite over atrophy. (I do. But I'm not. Frostbitten.) Even the animals were quiet, which is odd; the squirrels who live on our balcony, and like to do, erm, romantical things to keep themselves warm (things that are a little too frisky for me to want happening just outside my window, no matter what fondness I have for these critters) usually supply a fair amount of noise. Squirrel sex, apparently, involves many disturbing and bizarre noises.

Now there's a sentence you never even thought to bet I wouldn't write. Mwa.

So abandoned streets, and only 1 1/2 fantasies of my untimely death (interestingly enough, none of them involved hypothermia) which isn't a bad stat. And the complete lack of people, even in cars, not counting the immigrant couple who obviously hail from a country that gave them reason to consider this weather unseasonably warm and a couple of poor souls hightailing it toward bus stops, meant I couldn't really have the overstimulation scariness of Thursday's sojourn. I mean, I could have. But then I'd be flu-exhausted and agoraphobia-exhuasted, which means I wouldn't be writing this entry, which has you on the edge of your seat. (And no, you are not trying to get away; you are on the edge of your seat because you're that enthralled by my life. Every time I argue with rude comments that no one's actually made, I'm reminded of my brothers and their influence on my life. Coincidence? Meh. Brothers are still good, even if they do interject a certain paranoid defensiveness into a sister's journal.)

My mom is currently at an art opening, receiving a humongous cash prize for the creepy-ass painting which won best in show. At least, that's what we're planning for... I reminded her what I said near the end of The Age of Innocence (which minimizes the fact that the book is rather good, so let's be clear that the book is good): "Do you know why this one the Pulitzer Prize? ::waiting:: ...Because no one is ever happy. Ever." [Originally, I then proceeded to quote 8 Femmes, saying, "There is no happy love" (because I don't know the French.)] I told her that such was always the case with art; the unhappiest piece wins, and hers was seriously disturbing. How can she lose? (Since I did Edith Wharton this service, I'd like to do it for me mum as well: The painting's also good. It's just scary as hell, an amusing statement considering it relates to Persephone.)

...

I never really mastered transitions. Let's just say, it's now a little after eight, instead of a little before four, and my mom lost proudly, arriving home in tact and able to tell the tale. For the record, we've done enough of this jurying schtuff to know that it'd be a 2004 miracle, despite the calibre of the piece, for her to win. From her description of the show, it's amazing she juried in at all: a national show with about five "edgy" pieces (non-landscapes and -portraits.) One of five sounds like an achievement to me... And she has her own opening on the first of February, whee. Why am I rambling about this? Because it's easy and completely unrelated to anything I'm feeling right now or have felt over the past few days. Because the doctor asked me Friday to let myself weep over the weekend, and I haven't been quite so faithful to that as I was with the walking, something I'm not sure I care to change right this moment. It's true, the viral thing is boring, (when it's not the plague version other people are getting) ... but that isn't all that's gone on. And even that. Imagining. I can't quit imagining... And the phrases that people are throwing around regarding the good doc, words like "almost died" and "flesh-eating bacteria" seriously don't help. Since, in the sessions, I never really manage not to cry, I did actually do some crying around the fact that the doc's illness came so close to being 2003's final horrific blow. Or rather, being an even greater blow than it was... He'd already said his seldom-used version of "time's up" - "we really do need to end" - (which we usually avoid by ending on a very strong statement, a small breath, and his casual, "See you Monday / Friday?"), but I pushed forth and let out my last thought nevertheless. "It's just everyone, everyone," I said. "I mean, look at what happened to you."

He asked me to weep for myself, for the fact that I don't have the luxury so many take for granted, that I don't share their confidence in the certainty that my loved ones will still be near and in tact tomorrow. At first he said I couldn't take that for granted the way other people do, and I looked at him - knowing how many times he's turned my assumptions of what others think upside-down - and asked if people really believed that. Do people really walk around not only without the constant thoughts of what's going to happen to those they love but with a confidence that those they love will be alright? That's the point when he suggested that others might not so much take for granted the okayness of their loved ones, as have this "confidence." I guess this means people know that they aren't invincible, but they don't feel the odds are against them. They aren't invincible, but they don't live in a war zone, so they have little or no need to be. They can find security in the probability of their attachments remaining in tact, something that seems unbelievable to me in an almost melodramatic fashion. I started to think about my childhood, and the test runs to prepare myself to escape kidnappers. I thought of the parking lots, gas stations mostly, when the parent-on-duty would walk inside to pay, and I would sit in the car alone, watching the other people move and wondering which one of them was going to rob the station at gunpoint and kill my mom or dad. I knew that there was a possibility (slight, of course) that this would not happen. So I simultaneously watched the other patrons trying to decide who was going to kidnap me and take me away from everyone I loved forever, and probably hurt me really bad, and then kill me. Was I ever alone without thinking these things? Did night ever fall (did night have to fall) on a house with only me inside for me to sit on the edge of a chair waiting, expecting someone to break-in and in one fashion or another ruin my life? What about the nights I gathered my scrapbooks, journals, my most important possessions, and piled them onto a chair next to my bed, in preparation for my escape when the house caught on fire while I was asleep? What about the time my dad was buying movie tickets, and a man actually did pull up next to our car, and watch me in a seriously unsettling way, and zoom out of the parking lot at light speed, the moment my dad came back toward the car? When I tried to believe I was just nervous as always, but my dad said, "Next time you're coming with me" which I took as a confirmation? When I sat in the car staring at the locks, wondering if it was safer to lock the doors against the threat or to unlock them in hopes that I could manage to get out of the car and make a run for it.

People don't think these things.

And people...most people...never have them confirmed, never have reasons to start expecting their worst nightmares to unfold on a daily basis. I remember the attacks on the World Trade Center; I was at Rogers, and I felt safer (once I knew my sister was ok) than I'd ever felt in my entire life. Meanwhile, people all over the world were unfolding, people who had no direct attachment to the tragedy were freaking out because of the implications - the feelings of loss, of danger, of fear. I remember talking to Britt about it later, saying how for some of us, our lack of emotional response wasn't the sign of being cold or unfeeling, simply evidence that we'd been through this before. I already knew I wasn't safe; I already knew that horrible things happened, and when that horrible thing happened, I was in the safest nest of a home I've ever been blessed to call mine. But as a kid? I never had that sense of everything-will-be-ok. Someone was late; they were dead. I lost my test that I had to get signed; I was dead. Spilled milk or spilled blood, it all ended the same. The same terror. The same certainty. The same panic.

After Rogers... After Rogers... After Rogers, losses of all kinds started to feel probable. The first loss, the loss of Rogers - as I had it living there - knocked me down with grief. I felt the fear of having returned to an unsafe world after finally knowing a safe one, but mostly I felt heartsick, ill on my own tears, and paralyzed by depression. Losing Tracy made real something I'd never understood; that's the first time I ever really encountered death, as it's so different with elderly relatives you didn't really know, then it is with your seventeen-year-old roommate. Gone again. Eventually afraid. Then Dixie has a stroke, breaks a bunch of bones, miscarries more than once, goes into (and out from, thank love) a coma. Sara treads water, trying always trying, and I watch her head go under and up again, gasping, over and over and over again. Hospitalization after hospitalization. Tears in her esophugas. Jenna emaciated and talking about death. Suicide attempts. My grandma, alive for seventy-eight years, and dead in three days... My parents' marriage. So many tragedies I forget to name them. So many tragedies, legitimately painful ones start to seem minor. "Well, yeah, but that was nowhere near as bad as..." My own life and death struggle with an illness? My months of nightmares? The shame and fear I pulled like weeds in my brain, over and over again, until I found and destroyed the root of each? Well, yeah, that hurt like hell, but...I've seen more unbearable circles in this inferno. Haven't I? Maybe I just can't face them all at once. Put what happened to me on a back burner for awhile (no pun intended.) Let's come up with some sort of schedule to endure all this pain.

When I went into Friday's session, I honestly had no idea what we'd talk about. I was bothered by the friction between my mom and me, by the shadows growing around Rogers, by the states of my friends (and the silences that keep me inventing new nightmares), my homesickness, other things that slip my mind now. He seemed prepared to analyze Monday's session to find where we didn't connect, a track my impossible fatigue (and fatigue-induced-amnesia) scratched out rather quickly. I couldn't even remember what we spoke about Monday, not really, and since it'd been so well resolved for me that night, I didn't feel a need to return to it again. (I was scrambling for hints as to what it was, like a kid who didn't study, a fact which made him laugh and say he was glad I wasn't holding a grudge.) We did talk a little about the phone call being the same-old "I can't do this!" before and "I'm so glad I did this" afterward. I told him some of the reasons: I'd just seen him, his message says "life-threatening emergencies" and I was simply freaking out, not at quite those stakes, and so forth. He said I made the right call, so to speak; he knew something hadn't been communicated, he hadn't understood something, and I would have had to carry it around with me until Friday otherwise. (So he proposed. I doubt the truth of this statement. Personally, I believe I would have exploded sometime in the early a.m. Tuesday, if I hadn't called him and begged for mercy when I did.)

We ended up on Rogers, by way of my struggles and my friends' struggles and the struggles I have with my friends' struggles... Somehow, we ended up talking about guilt, and I told him that lately, I've actually moved from my typical "I have it too easy" guilt (even I couldn't pull that off given December) to my "I'm not doing well enough" guilt. The "I'm a disappointment", "I don't stack up", "all those amazing gifts people gave me, and look how poorly I've turned out" brand of guilt. It's the kind that wreaks havoc when I think about wanting to live up to everything I received at Rogers, (and certain specific additional gifts, like eighth grade friendships and the doc post-Rogers and so forth) and decide I'm not doing well enough. When I feel like I'm doing well, I beat myself up with the "I have it too easy" guilt. When I feel like everything's too difficult, I switch to this, "I'm not doing well enough" guilt. My head is always so kind to me, looking out for me no matter what sort of terrain I trip into. Golly, I'm grateful. Blabh.

The doctor, still thinking we were talking about my friends whose illnesses affect me, reminded me that guilt functions as a defense against anger and resentment, which instantly made me start crying. I told him, what I think is the truth, that I am getting much better at feeling anger toward people, even people I love. I'm recognizing that anger can be a part of love (as opposed to a sign of hatred, i.e. the "opposite" of love), for instance, I'm angry that you put yourself in danger because I love you so much. I told him that when the infamous letter came from Jenna, I was angry. (Among a few thousand other things.) I was angry with Jenna. Not just with the situation or her illness or some other intangible reality, but with the girl herself. I've had other fleeting moments of letting myself feel anger toward Tracy and Sara and plenty of folk I never allowed myself to be angry with in the past. I told him I feel like I do ok, for the moment (I'm improving) with individual people, but when I think of Rogers (and this guilt is all, "look at how far you've fallen from what you were given at Rogers; what would they think if they saw you now, blah, blah" ...which makes me think it has to do with Rogers), I can't handle the thought of feeling resentment toward them. I broke down when I said that, and he didn't hear me, which meant I had to say "resent them" twice, which took about five minutes. (Oy.) I cried because I knew, even if it was taking a convoluted path to get there, we were trekking closer to the truth. I remember thinking Monday (even within my fatigue-induced amnesia I remembered this) that part of the problem was he didn't yet know about all of the dark coming up around Rogers, and my fears about what that darkness meant. He had tried to comfort me with thoughts of home and what I was given there, not understanding how my perspective has warped over the past few weeks. I started to tell him about that warping process, about how when Rogers first happened, it was nearly flawless...It was this bright and shining miracle with almost no hint of ickiness. As I felt a little safer, as people began to support my vision of Rogers as home, I began to let loose the handful of less-than-marvelous details - like the barbecued tofu and the lack of diversity/ acceptance of diversity... But the specks of ick hardly managed to dull the brilliance of that experience and what it gave me. Seriously. But, I told him, now, after this time has passed, after all these things have happened, after seeing so much of what was good there fall apart on the outside world, I felt like the darkness was starting to balance out the light. I told him how hard it is for me to remember Tracy, who tried to kill herself and came back, got better, progressed and started to live is the same Tracy who later took a bunch of pills and didn't come out of it, didn't come back. I think about all the good of Rogers, how everyone was moving forward, and all of the delays, the stalled vehicles, the backslides, the emergencies, the accidents, the crashes, the hospital beds, the bargains with God and Death... and I don't know how to keep it as a miracle. It was a miracle, wasn't it? (I have to ask?) What if it gets taken away? He said he didn't know how it could possibly be anything less than what I'd always described it as, considering the change that's taken place in me in response to it. And he suggested that my progress will keep that truth secure.

I told him part of me believed that, but another part - the part of "my head that is always so nice to me" (he laughed) had this theory. The theory says that sooner or later, I will completely fall apart; that is, I will return to a state equal or worse to that of myself at, roughly, fifteen years. When this happens (inevitably, mind you) my own progress will of course disappear and will no longer serve as evidence that Rogers was my miracle. He brought up the people who have "fallen apart" - to some extent - and the idea that the time they had between Rogers and falling apart was maybe still a miracle. I cried hard and wanted to ask him if that's the best any of us can hope for these days - four months or six months or three years - before we return to the hell of that illness? Is that really the most we'll ever have?

The fact, of course, remains that I haven't hit that mark. I haven't fallen apart. If there is a time limit labeled "the most I'll ever have" - I haven't hit it yet, and maybe (again, the doctor proposed) I'm as scared that I'm going to keep getting better as I am that I'm going to get sick. (When I called him Monday, I told him, shaking in body and voice, that I didn't want to die. I didn't want to die. I didn't want to die.) Why am I so convinced I will? Logically, it's not impossible that I've become certain of my own impending disintegration to stay safe from the idea that I might not disintegrate. "Maybe," he said, "Rogers' miracle will make a spectacular difference for one person, and that one person will be you."

"...I know this...sounds bad," I said, "but, I just...I met so many amazing girls there...if there can only be one..." [insert long thought monologue about how little I'm doing with my life, overlooking, of course, the part about saving it] "...it shouldn't have been me. It shouldn't be me." I cried harder because as I told him earlier, I want to live, I want to make it, but all the same, if I run down the list of identities, mine doesn't come out on top. It can't.

"Maybe it was something in you, some greatness in you, that connected to the greatness at Rogers. That's why it's you."

"But there's greatness in Sara," I said. "There's greatness in Jenna and...in everyone." He nodded. The whole theory seemed ridiculous. There was no way to prove that I have some element the others don't (and of course, they have some element I don't, because it wouldn't be like I was better than they, even if I were different), and there was no way to convince me that I deserved this "over" any of the other residents. We all deserve it. We aren't all going to get it. And why the hell should it be me?

I told him, "all my life...I wanted to be, 'the one.' I wanted to be picked over everyone. I wanted to stand out, be the favorite, anything." To be honest, I did, and was, several times - but always for my achievements, never just because of who I was, except by the occasional boy which of course was a crisis of its own each time... "I've always wanted that. So much. And the idea of Rogers...I still melt when I talk about them...the idea of being The One, of being, like, chosen by Rogers...it's the best thing I could ever be offered. But I don't want it. I don't want to be the *one*. I want everyone else, too."

I fell into a lull. "The first time I ever saw Tammy," I said, "she asked me what one wish I would make, if I could make one wish. And I told her, I guessed, if I could wish for anything just then, I'd wish that everyone could get better from this illness. She told me to be selfish, just this once, and make it about me. But it was about me," I said. "That's what I wanted. That's what I needed, selfishly. For everyone to be ok."

"Then," the doctor said, "you could get better without the guilt?"

I nodded. "Yeah. I think so. I could get better without the guilt and without the grief and the losses and the fear..." I wouldn't have to live in this fear, all the time, this certainty that no one is ever safe. "Even you," I said, finally. "I mean, look at what happened to you." (And you're better, and I'm sorry for bringing it up, and I know you feel sorry for being gone, even though you had a really, really good reason for being gone, and I don't want to make you feel guilty or anything, but that was really hard, too. I won't say it so clearly that it connects with "loved ones" and "people I care for" and sets off unecessary alarms. I'll just say, and you? Losing you? ...Everyone, everyone at risk. No matter how much I love them. No matter how much I need them. No matter if they seem safe; that just means the threat is hidden. I could be the one for whom the Rogers magic worked? I could really and truly be the posterchild, the walking advertisement, the girl adopted into the family business, the one who never lets go? *Where do I sign?* ...And then, when I'm better than the best I've ever dreamed of, when I've been given that, how do I save everyone else? How do I settle down in a place where the world is safe, and I never, ever have to think about hospitals and electrolytes and emaciation and heart trouble and court orders and discharging a.m.a again... Sign me up for the life that lets me believe what I know Stephanie said, the words I've been telling myself I must have heard wrong since the day they were spoken: "You've changed the most of anyone I've ever worked with." I accept, I accept, I accept! Someone pick me, someone want me, someone notice me, by God, I'll give all I have in return. But then, we have to save the rest. We have to... Because if I were a motion, I'd be an embrace. And without another person, the right person, all the right persons, that's just empty...

~me <--who apparently decided to make up for days without writing by writing days' worth of entry...Saturday and today were boring, I promise...

^Lisa Loeb

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