.blinding

It was the same thing. The same thing that I felt when I was a kid. That blinding need to do something destructive. Luckily for a long time all I knew how to do was scream and throw things. Later I’d gain the resources to hurt myself in new and interesting ways. I’m eight. He’s been screaming at me since he came home. I felt the air change when he walked in the door. It didn’t close, it slammed. The air sucked out. Pressurized cabin. I held my breath. He came at me with pure fury. Something wrong with something. I moved something. Touched something. Scuffed something. Did something wrong. So wrong. Then the animals inside me would start clawing their way to the surface. My eight year old blood would boil and I would fight like a tiger. Every weapon in my arsenal. At first just blind rage. The older I got the more I incorporated sarcasm and insult. Skills I learned from the kids who made fun of me on the bus and from the other damaged children. I fought him with everything I had until that feeling came. I was out of my head spinning off into the sky. I would run. Into the woods, into my room, to the lake. Just ran. And I would scream or throw shoes through my wall or dig my hands into the wood of the dock until it splintered into my skin. My mom would help me pick out the splinters days later. I would do these things with all my might until I came back down into myself and I’d sit there breathless, numb. Staring into the bottomless water, losing all knowledge of time and temperature. I’d come back into the house hours later cold and clammy and he would ignore me. She would sometimes try to engage me, ask where I’d been. But I was deaf with anger. Into my room. When I got older, onto this very diary page. To get it out. I wrote on the walls of my room. I set things on fire. I had to try to engage parts of my brain that weren’t affected, I had to try to feel something else. I’d be numb for hours and the depression came somewhere around 9th grade. It flicked in and out at first in the form of anxiety, social awkwardness. Then it settled in like a thick smoke and choked out all the life I had left. I was numb all the time. I hardly fought him for a while and would just go to my room to cry or experiment with ways to escape. Knives, needles, sex. My parents still have those steak knives. Part of me seems to recognize the very one it was that I planned to kill myself with, even today, when I go home and hold it in my hand, there’s a twinge inside me like my body knows something my brain doesn’t. All these things the blind rage caused. It’s much more rare that I’m overcome in that way now, but it still happens. Happened about a week ago. Had a bad day at work, feeling ineffective and powerless and dumb and ugly and worthless. Came home and there was a card from him. Saying how much my grandmother loves me. How she thinks I’m beautiful. And successful. And wonderful. He thinks I should call her sometime. I lose my mind. I’m out of my head instantly. I smoke some weed, get really fucking high. That’s not good enough. I go to the liquor store looking like a coked out whore to get a giant bottle of cheap pinot. I come home and proceed to listen to Three Days Grace and drink half the huge bottle. The room spins. I remember screaming into my computer the songs for hours, being on the phone with someone. Crying on the roof. Sitting on my floor with my leg bent back screaming in pain only I’m too numb to notice. I feel it the next day though. I channeled all the self destructive desires of my youth and played them out with all the resources I have at my disposal. I remember looking down into the street from my balcony, looking for someone to fuck. That blind rage swept me and I was gone, only with the guts to act on my pain. The next two days a mystery plague wracked me. It wasn’t a hangover at all. I felt like my body was cleansing itself of the demons that possessed me that night. Fever dreams lit up the next night. I was wide awake and dreamt I was swimming beneath oceans of paperwork from my job and my clients were in the sea too. The lawyers would paddle by in canoes and tell me there’s nothing we can do. I was helpless, drowning, grabbing at papers trying to put them together and make them make sense. Frantic, lost, empty. I woke up the next day with the distinct knowledge that this was more than a dream, more than the flu. It was something meaningful, my subconscious, the things I struggle with to my very core all falling out all over the place. And these are the things I think of when I’m outside my body. Writing papers and looking in the mirror wondering who is looking back at me. Pinch, scratch, crawl around on the floor still not sure where I am, who I am. So depersonalized I could float away. I start to wonder about it, why this happens. And then I remember. It all started with the change in the air when he came home from work.