Jab

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A week ago, while deep in the brambles of working on some new poems, I remembered a journal my Aunt J had given me when J was born--dark blue, puffy silver stars, fancy thick paper. My poems are stretching into new territory, and I remembered this journal as only having one entry, roughly written a month or so after J was born, and a letter to my new child wherein I promised to see him as a person, not as an extension of myself. I thought the rest of the journal was blank--the paper was too thick, I didn't think I wrote at all for the first few years of J's life, etc.

The journal was my on bookshelf, along all of the other journals I've kept: the spiral bound expensive journals from college, the leather-bound, Celtic-knot journal my first best friend Acorn gave me (and my two dogs-ago dog chewed), the multiple composition journals I have used as writing notebooks since. I pulled it off the shelf, expecting that one epistle, and instead found multiple entries in 2005--the letter I remembered, and then more. Letters to J, but also tortured observations of the small world outside my window as I was breastfeeding, a tightly controlled journal of those first few miserable months in which I was trying to hold things together.  What comes here must be redacted but know: 


disassociation. Being fucked on the living room floor. How I knew to float up to the ceiling, leave my body. Separate bedrooms. 


[when ---- moved into the living room, refusing to sleep next to me and the baby since I wouldn't let him fuck me.  Why would I sleep next you you, I quoted him then, when you won't let me touch you?

When ---did fuck me, I disassociated, floated up near the ceiling.  It was on the living room floor. ]I wanted so much [to love ---- be happy in ----- my life. I wanted to feel nothing, or to feel what was expected of me.

What is wrong with me, I wondered?  I never write anymore, i wrote. Maybe I'm not a poet. Maybe writing is something I did when I was young.  I was twenty-seven.

Then, a break--dozens of blank pages. Then, 2007. Right after I left. Some kind of rupture. Then another outpouring of pages. Then, blank. I must have switched to another journal. I haven't looked into any of the others.

*

I remember writing none of this.


*

This week, R. and I got our first dose of the Pfizer vaccine. We stood in line at the state fairgrounds--decrepit, overgrown, desolate--and the crowd was quiet and somber. The nurse who administered my dose was motherly, patted my arm when I told her how afraid I was of needles. Then it was done, and we drove home and saw eleven hawks. Last night, both of our left arms sore, we curled around each other, the dog softly snoring on the floor. Would I have believed at 27 that I could ever feel this safe?


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When we stood in line I could barely keep from convulsing--dry sobs. What is this? I wondered when I held J. in my arms at the hospital that first night, what the fuck is this? 

I was feeling something. I was feeling. Overwhelm. Love.

*

In our text tonight, J writes I'm glad the first video we have is me saying smash the state! My little communist anarchist. He regularly schools me about gender essentialism, the craven cruelty of capitalism on our daily walks with the dog. I didn't understand there was a world left of me until he pointed it out. 

I guess I did something right as a parent, I text back. Yeah, he says. 

*

What I don't think you know how to deal with,  my therapist said,  Is joy. Is happiness. 

Is being here, now.

I wanted to write, tonight, about how I've learned to cook for my family--how instead of weighing myself every few hours, tracking every last calorie i've eaten on an app on my phone, I've instead learned to bake bread, make pasta, vodka sauce, enjoy a bottle of wine, stop myself before taking photo after photo of my belly [well, sometimes; S. be honest, now--], how J and D and I cook and bake and how the house right now smells of basil and oregano and onion and garlic--


Instead.


When R. and I stood in that line--I could barely breathe. Overwhelm. Love. Joy. 

*


I couldn't see how i was sending messages to myself all along, I told my therapist today, and I refused or was blind or just couldn't read that language yet.

*


The other shoe will always drop, I learned from my family.


*

Look: here we are. 

Whatever I is is less interesting to me than we. 

It is not stupid to be okay. To be happy.





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