Tornado

tor·na·do
a localized, violently destructive windstorm occurring over land, especially in the Middle West, and characterized by a long, funnel-shaped cloud extending toward the ground and made visible by condensation and debris.

People who have never lived here don't understand. Those of us who have never lived anywhere else, well, tragedy can occur anywhere.

You tell yourself that you have a storm shelter, and common sense. You prepare, and you believe preparedness is safety. You fool yourself, because as adults, that's what we do.

Children are the brave ones. They believe in monsters under the bed. Childhood is honesty, and the older we get, the more we're taught the lies and uncertainty of adulthood.

The monsters are still there, but we think that with enough foresight, we can somehow keep the horror at bay. But monsters don't have rules. They're everywhere. Sometimes, behind the faces of people we trust.

September 13, 2011 was my own personal tornado. It was darkness.  Once something like that happens, moving past the tragedy is impossible, the tatters of the life I knew fell away, and every day was the day of the tornado.  I lived in the eye of the storm.  It all seems quiet, but on every side, the tragedy is still happening.

--


I like a good beer buzz, early in the morning.


Drinking was the sign of adulthood in my family.  Beer was for barbecues, champagne was for New Year's, and vodka had it's own seat at the dinner table.


I'm a drinker.  Sometimes, I'm a drunk.  I like the taste of beer, and I love the way it makes me feel.  Blurry at the edges, wanting to laugh, fuck, and maybe pass out.  Beer.  That's the name of my God.


I know I'm not the first person that kind of thing happened to, and I won't be the last, but there was such surprise.  That's what I'm most ashamed of.  The surprise that something like that could happen to me.


You wouldn't believe the amount of shame that I carried around.  I'd spent my days off watching shows like Law and Order: SVU.  I would watch it and think about the tornado.  About sleeping with all the lights on, and checking the door to make sure it was locked at least fifty times a night.


Anyone who could take away something like that from another person, to turn pleasure into horror and pain, doesn't deserve to walk in the midst of people. 


What was stolen from me is something I'll never get back.  It wasn't just my torn body, it was the way I used to trust.  The way I could love anyone, completely, and selflessly.  I miss myself.  I miss certain things about the woman I used to be. 


The worst part, the one that anyone who's been through it knows, is that one memory you can't bleach with therapy or booze or antidepressants.  Mine is the sound of him spitting into his hand.  Just typing that last sentence makes my stomach clench, and my lunch flutter in my stomach. 
There are some nights, that I wake up to that sound, him spitting into his hand, and think about that being the last good moment in my life.  That spitting sound, and then we have now.




--


“Not forgiving is like drinking poison and expecting the other person to die.”—Unknown


I hate helpful, huggy quotes.  "Fuck your forgiveness.  There are things that should never be forgiven. "  -- Me


The first time I tried to have sex after it all happened, was so awkward, it was like regaining my virginity.  I didn't want to have sex.  I didn't desire it, but I wanted to know that I was capable of still deciding.  It was the decision that I was most worried about. 


I talked to one of my best friends and nagged and pestered him so much, he finally agreed to have the most awkward sex imaginable with me.


Getting hard wasn't the problem, it was staying hard.  When you're trying to have sex with someone who has a Sports Illustrated archive worth of issues below the belt, it's impossible to be in the mood.


A year or so ago, he told me it wasn't the worst sex he ever had, which made me laugh so hard I let out a monstrous, honking fart.  We both laughed at that until our stomachs ached.  It felt good to know that I still had the ability to laugh. 


--


"It's a way we had over here with living with ourselves. We cut 'em in half with a machine gun and give 'em a Band-Aid. It was a lie. And the more I saw them, the more I hated lies.'' -- Apocalypse Now


I won't tell you a lot of the clichés you hear from most people.  Those are like the religious pamphlets zealots hand out.  Take a look, and then throw that shit out.


Either you'll survive, or you won't.  I think there are strengths in me that I never realized.  Was it worth what I went through?  Not on your fucking life.  I drank until I alienated family, friends, strangers, everyone.  I remember waking up on a pile of beer cans for about six months straight.


It was ugly.  Hell, I was ugly.  After I made it through, I didn't have much left to go home to.  It's a good thing I know how to start over.


Some nights, I wake up and have to tell myself that it's over.  I lived that one day for years, as much as I'd like to leave it behind, it's always going to be with me.


I'm still going.  Maybe I'm too dumb to quit.  Whatever it is, I can live now.  The eye of the storm is finally behind me.




--


“There is a wisdom that is woe; but there is a woe that is madness. And there is a Catskill eagle in some souls that can alike dive down into the blackest gorges, and soar out of them again and become invisible in the sunny spaces. And even if he for ever flies within the gorge, that gorge is in the mountains; so that even in his lowest swoop the mountain eagle is still higher than other birds upon the plain, even though they soar. ”
― Herman Melville, Moby Dick

When God wants someone to be good, he makes them plain. When he wants a worthy adversary, he makes them beautiful.

I can smell his cologne. Ghostly and faint after a long day of wear, but still there. The slightest whiff of Jack Daniels as he leans down to kiss me.

And I can’t. I lean forward, away from him and that smell, the smell that still has the power to make butterflies clang in my stomach. No matter how much it excites me, it also makes me sick and afraid. Like an alarm clock, I hit the snooze button on those feeling, five minutes, ten, fifteen, always knowing that it’s going to be right there for me to face when I stop prolonging the inevitable.

No matter where I am, he always finds me. In every moment of de ja vu, every time I feel someone’s eyes watching, each and every time, I’m sure it’s him. That kind of devotion could be called obsession. Or maybe loyalty, I’m not sure which.

I know what it’s like to be spooked. I know what it’s like to run so far away the roads all melt together; the faces all have the same questions, namely the kind that just can’t be answered. But no matter how far I run, how far away I go to lose myself, he always finds me. All it takes is that smell of cologne, just enough to taint the day. Just the faint traces of something that should be dead, and stay dead, but isn’t.

No matter how bad it gets, there’s always that part of me that wants to go back. Back to the beginning. Sometimes I spend whole days staring outside, just wishing I could go back, wishing I could change the course of things. Marty McFly my situation. But it stays the same. I get a little older, not much wiser, and it takes more whisky to hold me together. Just enough to let me sleep, but never enough to really forget.

It’s another Friday, and there’s a long weekend of nothing special. I make my usual trip to the liquor store, thinking inside that it can’t be good that the cashier knows me on a first name basis. Or my usual brand of poison.

At home, before the sun even goes down, I’ve had drinks one through four. No foreplay, because there’s no time to waste, and no work to go to tomorrow.
I want to be good and drunk before I start wading in a sea of might-have-been. I drink myself under the table in record time, and there’s nothing but whatever dreams I don’t remember.

I wake up feeling sea sick and disconnected. I can taste the remains of the bourbon I drank, dead and shriveled in my mouth. I want to just lay here, discarded snakeskin of a life surrounding me. Maybe if I don’t move, my body will just give up.

That last thought makes a laugh snort out of me. Self-pity isn’t like me.

When I go to the bathroom, it’s when I’m brushing that death taste out of my mouth that I notice it.

One of his t-shirts. I’m wearing it.

Maybe it’s just memory, or maybe it’s the actual smell, but whatever it is, I can smell him. In the room with me, how thick the smell of him is. Cloying. Clawing at my nose, my stomach, my heart.

After I throw up, eyes still crying a little, I run straight for the bourbon. Only amateurs have time for a glass. Today, there is no need.

After I’ve drank enough that my hands aren’t shaking and I don’t give a fuck about the shirt I’m wearing, I open up that floodgate.

The one that sometimes only spills over a little, just letting out enough to keep me sane. Tonight, the dam inside me breaks. I’m ruining this t-shirt, the last t-shirt of his, with my tears. Making it a little less his, and a lot more mine.

Striving to smell that last little bit of him trapped in the cloth. Trying to embed the smell and taste of him in my heart, where I’ll never lose it.

I sit and curse him, scream at him, hate him.

For the last little bit of him that I can't run away from. The part of me that misses him so much I just can't heal.

What's dead should stay dead. I know that.

I know it, but it continues to break me.

Absolution and Reprieve

There is an unseen world all around us. Most people pass through it, like fog.

Then, there are others, like me, and instead of fog, it's a tangled web of invisible wire.

I've tried running from it, tried pretending, tried hiding. But the one thing I know, the one certainty in my life is this: you can't run from who you are.

There will always be something, or someone to drag you right back. You'll always end up facing yourself no matter how far you run.

No matter how far you run, you're only fighting yourself.

I wish I didn’t know that. I think of writing this, and I think of the disbelief of someone else finding it and reading it. Maybe shaking their head, maybe rolling their eyes in disgust, and I envy them, I envy them in their disbelief.

--

From what I’ve pieced together, there is a long history of that sort of thing in my family. It was the great unseen. That which never was spoken of.

There was the way my dad and my grandpa could speak to each other, without saying a word. The way they’d talk about me, sometimes thinking I was already
asleep.

They’d talk in whispers about this thing called ‘it.’ About whether or not I had it.

They’d discuss it late into the night.

I remember laying in bed, trying to figure it out, trying to understand.
Whatever ‘it’ was, I didn’t have it.

I’d puzzle it out during class, or recess, or anytime I had a spare moment to think. It was always there, waiting for me to turn it over in my mind, trying to make those puzzle pieces fit into a pattern that I understood.

On my last day of fourth grade, I was sitting on a bench, waiting for the recess bell to ring, once again turning it over in my mind. Trying to give it a name, so it was manageable.

The bell ringing startled me out my thoughts, and I started walking behind a fifth grader, noticing the contented humming of bees, the smell of honeysuckle, the drowsy warmth from the sun.
I watched her walk up the steps in front of me, and this dread, this terror seized me.

It felt like my throat was full of hot, packed glue. I tried to yell at her, I reached forward to grab the back of her shirt, but I was frozen in that spot.

The heat, the smell of flowers, it was too much. Every one of my senses was in the red. I knew what was going to happen, could feel it in every part of my body. Worse yet, I couldn’t do anything, all I could do was watch.

As soon as she reached for the door, someone else slammed it open. Her hand met the thick, tempered glass with a sickening crack. Time slowed down to the point of insanity, and I could see the drops of blood as they fell from her arm.

Time surged forward again, and slapped me back into reality. I remember my knees just folding and spilling me to the grass. I sat there, trying to breathe, trying not to throw up.

That was the day I found out what ‘it’ was.

--

You’d think something like that would be a gift. Who wouldn’t want to know things like that?

Me. I don’t like knowing things like that.

The upside of it is knowing when your friends or family are upset, and knowing what to say or do. Knowing exactly what they need. Knowing what they need to hear, and being able to say it. Those are the good days.

But the bad days, so many of them, so many thoughts invading the privacy of your mind. Most people know what it’s like to be alone with their thoughts. Imagine someone else’s thoughts, or panic or anguish invading your head. It feels like an ice pick lodged in tender flesh. It’s intrusive, and it burns. The more intense the emotion, the more intense the pain it brings.

You get used to it. But you never get completely comfortable with it.

It’s having something inside you that you can’t share with anyone else. You try telling someone “so, I can hear your thoughts.” Because most people don’t believe you. That’s okay. The ones who actually do, are even worse. It makes you a bad person, prying into something, being something you don’t want to be. And the worst thing is the look in their eyes. Like you chose this for yourself.

--

The worst part is knowing things, and knowing you can’t change them.

The first couple of times, I went through stages of grief and denial. Played accuse-a-palooza. Blamed who I was for what I couldn't change.

Now, I change what's in my power to change, and what I can't change, I think of on sleepless nights when there's nothing but the tick of the clock. Those nights when there's no such thing as minutes or hours, those nights when there's no time, only darkness.

--

The janitor, the one who has a smile for everyone, is going to fall down the stairs and break his neck. He'll lay there, the last few seconds of his life draining away, and his last thoughts will be of the daughter he never sees.

The girl I work with, three desks down, is planning to kill herself tonight. We’re not friends, we’re not even close, but I’ve tried to talk her into going out and having a few drinks. I’ve tried to do everything I can to distract her, but the thoughts in her head are getting louder and louder and I can’t drown them out anymore. She’s aching inside, her heart feels like someone poured gasoline over it and set the entire mess alight. My hands are shaking at how much she hurts.

There’s the woman who rides the same elevator I do everyday. She doesn’t know that today is her last day here. When she goes home tonight, she’s going to die. Aneurysm. I told her she looked beautiful this morning. Her eyes lit up like I was the best person in the world. I should've told her that everyday, just for the look in her eyes.

Days like today, I want to jump out of a plane with no parachute.

--

Instead of lunch today, I have errands.

The janitor first. I meet him on the staircase, just as he slips. I get a taste of his elbow in my side, as he falls into me. He's still thinking of that daughter he never sees, the one he abandoned; she's never far from his thoughts.

He thanks me when I keep him from falling, and I nod at him and go on.

Two phonecalls later, and I've ordered flowers for suicidal girl (The card is what will make her change her mind, I'm sure of it) and for the lady who's going to die.

I know flowers won't make up for the fact that there's nothing I can do, but I want her last day to have some distinction. I want to do something for her, as if that will make up for her forever nap.

--

Passing people on the street gives me a headache. It’s picking up the minor things that ride on the top of everyone’s subconscious. It’s like having a hundred radios tuned into the static, so loud, it drowns everything out. And no matter what I do, I can’t run away from it.

It’s like a fire, it rages and raves, and nothing can put it out. I walk past people and their lives just seep into me.

I used to want to save them all, and I ran myself ragged the first couple of years, just trying to do that.

And then I met him.

I was walking in the park, at night, the only time I can get away from things completely. I saw a man on the opposite side of the sidewalk, walking north to my south. As I passed him, I braced myself for the normal onslaught of thought bleed.

As soon as we passed, nothing.

Uncomfortable, church quiet.

When I turned to look at him, he was looking back at me.

“You can see me?” I nodded to him, slowly.

He ran back to where I was standing, and that awkward silence descended. I couldn’t hear anything he was thinking. Nothing.
--