My Grandmother's Hair

Frozen in Im/Permanent Winter

Frozen in Im/Permanent Winter

I felt as if I could do this for a long, long time …

For as long as it took

to step back,

to see the craziness,

to face the killer.

To find a place that welcomes

a voice that wants to be heard.

By March of ’95 I was slowly beginning to pull myself out of the underworld and into a semblance of spring and the possibilities of life. I had let go of the thesis with scarcely a sigh of regret. It belonged to a world I was no longer interested in for I had chosen to work in the worlds of story writing and clay. Like the art work years, I had learned a great deal while I was researching and writing the thesis, and that would prove to be more important than the product, meanwhile I was told that the drugs my body had so violently rejected had excoriated my entire digestive system from head to tail. Advised to take it easy, I began to eat small amounts, using as much imagination as I could muster to make small, appealing meals. I needed no telling that food must be soft and bland like an infant’s. As I felt it in my mouth I remembered my children’s faces when they first tasted pureed food: surprise, the mouth pursed as the tongue rolled it around, throat muscles moving in a new kind of swallow, or spitting it out with a look of reproachful disgust. They were getting used to something new. I was bargaining with pain, experimenting with food that would not re-injure still healing soft tissue.

I reacted to changes no one else would notice. One day the carbon core in the water filter was replaced. Unfortunately the company had forgotten to pre-wash it, and at the first sip of water, my body convulsed. A friend, visiting with his child, reacted almost as strongly, left as quickly as he could, saying: “He doesn’t need to see this.” He was sure I was hysterical and overreacting. Who wants to watch someone who seems to be falling apart? Denial can bury fright. I had done that enough to recognize it in someone else. But it was so hard to persuade my mind that my body knew best … that to sustain my confidence in the face of other people’s disbelief tested me almost beyond emotional endurance. Every hour of every day I had to keep reminding myself that, like Ereshkiegel, I had descended to an underworld, been flayed, was now slowly healing, cautiously putting myself back together again into … What? Those who had not been on a similar journey saw only the fragments.

  

A CHILD’S QUESTION

“Where does it all begin?”

John asked, lying beside me

on top of the covers

(as was only decent).

I thought he wondered why

I was so sick and tried to answer:

“Oh love it’s so … it goes so far back … I …”

“No! That’s not enough. That’s not it!”

Flinging himself up and away shouting

“Look at you! A skeleton! You’re not

trying!    When does it stop?    When

will you be better?!”

I didn’t know.