The Death of Small Creatures (31 page)

I remember walking for hours at night when I was sixteen, my boots crunching over ice and snow on the quiet streets of Cranbrook, street lights gleaming off asphalt, snow falling softly upon me. I stayed out for so long sometimes Mom or Warren would come looking for me. I'd hear the car ease up beside me and slow down, the window roll down and Mom's gentle voice say, “You lookin' for a ride, sweetie?”

I said nothing, just opened the door, got inside and rode home silently because it hurt to speak, but I loved her for this act of kindness and believed, if only briefly, I would get out of that town, that one day I would leave and never look back.

Twelve

Crossing Over (January 2012)

Look at the unity of this

spring and winter

manifested in the equinox.

– Rumi

A few blocks
from my St. Patrick Street place:

I'm standing on a high lookout, up a dirt path that leads to a rocky hillside upon which is this cement platform with a railing around it. The wind presses my body backwards against the railing. The air streams through my hair. I look upon Victoria, across Gonzalez Bay with its beautiful heritage houses perched on cliffs all around, and to the Strait of Juan de Fuca, Port Angeles in the distance, the water gleaming grey-green, waves breaking in tiny whitecaps upon the scuttled sea.

Maybe the ECT is helping. I continue on with my treatments throughout January. Maybe it's more than that, something I can't quite put my finger on, some resurgence back into myself. I'm remembering who I am again. I'd almost forgotten.

And who is she who was forgotten? I look in the mirror, at my face, and try to see myself. Sometimes I say my name out loud. “Trisha?” And the world becomes surreal, because I have heard myself from within myself.

Who was I before? Who am I now?

I would like to think I still retain some semblance of innocence from girlhood; many say I have. I hope this is true, but I feel something has died as well, that belief that everything is going to be okay in life. The truth is things might work out or they might not. More than once every day I say to myself,
Hold on, Trisha. Hold on
. Surely it's the surge to live in spite of various deaths that is the essence of existence. I am standing on this lookout, gazing at the sea, and I realize my stories have aligned themselves, that I own them, no one else possesses them, and I am here and becoming whole. I have found new structure to my existence, and perhaps this is the greatest personal development so far, because this structure allows me to focus on life beyond Dr. P.

I get out of bed late, after eleven most mornings, pull on some shabby clothes and walk over to the coffee shop across the street to get a double Americano. I go for a long walk in the afternoon, work up a sweat, let the last remaining bit of poison come out of me. I eat dinner, nothing fancy, nothing well thought out or grown up enough to be called a well-balanced meal, yogurt and granola, or a couple of rice cakes with cheese melted on top, three spoons of peanut butter.

My eating habits and my relationship to food are still a huge struggle. I've often thought over the years (but never said out loud) that this eating disorder, though dormant now, has been the greatest struggle of my life, more than depression, more than bipolar disorder. And while I know the bipolar disorder was influential in keeping the eating disorder going, the eating disorder nonetheless keeps me hostage. Every hour of every day since I was sixteen I have obsessed about losing weight, sometimes every moment that passes throughout the day. It's the same now. I suspect it will be this way well into the future.

In the evening I cuddle Marcello on the couch. He grooms me, licks my face all over, and I feel like I'm in love with him but also in love with something broader than him; I am getting to love life, and I am falling in love with myself.

After dinner, I write.

The physical world has become at once soft and sharp. It is soft because it lacks the lustre of being in crisis. The days are ordinary. I am living, I suppose, like an ordinary person. Only sometimes do I long for the drama of it all, the razor blade stricken over thin skin. But it is sharp too. I am here now. I am calm and see the essence of things glowing around me. I blur my eyes and things glitter. I observe objects—a tree, a rock, the ocean—and feel their life force emanating from within them, and the life force flows through me because I can feel more than my suffering, because my body and mind are free of drugs and alcohol. My anguish for Dr. P has softened. I still tell him I love him, because I do, but there is so much more awaiting me.

I believe it is largely through walking, by keeping my body in motion, by venturing out into the world, that I recover. I walk past the Uplands golf course, emerald putting greens and fairways, the ocean beyond, old wealthy retired men in golf pants and caps, and I love watching them swing their golf clubs through the air and hearing the tiny tick of metal hitting the ball as the club connects. In this tick is my future, a sharp materialization of something from nothing, a tiny sound from thin air.

Then farther still, to Oak Bay Marina. I walk out on the docks when the gate is left open, survey the vessels, feel the warble of wood underfoot, the gentle slosh of the sea, and I feel buoyed, as if I am floating above the earth but firmly planted on the ground at the same time.

Did the ECT reset me? How it works is a mystery, to the medical profession and to me.

My body becomes soft and voluptuous. I can stand up without feeling like I'm going to pass out. I have colour in my cheeks and girth to my hips. I regard the weight with mild hostility but nothing like the violent aggression and disdain with which I have regarded my body in the past whenever I gained weight. I can stand it.

Caravaggio is gone and I grieve the loss terribly, but Marcello romps about the apartment. I come home some nights and he is perched perfectly in the middle of my bed as if he has been sitting that way for hours, waiting for my return.

Seven years old.

I find her in Grandma's back porch upon a pile of laundry, eyes squinted tight as in sleep. The boy, Calvin, is with me. I want to show him my favourite kitten, only a few months old but old enough to dodge the neighbour, the army veteran whom I incorrectly believe is a “vet,” a veterinarian. Only this vet guts deer and moose and places the heads on the wall in his basement above his gun rack, or so my brother tells me. I have never dared to step foot inside that house. My kitten is big enough to run and scamper through the mean veterinarian's vegetable garden, but small enough that I can pick her up with one hand to make her meow and spread her claws wide. I like to squeeze her and make the claws pop out.

“Oh, here she is,” I say, scooping her up with one hand.

Calvin sucks snot off his upper lip. It's gross; he's always doing that.

He's a dirty little boy who goes to sleep with chewing gum in his mouth and wakes up with chewing gum in his hair. His mom, Hilda, is an evil mom. She scolds him, swats at him, comes at him with scissors. His dad is a grave, brooding man who drinks a lot. Calvin has weird hair, chunks missing in places the chewing gum has been cut out.

He's a sad boy.

I will come to know this retroactively, his sadness; the boy who never has a chance, who one day years from now will die of a drug overdose.

Something's wrong.

The kitten has become a strange kitten, heavier, cooler. Knowledge is verging. Retroactive coolness, rigor mortis, but oh… her soft fur.

The weight of her in my hand: is it my hand or she who is altered? I giggle, “Come on, kitty.”

I look out the dirty window above the dryer. The sun is setting. There's a wedge of pink light on the side of the vet's house. The first frost is coming.

Calvin stands there, hands stuffed in his pockets. He's unimpressed. “Dumb cat,” he says.

I shake her harder, feel it now, a nugget in her belly.

The dryer is churning damp clothes,
thump, thump, thump
. The room is warm and humid, smells of Downy dryer sheets, Tide and Javex bleach. I love the specks of blue in the Tide. I want to eat Tide, even though I know I can't, to dip my wet tongue into something soft as icing sugar.

Too young to be bitter, I know no better than to believe in this dream of the perfect family you see on commercials: crisp white sheets ballooning on a clothesline, green grass, a pretty house, a pretty lady and a pretty girl doing laundry in the sunshine, a crisp pile of white sheets folded in a wicker basket and a handsome man, a good father, in a suit and tie waving from the doorstep. “Honey, I'm home… how—are—my—girls?”

The kitten folds over the hard edge of my hand.

I say, “Oh,” then, “no.”

In this moment, time slows, then stops. The room feels small, the air thick. I feel the bluntness of my existence, though I am too young to understand it fully. Something like my life flashes before my eyes. My face feels hot.

Then I say it, the thing I will reflect upon my whole life, and I'll never know why or where it came from, except maybe from my mother who is always talking about life after death, who is always talking about how hard her life has been.

“Uh oh, Trisha. Your life is going to be hard.”

I'm sitting on
the shore of McNeill Bay, a block from my new apartment, with Caroline and Steve, my new neighbours. We're smoking cigarettes. The ocean is a white sheet, glary and austere. My eyes feel sensitive and tear up, tears streaming down my face.

“How are you?” Caroline says.

I want to walk for hours, perambulate into myself, slow steady footsteps, until I am inside my skin, looking out through my blood into a faded pink world. I need the warmth of myself, the way a baby needs to be cradled inside a blanket, cocooned inside its own warmth. “Fine,” I say.

I am alone.

I say I am “fine,” and wonder what this means, these four little letters. I think about the barriers within me that I have built against love, love for myself, for family and friends, for men, and I realize I have only halfway been loving people, because I was not wholly there to give the love. I realize I have never really been in love with a man, not Leigh, not Dr. P, not Richard up until now. But rather, I have been clinging to them so that I would not fall, so that my life wouldn't fall apart, because I was terrified on my own, a tiny pinprick of light in blackness with no planets or stars around. I have been a man's prize and financial slave. I have been obsessed. And now, I am my own damaged person. But I am who I am.

I am so tired of spinning my wheels since I was sixteen, always feeling like a failure, spurned by a fierce desire to do more with my life, to become more of all the wrong things (successful, famous, wealthy), when I should have been working on the basics (self-forgiveness, self-soothing, self-love), nurturing myself emotionally and physically instead of starving myself of love and sustenance.

I have been starving in one way or another for more than twenty years, either through self-hatred or bulimia, that disease that makes you want to rip off your skin and slake the fat and muscle from the bones, leaving only white shining bones behind. In her memoir
Wasted
, Marya Hornbacher describes a girl who set herself on fire. She says she understands this compulsion. I have also understood this compulsion. You set yourself on fire and leave a blank space behind where your flesh used to reside.

“Fine?” Caroline says. “That's good.” She has been a good friend, supporting my breakup with Leigh and my new relationship with Richard. “You take all the time you need, sweetie.”

A freighter glides past, snail's pace, or so it seems from here, far off on the horizon. I think of oil spills and dead whales, seagulls' wings tarred, seals washed up on the shore, but then there's a glimmer of light on the horizon, pink clouds as the sun goes down, casting shadows on us, relief from the light.

The world feels beautiful in this moment.

I am beautiful in this moment too.