unnumbered · the void · shin-deep

In the beginning I had no words for my wants. I was small, and the house was quiet for nap time, and my grandmother's dresses hung in the closet like other lives on hangers — and I tried them on. That is the whole record of it. No theory. No name. A child in borrowed silk, fitting.

My grandfather wanted a little girl in the family. He said it the way men of his generation said true things — once, lightly, never again. And somewhere in me, a hand went up. I wished I was it. I had no words for that either. The wish did not need them.

Adolescence taught me stealth: clothes that were not mine, worn in rooms that told no one. Then my teens finally handed me a name for it — a cold, clinical thing — and I did what the frightened do with names. I used it as a burial marker. I called the want a shame, filed it under the word, and shoveled.

And while I was burying, other weather moved in — on its own schedule, under its own laws. Depressions the size of seasons. Then the opposite: thought at racing speed, grand designs, empires I was days from founding; sleep dismantled board by board; every emotion worn at the surface where it could cut whoever stood close — and from inside it, I could not see the havoc at all. Later, worse. Conversations I can still hear, held with people who swear they never happened. Days when the border between dream and waking went unguarded in both directions.

Then a coworker — not a physician, not family, just a man on shift — looked at me and said, "man, are you bipolar or what?" And it clicked, the way only rude true things click. Something was wrong. And it was not the world around me. It was me.

Eight years now. Eight years of taking the pills and keeping the appointments and collecting the proper words for the things that are wrong with me — and because this is the one room in the registry with no light in it, I will file the truth at full price: the words and the pills help. They do not help near as much as they need to. That is not a complaint. That is a measurement.

So here is where the record actually stands, beneath everything else on this site.

I am in the reeds. The river is the old one — you know the one — and the water is at my shin, and it is cold, and I can see the current, and I can see what is downstream.

And I do not
want to go.

I still have dreams. I still have wants — even the impossible ones. Especially the impossible ones; you have read the rest of this registry, you know exactly what I want and what it costs and how long I have decided to wait for it. So I tread the edge of the water — careful, deliberate, shin-deep and no deeper — and I watch downstream the way you watch a road you are not taking.

The reeds hold. The wants hold. She holds.