This appears in a pre-2010 issue
of cc&d magazine.
Saddle-stitched issues are no longer
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So I’m going to be just like my sister. Foaming at the mouth at the littlest things. Also gnashing my teeth at the littlest things. And, at the other extreme, just sitting staring into space. Seeing something beyond the surface of things. She can sit for hours with her eyes trained on a single spot on the wall. Then it’s back to the other extreme of staying up all night in a sweat, busy. Busy writing in her notebook. Or busy practicing her guitar. She knows what the house is like at four in the morning. Sweating that funny kind of hot oily sweat that goes along with being in that state. Dawn comes and she’s always amazed to see us getting up and wandering in the room. She’s still busy and has lots to do when we get up. There’s no rest for her. She keeps on with her book or her guitar until it’s time to do one of two things. She might settle down and sit staring at the wall, breathing fast. Or she might crash and decide to go to bed. That’s what we encourage her to do. And to get her into the shower is a struggle. I’m not dirty—you’re dirty, is what she says. Hygiene is important. And she just lets it go. There’ve been time when she’s been in the hospital that they took her in the shower and scrubbed her down. But we can’t do that at home. So she stays dirty. Black face, black hands, all smudged up. And greasy. Her hair slicked back in its own grease. And her face shiny with her own grease. Her nails have dirt under them—where they’re not all chewed down. Jagged bloody nails. And she picks at the skin of her hands and bleeds. And at her feet, when she’s sitting down cross-legged. I’ve read the things she’s written in her book. It just long long strings of nonsense words. Like skedaddle the monkeys and ruin the front of the stately edifice. It goes on like that. She does play good guitar though. I think the only time she’s fully sane is when she’s practicing the guitar. She’s got a whole routine to it. Metronome finger exercises. Metronome scales. Metronome arpeggios. Then each piece three times with the metronome. Then once a week each piece full blast wide open. She’s a good guitar player. But she has bad stage fright. She can’t play for people. The tunes fall apart. That’s why she likes the writing better. She lets it rip, really lets it rip. She says she sees the words coming up from the paper at her, and she catches them and slams them into the page, and then nothing can change them, nothing can move them. Her stacks of used up memo pads fill the corner of the room. She says someday she’ll get to cleaning it all up. She’ll type it up nice and neat. But she’ll let you read it. It’s scrawl. Page on page of nonsense. After two or three days of staying up straight blazing through the music or blasting through the writing, she goes to bed. She might stay there for days on end. Just lying there with the covers pulled up to her neck staring up through the ceiling. And to get her to eat is a struggle. You’ve got to catch her between cycles, if you know what I mean. You’ve got to catch her when she’s dashing through the room. You’ve got a have the food on the table, and she stops up short. Then, she’ll eat like a dog. Until its time to throw up. She doesn’t know when to stop, so you’ve got to watch how much to give her. She might not eat for three days. Then, all at once, she wants to eat enough for a week. We take her to the doctor every Tuesday night. He sits in his chair, no pad or anything, and listens with a finger stuck in his cheek. She babbles on and on about the guitar or the writing. Then one time she stuck her finger down her throat and threw up right in front of the therapist. Said Whew! Whew—I just had to get all that stuff out. She’s not overweight or underweight. Though she ought to be like a stick, they way she pushes herself. She sees a psychiatrist and a psychologist. She’s got six different kinds of pills she takes. Prozac. Klonopin. Risperdal. Wellbutrin. Abilify. And there’s more pills than that but the others aren’t for her mind. I can hear her downstairs in the family room. Tonight, she’s playing the guitar all night. It sounds beautiful, but it is a damned shame. Just rolls it up in one flight of sound all the things that could have been with her. She’s got lots of talent. And, she is beautiful, in a crazed kind of way. You’ve have to see her to know what I mean. You’d have to look into her eyes. From the set of them in her face its as though they ought to be glowing red. Hot red. How long can she keep it up living this way? The doctors say years. But the body will weaken. She’ll grow old before her time. And she’ll probably die young, relatively speaking. But you know what’s really funny? Her hair is always perfect. Pulled back in that bun. Filthy, but perfect. What must be living in that bun. Someday I’ll go through that stack of memo pads. With the music, its easy. You can hear that it sounds good. But what might be in those pads? You can’t hear what’s in them, they don’t shout out to the world. Someday I’ll go through them. Probably after she’s gone. The pile is still growing. When she’s on the upswing, she fills a pad a night. She grabs at the air above the pad to show how the words are coming at her. And she catches them all, she says. Where they come from, who’s to know? Somewhere deep in her. Too deep. Deeper than a person’d really want to look. But someday I hope to get at least a glimmer of insight. To what makes her go on this way. To know what’s driving her. A bit of what’s in her might be in me, you know. A bit of her madness might rub off, in time. We both came from the same womb, after all. The same warm soft place. Why should I be any different than her? And when will it start for me, if at all? Some of the things I do you might call crazy, I suppose. But I can’t think of one. You know me, you watch me. Can you see any of her in me?
