[12] Then made one bundle of himself and me

I get out a pair of nail scissors and my sewing kit – both in the top kitchen drawer, a small mercy – and measure out a length of black silk thread, the closest match to his stiff-cut hair. He sits still and silent while I work, our backs to the awakening window and the canal below. The next minute is trying to make me stronger again, and he’ll be there when it succeeds. A crisis is an opening for unprecedented futures and unanticipated recoveries of the past. I’d almost, last night, fallen into the trap of repeating myself. If you’re going to be ashamed, let it be for actions, not thoughts. Unhappiness is the repetition of old patterns, and I’d been doing that last night. This can’t be happening, I was telling myself in the bedroom while it had the hold on me, this can’t be happening again. Twenty-two is a strange age, so I’ve been told. You’re not wise but you know wisdom is possible, that it’s inside you to hatch. But will you have enough to become yourself, let alone raise a child? The answer is as much about fate as experience. It’s about what you do with what the world does to you.

It knocked me sideways and down seeing … again. That guy, I tell you. It took hours to catch my own threads and start weaving them back together, all the while wondering if I remembered how. Since Paul, I’d never been tested like this. The first time I righted myself, years ago, it was like God rolling the knucklebones, thousands of them, one for every day of my life, until one day, like that, most of them came up sixes or fives. Most of me felt no hope at all, and I was telling myself to be ready to suffer until I died. Getting stronger happened without my volition. If you hold on long enough, the planets will align without you whether you still hope they do or not. Cast yourself into them, give up. You need to do that sometimes, and perhaps once can be enough, you hope, but there has to be once. That’s what I did – I threw away my will – and instead of being crushed, my will came drifting back to me. It turned out I was tethered to it. That’s how I explain it to myself. Now I’m telling myself I don’t have to go back there. I will not, now that I’ve been reminded what it was like. And I even have ways not to. I know because Paul gives me room to live like someone who remembers it. It’s a self-obligation to stay whole and authentic in a world that wants to tear the both of us asunder. It’s the chore of our being together, and any tool that helps do that is good.

The symptoms that came back last night: even when they first appeared twelve years ago, I knew they were just that. There was nothing wrong with me, it was the world that was wrong with me. But knowing something doesn’t help you solve it. You can’t change the world, and the symptoms were how I manipulated it. Women aren’t supposed to go out and conquer. A women’s only power is to manipulate the men in it: hide behind them, keep them all out, mess with their heads and revenge yourself at the same time. That’s what women do. The difference is, I have reasons not to feel helpless now, and it’s not as if I’m the only one in the world who’s angry at what the world does. I know what it’s like to have no will, the same as I know what it is to have a strong one. So it’s borrowed – you got a problem with that?

My conscience is cruel, demanding, and sadistic. It punishes me simply for wanting things, but it refuses to be clear about its own rules, and you end up placating it endlessly so that your life turns into an endless search for ways to assuage it. No wonder simplicity sounds so wonderful to those who are frightened of insight, who are afraid to think for themselves, who won’t even acknowledge a self to understand. When there are no clear rules, I ask myself what they would have to be if there were any, and then I commit to them and make my own way. That’s how I keep the demons in check, night after night – by telling myself what I’m sure the gods would tell me if they ever told us anything clearly. When I remember to commit myself that way, and how hard it was to learn how, I’m not going to let the void find me again. I’m safe from my worst self. I know where the edge in me is, where the chasm opens. I can see it in daylight, and feel it in the dark, and hear the wind’s voice like no one else, and tell the earth’s time without a clock, and dance on the edge as well as Paul can. I know all of that is in me. I guess wrong sometimes, but at least I know when I have and what questions to reset. I will not be murdered the way this world would murder me – that is, silently, without a voice to protest honestly. When I have to die it will be on the ground I’ve prepared, not like that Christ night in the asylum bed when the portal opened behind my back.

Sometime soon he’s going to ask me, ‘Who was that guy who scared you,’ and I’m going to tell him part of the truth: ‘Today, he’s nobody.’ I’d used to wonder what would happen, years later, if those eyes ever looked into me again; I’d used to frighten myself with the premonition of finding out. I’d never thought any good would come of it. Turns out it was neither good nor bad, it was only an inevitability, and those never need to be the last ones. You can step right through inevitabilities – It’s an old human folly to think they’re an end point, a wall. I repeated old mistakes for a night, then I stopped when I knew I was doing it, and Paul was there to help me catch myself. I’m ashamed of what I did to him, but I would have been more ashamed to stay where I had fallen. The next morning, while I’m sewing Paul’s head back together, I can look with cold vision at those eyes that stared again in Mister Rosemeyr’s shop and I can tell them back what they tried to tell me, at the worst possible moment so many years ago: ‘You mean nothing.’

[[ chapter 13 on 28 February ]]