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Everything I write starts with “I” or “me” or “my.” How limited is my scope? Can I not see past anything that I directly experience? I am so easily swayed by fleeting emotions and feelings. Cutting criticisms oscillate with beliefs of grandeur. I think they call it manic-depressive, which has a ring to it. I like to dramatize it, to transpose my feelings onto a narrative over which I can hang my sodden body and cry those heaving cries. 

Self-pity that wretched thing. It crawls on all fours, sliding out of my esophagus and onto the cold floor, retching and crying and covered in slime, feeling sorry for itself, that old shtick. I give it a kick and it cries harder. Instead of laughing I stick out my foot and let the goblin climb up my leg and onto my lap. Its breath is shallow and rapid, like a scared dog but extraterrestrial and bald and terrifyingly disgusting. I try to pet it but am immediately repelled. Instead I watch as it makes a home on my lap, curling into a melon and synchronizing its heartbeat with mine. I feed it a dill pickle chip and scare it off of my lap and into the woods.

I talk about this and that, about grand plans and musings, but I sit and mope all day. About how I have a new knot in my shoulder, that familiar ball twisting into itself beneath the soft edge of my shoulder blade – the result of a capricious sun salutation. Mad told me he could fix it in three minutes. I stood on the roller rink with my back to him, watching pajama-clad dancers bounce and glide inside marine layer dreams, crisp & calm, Mad’s hands diligently pressing into my shoulders and back. “Relax” he shakes my shoulders, commanding: “Relax.” I try my best. I’m learning how to do this very thing – to relax. Trying to relax proves paradoxically difficult. How does one let go?

I watch the middle schoolers at the bus stop. One boy asks: “What’s in your fridge?” The other responds: “I don’t know.” I marvel at such uncomplicated comfort, disbelieving that I once had it, dismayed that I’ve somehow lost it. 

I wonder if I will ever be comfortable again, in my own skin, in the vicinity of others. I will; I must. I’m laughing more and more, which seems to be a good sign. It’s not the same laugh I had as a kid or teenager; it’s something heavier, leaden with miseries that I cannot shake. But every once in a while I let myself laugh. It is spontaneous and unselfconscious; it lacks route or reason. And as soon as I try to grasp it, to bottle it up for later, it disappears.