Alone, again.
In the silence of a broken home, it’s impossible to hear anything besides your own thoughts - the kind that I could escape whenever Jamie would distract me.
When you’re alone, those thoughts are forced to shout over all of the conversations you’d heard in that house - the arguments around the kitchen table, the children screaming from the second floor, down the stairway and through the parqueted floors.
I hear everything, especially the whispers between incapable lovers in a bed that hardly ever saw the spoils of a married life.
Alone, the home feels like a delayed pause. I shout through blackness and out onto the tennis courts, where my boy used to run. No one hears me. No one can respond.
I wheel around much easier now - with no furniture or people to avoid. And I sleep comfortably - in the same position I wake in. And finally, I’m self-sufficient. I control my days and nights again.
I refuse to feed myself, not because I cannot, but because I choose to. I’m liberated by my paralysis. I touch nothing besides my own cell, and see nothing, except absence.
I brought the ritual back, too. It’s different now, though. I don’t do it in the mornings, and I’m never cut short by an alarm or an intruder. I also don’t get naked anymore - but the core remains.
For hours, I sit in front of the hallway mirror in our bedroom - where I hear the whispers shared by incapable lovers, beside a bed that hardly saw the spoils of a married life - and stare into my brown eyes. I feel nothing, again - and see nothing in my own reflection. Gone are the regrets. Gone are the five steps of recovery. I’m recovered. Gone are the terrors. Gone are the fantasies I once had - about being the person I once was.
When I grow tired, of the endless pool, I wheel back to the great room, where I can cry. I say, out loud, that I would be better if I could be. If I got the chance to live like a man, I would live like ten.
If I could break free, I would - with the fervor of a folk-tale warrior, running across the globe, leaving no ties behind.
By the end of my proclamation, my throat aches, as if shouts had actually flown through it, but I cannot hear my own voice.
Silence, in my solitude.
Alone, again, and I remember what my therapist told me in one of the months during my seven month imprisonment -
That the tragedy of the body, is that it cannot expel the human spirit beyond its own abilities. The internal, no matter how valiantly it fights the body, always loses. The only success comes from cooperation, but - my limbs have not cooperated with my ideas for a long, long time.
And so, alone, I live, with my bounds - where I belong. And I stay seated in my chair.
