Kaitrin's Journal

 Ethan called me today,as I lay busily changing the landscapes as they appeared across the gray tank of the T.V. Yes, that's "busy", for me--and an accomplishment, as well. For it means I managed to make it out of bed, to rise up and move through the heavy air  that accosts me each morning as I struggle to pierce it--that air as inverted,as heavy, by now, as the gravity must be on the moon.Yes, and on these lucky days,I make it to the living ropm couch,that elongated and solitary island, where I splay out.I turn the sound down low on the T.V. and then sit altering the channel;I can do this for hours,I've timed myself,now. Counted all the ways and the durations of which I can waste time. Paralyzing depression resembles nothing if not the congruent shapes of resignation.

         I rarely pick up the phone lately, and for one simple reason: there is usually no one I can bear to hear from.The very  first,standard,simple human questions they'll ask are taboo to me now:how are you doing?What are you up to? What are you planning today?(Um, doing abysmally,and up to nothing,and,let's see,planning nothing new.Now you talk....your turn! Take me from me---)

           My half brother Ethan is different, if only because he no longer asks those questions. It doesn't mean I'm not ashamed of myself,however,and would therefore rather he not call.I don't want him to findm e this way either. But I picked up,when I heard his voice hail me through tthe machine.What.What.(I speak like this now--in a low,level,colorless voice without inflection.A voice without seasons or time zones, that bears neither shadow or light.)

         Ethan wanted--it turns out--for me to call my mother. She disowned me when my father died this past March.It doesn't mean she doesn't call me,still,to scream at me,through her blackouts, but she never calls me sober,and I give up now. Meaning: I stil want her to love me, and so I will remain unrequieted in my love for her.Same as my sickness keeps me at this distance:in this unrequieted love of the world.

  But to get off the hook--literally--I tel Ethan I'll think about it.

"You will?"His voice is narrowed,slanted. He knows me well enough that he doesn't believe me.

"Of course."And, it's true.I have nothing but time:Therefore,I can and will, indeed, spend parts of it thinking. 

My mother never loved me.It's as much a fact as that she's an alcoholic, or has blue eyes, a light resin of freckles on her skin. She was too preocupied and too infatuated with life on her own terms for love on someone else's,  and she abandoned me when I was five.She truly never wanted me back; it was her misfortune,11 years later,to re-find me."If you love something, let it go--"She may have thought of this adage, when deserting me with her little known older sister.She may have comforted herself with that nobler concept of sacrifice:"I love her THIS much, that I will give her away--From selflessness,I now hand her fate into the air..." And so,she had washed her own hands of me.

  But there is more to that saying...."And, if it's truly yours,it will return to you." As,very briefly,much later, I did return to her, too: I had tried. My mother didn't like that part at all. 

       We did not ever inhabit a shared life, and remarkably little between us has either ended or begun.What I took with her is my attempt to not become her: the second strongest reason that I try hard not to drink is so I don't transmogrify into her form.I don't believe I still retain even the most fractured of wishes to be loved by her any longer.

         At least, in my waking,woken life,I feel no aching any more for the old,invented feeling of the uplifting and engulfment, of her love. It is only from my sleep that I will ocasionally wake with my hands loosely in fists,splayed, and clutching at the emptiness,as where a body, where a form, had been,that I'd half held.