Art Therapy at the Space Station [Psycho-Surreal Memoirs]

54
I gave my shell a name when I took my first sip of whiskey from a handle of Evan Williams. And I kept drinking, wandering around the backyard with HEAVEN written on my back, while a group of punks and burners sat beside a burn barrel. As if for the first time in my life, I could speak with the heat on my face and fingers. I had an animated, but forgotten, conversation with my roommate about Clive Barker and Poe. when before I could barely force a smile in the presence of others.

It was like alcohol was greasing the engines inside my head, and everything that anxiety laced down with its trappings and tape and sticky fingers was being slowly pried away, freed, with every sip.

When I drank too much and began to spin, throwing up in the bathroom and thinking “Well, I’ve poisoned myself,” an almost numb, calm wave descended upon me. I stumbled back into the living room with vomit on my skirt and leggings. A boy lay me down in his bed in the next room and got me some water to drink. I clung to him, calling him my boyfriend’s name as the world spun. And he held my hair as I threw up in the yard, whispering “You’ll get used to it.”

I carved out eyes and a mouth for my shell, and I called her NAMELESS, because the only personality she carried was the one easily reflected back from the faces of others. I pulled her out of whiskey-soaked glass and numb fingers. She got me closer to the blood creating a rosary around my neck, got me closer to taking my skin and peeling it down because at points in my life I couldn’t separate me from her.

It’s easy to become an alcoholic when alcohol is a continuous sustaining process for preserving what you think is your only identity. Even if you have the foresight to name her NAMELESS, after her lack of self, lack of personality, for her drain-mouth, whirlpool skin.

55

Meanwhile at the space station:

The writer sleeps on the ceiling of her dormitory now, after her art therapy she feels most comfortable with gravity reversed. She wants to float upward, not fall downward. She wants to break through every window she finds, she wants to be more of a bomb and less than a person. She doesn’t yet know it, but this is the beginning of learning how to be human again.

She burns her books and tears apart her clothing and walks the hallways of the station in tattered fragments of materials, of things she used to be but doesn’t want to be anymore, tubes trailing from the back of her neck. She has to be scanned every 24 hours for insects, to make sure no new ones come crawling back onto her skin. The intern’s bruises have yet to fade, but nobody dares to mention them. The writer could be a spider, the way she can bend backwards and crawl so fast it looks like she has eight limbs instead of four.

She’s trying to process all these new emotions and feelings without going into the airlock and flinging herself out into space. She’s right on the precipice of experiencing a new way of data perception.

Today: the robot in the hallways ran into her while she was looking at the day’s schedule.

Another patient ran into her in the cafeteria, knocking her tray over and sending her dried food scattered across the floor.
Neither time did she allow herself to apologize for inconveniencing another.

But she thinks - I don’t even want to write anymore. When I go home, I want to burn everything and start over. I want to rebuild my consciousness, from the ground up. Here you go: A childhood without snapping a leash over your head. And take this away: Worrying what other people think. And take this away as well: The accident in the park, the frozen smile, the rattlesnake underneath your feet, the bloodless heat of the writer’s mother telling her she’ll never learn to love, the broken furniture, the hot oil at her father’s feet, love like a burden around her neck, the broken neck, the arms twisted like broken birds, spitting in her mother’s face like the last burnt out, snapping rebellion of a dog whose feet have been nailed to the doghouse floor, the writer being forced to the ground and her chest pushed on until she thought she might suffocate and collapse underneath the weight.

And take this away.
And take this away.
And take this away.

The writer would return home from the space-station with the indents of tubing in the back of her shaved head, and her spaceship has grown moss around its exterior.

“You’re not ready,” the specialists told her when she asked for her release. “We can’t recommend your departure.”
“What do you mean I’m not ready?”
“This is only the first step in the process,” they said. “You don’t even have the proper training yet to rebuild on the broken landscape.”
“So what’s next?”

“Check the schedule.”

So the writer pretended not to notice they were staring at her as she floated down the hallway and checked the schedule.
Art therapy. Fuck, again?

Note: This is part of my Psycho-Surreal Memoirs Series. You can find more by looking through my feed. They're designed to be able to be read in any order.

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