Or: When Health is Nothing Like Riding a Bike

He made the world to be a grassy road
Before her wandering feet.

W.B. Yeats, The Rose of the World

Around the time I turned sixteen years old, despite having ridden a bicycle since I was about seven, I suddenly stopped being able to mount one at all. I could not (still cannot) figure out how brakes work. I had entirely forgotten how to steer. It was (and, context aside, continues to be) the very amusing converse of that famous old expression: “It’s like riding a bike: you never forget!”

But I forgot. And a week ago, we finally determined why. Following my father’s departure, my mind misfired: it arbitrarily repressed a number of seemingly innocuous memories. Birthday parties, basketball games, and school lessons all became hazy at best; at worst, they were entirely obliterated. I never know when they’re missing until I try to recall them. Apparently, this includes the time my dad taught me to ride a bike.

It might not seem like a big deal. It certainly wouldn’t be for any normal person. But that is exactly the point–things like this are why I don’t get to be a normal person. Never mind living on my own. Never mind holding down a job. Never mind stable relationships. Never mind having children. I don’t even get to cycle down the street with the rest of my university friends.

When my peers were traveling to foreign cities, learning new languages or new things about themselves, I was checking in and out of hospitals, testing out new medical procedures, and trying to determine the likelihood of being able to continue an academic career at all. When people tried to help, I closed off from them. When people made me feel terrible about myself, I let them. When the person I had been seeing for half of a year decided suddenly, without explanation, to sever me from his life entirely, I thought I deserved it. Because whenever someone chooses to leave me, I have to reckon with that possibility.

Please do not think that I feel sorry for myself. I honestly never have. There’s very little to pity. I don’t even know any other way of living. There is nothing to mourn, because I never really lost anything: I can only ever remember being like this. But sometimes that frustrates me, and sometimes it makes me sad. Because I am defending myself, all of the time. And against what? I really couldn’t say.

I would like to be less of a burden for my family and the people who love me. I don’t believe that I am dead weight, or unworthy of their care, but I know that I cause worry and grief to many of the people that I wish to hurt least of all. The person I am lives often in the shadow of the illnesses she carries. And that’s lonely. That’s frightening. That’s hard.

But I have made, so far, a kind of life for myself. I still go to work every day, and sometimes try to do some art, or learn a piece of music. I always show up to therapy. I usually remember to put gas in my car. I try to keep in touch with people. I don’t hurt myself the way I used to. I really hope that I can go back to England and achieve something more than half-hearted survival. Sometimes, I think a lot of people don’t like me; but I also know a handful who (probably) do. And that doesn’t always feel like much; but honestly, it’s something. Maybe everything. In any case, it’s better than nothing at all.

So, it’s okay. It’s always okay. I’m working on it.

Eventually, I’ll get there. I’ll find my way back to health–that elusive, half-hallowed word that imbues every image of life I conceive–and back to the people who love me. I’ll want to be awake and alive again. I’ll learn to enjoy, or at least endure, solitude. I’ll laugh a bit more than I have of late, and write just as much, and drink a bit less. Who knows? Maybe I’ll even learn to ride a bike again.

Because I don’t quite recall what it felt like to be that child, elated beyond language, knuckles wrapped around the handlebars, the wind in my hair and upon my face, my dad perhaps running and laughing–did he laugh back then?–a few paces behind me, as I kept the two wheels upright on my own for the first time.

That image is a fiction. I don’t remember it anymore.

But I wish I could. I wish I could. I wish I could.

մի գեղեցիկ օր

Why, what could she have done, being what she is?
Was there another Troy for her to burn?

W.B. Yeats, No Second Troy

I am now nearly twenty years young, and all of them drenched in exhaustion. Simply and swiftly, I am running out of interest. Who would want any part of this? My life has not gone wrong, not much more so than anybody else’s—but even so, I am losing my willingness to engage. I am disgusted. I am disillusioned. I am another scorned and jaded thing. Isn’t that right? Isn’t that what every person like me gets to be in the end?

I do not understand why we allow women to be treated like this. I do not understand why we provide them so little support. I do not understand how I, not even fully a women, have fallen into this paradigm so many times.

These people that I write of are not uncommonly vicious or cruel. I think this is just how most people are. I guess I knew better than to have ever hoped otherwise. At any rate, this feels worse than dying. Because it is so easy to be spurned or lost or left behind. But to be mistreated, to be stolen from in so many senses of the word, to face the sheer disrespect of apathy, and on top of it all, to be expected to stomach that helplessly, quietly, like the little girl whose father said he hated her—there are no words for that.

Understand this, please: the girl that I write of was a child. She was young and optimistic and naive enough to believe that the occupants of this world might hear her, and help care for her until she learned how to care for herself. So across this winter, she poured out whatever she had to offer, her time and her chemicals and her language and her skin, like offerings to an absent savior. She asked things of her body that it was not yet ready to achieve. She saw quite clearly each disappointment, each falsehood, each cautionary sign: but she tried anyways. What she was bartering for, with all of that unspoken sacrifice, was neither faithfulness nor longevity. She needed no endurance, no promises, no love. It was the mere lack of catastrophe she sought; the tranquil forgoing of malice or regret. She wanted to keep the memories clean. She wanted to recall, in peace, the clairvoyance of a body otherwise condemned to the wrenching aches of its grisly closure. What she did not understand (or perhaps knew, but did not want to remember), was that such a fate cannot always be prevented or foretold.

In a circle cast of salt, I saw iron links and fine-wrought silver: my history and my penance incarnate. Amidst clouds of heady jasmine, bright rosemary, astringent sage, I stared into the eyes of a half-dead talent. In a shower of crimson, from one clean incision, in ripples of water and tongues of pale fire, I asked for forgiveness. Then I awoke, really angry, for the first time.

We never left that labyrinth, though I have long sought for an escape. I always knew myself to be Icarus; but to him I was lesser, a mere Ariadne. In the brine of that Naxos-shored bed, I was a useful and knowledge-bearing object. But I was stronger than what he made of me. I always have been. I would have won out in the end, if I drove my teeth into him, made manifest my longings, instead of holding back and holding back and restraining what I really am. My madness would always have overcome his weak desire. Is this the truth that Theseus saw so many centuries ago, reflected in the foam of the Ægan? Is this why he allowed an ocean to come between them in the first place? Back then, Ariadne slept on; of late, I seldom have.

Whatever becomes of this body now, our history will favor my fate. He can have whatever else of mine he likes, and he has so far taken plenty. But this scarred, disfigured, fighting body, and all of the healing we learned it to be capable of—that is mine to keep now. Moving on is easy. I felt so fucking little to start with. But I still have not learned to swallow the fact that there is nothing left that I can do. I do not know how to live with the incessant, maddening knowledge that, once more, even with my father gone, I have been wronged and mistreated and lied to without any hope of any recompense or retribution. And I am expected to survive anyways, with no consequences and even less support, when the selfishness of careless men has endangered me once more.

It burns beyond all reckoning, to lie the precious memories of this year to rest beside some fucking parasite, who made of me another Penelope, who watched me fill a garden with moths. But the cast is changing now. I will learn a new desire: find a new fate. After all, not every woman left the ancient world unburnt. I am ready for a second Troy.

It’s okay. But even if it wasn’t okay, what am I supposed to do?

Raymond Carver, Cathedral

Tonight, I will try to write my own body apart. It is tired of waiting. It wants to belong. Perhaps, in mere pieces, it finally can.

Fingertips stained with nicotine: grown tough like cypress. Jaded lines of a knife-point along my hips. Half-healed burns in a cosmos up my arms. Hair torn out at the roots. Guitar strap slung like an albatross around my neck. Crescent scar on my upper arm. Eyes like a child’s, lashes growing in a rusted tangle. Bones that shift like a scourge beneath the skin.

Even now, like this, I am better off than I was however many weeks ago. My skin feels less bruised and fragile. My veins drip no ichor, but still thrum dimly. My form curves like music, a notation: I command more attention, demand more space. These wounds are closing off, retreating. With nothing left to dampen my pulse or thin my blood, I walk through the world like an ordinary woman. I go to work. I read the papers. I think of my friends in faraway places. I linger and exist, wishing that my heart could ring out in pieces, or echo like so many shards of light.

I have been left disappointed and resentful and, above all else, alone. Whatever was wrong with me before is fastened to the underside of my mind. Try though I might, I was unable to exorcise its presence. I can still feel it breathing inside of me. Honestly, I am beginning to think that the only thing to do now is to go back and try again. Perhaps I can find some strength this time around; recall the weird luck of my childhood; live. 

In the dim reflection of the doctors’ frightened eyes, I can see plainly what was done to me. If I forgive them all, for everything, can I mend my troubled ways? Before I try, I should focus on making it through tonight. 

It has just been too hard, remembering all of the things that I had buried so effectively, laid to rest like bones still aching with unrealized breath. When I was twelve or thirteen, scarcely more than a child, I fell down the unpolished wood of my garage stairs, trying to escape my father’s wrath. I had sought to wrench away from his horrible words, the livid vein that pulsed in his temple: but my foot caught fast on the threshold of the door, and I crashed down like a small burning star, frightened and hurting all the way.

Those were the days when there was a child left to save. But she died, you see. The girl that I was, she expired swiftly and painlessly, inspiring my present self to try for the same. But all of us know how this story ends, or doesn’t. I will not ask you to read it again.

It is so hard. I can taste the bitterness and grief rising up in me like bile. I write for the people who are not listening. Can I forgive the ones who shattered my tedious self-assurance? Can I forgive the causal figure of that scar on my arm, where it was dragged along the memory-edged stairs? Can I forgive the community that left me stranded on its periphery, driving its edges into my skin? Can I forgive the thing that fed from my mind and my chemicals and my body for half of a year, and then grew disinterested and departed wordlessly, leaving me with a catastrophe that he never cared to learn of?

These, all of these, are acts of violence. Sometimes I feel like people around me are letting me exist this way: because it is convenient, because they know that I can withstand it. Whenever they expect me to suffer quietly, and I do, it feels like proving them right. That makes me want to stop surviving. You who did this, who let me down, who disappointed me, who made me feel like shit about myself, who left me to hurt myself and recover on my own–what are you thinking now? Who among you will read this? Do you count yourself among the number?

I am trying, I am trying to forgive. Because maybe then, I can be forgiven too. I did what I thought I had to, and then ran. I am not sorry yet, but on the day my life and my habits catch up with me, I will be. And I will need forgiveness then, like a scorched forest needs the rain. I never learned to look after myself, to walk like something precarious and rare. Because some part of me will always be twelve or thirteen, and falling down that flight of stairs. Someday I will lose what little of my health remains, and that deterioration will murmur like a toxin through your veins. When such a time comes, it should bring you no surprise to find me down among the ashes. Go on, then. Let’s see just how much it takes.

But maybe not. When I was young, I used to love the autumn. It is the only season by which I can really abide. That time is coming fast, coming now. I am wringing out these hours, like bed sheets drenched with blood. And he knows what that looks like: what I gave to him. When I lay back today in the hospital bed, my thin gown and thin form all restrained, the doctors came to know what he and I had made of one another, in the days before he let me fall.

This is all that I have left to work towards now. I will try for the impossible, I will try to forgive everything. Because in spite of all my anger, my adoration, and my pride, I never belonged to you–not any of you. I will not be enthralled by your apathy any longer. I will not yield, nor accept the harm that was done to me at your hands. These costly mistakes will be repeated no longer. The cycle ends with him and me. Either I am courageous, or I am very, very weak.

I cannot forgive you yet, but know this: I am trying to. You were as clever as you were cruel. You might have anticipated all of this from the start. But for myself alone, I must do this. I must forgive it all. I must find some way to love the memory. I must find some new way to feel.

Just remember this, darling– you never owned me.

And I?

I do not kneel.

I have had my chances. I have tried and tried.
I have stitched life into me like a rare organ,
And walked carefully, precariously, like something rare.I have tried not to think too hard. I have tried to be natural.

Sylvia Plath, Three Women

I have spent some time traveling, existing in untethered motion, that old respite of my childhood. I reduced my world to the backseat of a car. I saw everything. I felt whatever I could. Such perambulatory endeavors, like the events that precipitate them, are scarcely new to me.

I have walked, in my short and troubled life, the winding alleyways of a thousand vivid cities. New York. Paris. Boston. London. San Juan. Honolulu. Oranjestad. Dublin. Toronto. Oxford. Amsterdam. Los Angeles. Chicago. Montgomery. Phoenix. So many others, now forgotten. Back then, I was restless and always awake. I was invisible and engaged. Now and then, in such places and times, I met those who lived fully and well. They knew a peace that I had never believed possible. And so I gained my glimpse into worlds where people did not hurt as much. And eventually I came to learn, as I would time and time again, that this bored me. There are some things you can only feel alone.

Those were the strange and lovely days of my earliest imaginings, when my world was all rainwater and starlight and things still to come. Every day, those memories fade out a little more. I lost them to tongues of flame and keen silver edges and rich, low notes of scotch: to the nicks and scars along my hips that now forge a kind of quiet farewell to unsustainable instances of fascination and false joining.

It was a long year. They were not right about me, and him least of all. I was flawed and I was wanting, but I was worth more than nothing. I was strange and unearthly and harmless. I loved well. I did not deserve to be cast off once more, left alone on the other end of an ocean and a discourse, with half of my memories and all of their horror, with madness and some life inside of me, with decisions that nearly undid my form, with things he should know that I can no longer bring myself to say. This is my virulence, my insurrection, my voiceless indignation. I deserved better. I owe him loss.

Wretchedly grieving or righteously incensed: I could be either now. Those are the boxes that I am meant to curl up in. But I will not comply. Instead, I will just be this. I am not okay with what was done to me. I cared, and even now, I can barely bring myself to stop. But that was known. It was always known. It was exploited. Why ask to stay in touch, after all, when it would have been more practical, more humane, to remove my efforts with surgical precision, to undo me like a lobotomy, rather than leave me to wait and wonder and write down reasons to freeze to death until I was as stoic as ice, with nothing left to obscure or defend? I should have been left alone from the start. It would have been better. So I will remember, and I will move past this, and I will hold fast to the forlorn conviction that not every figure I care for will follow the subhuman path of my father—even if this one did.

I had a dream, just the other morning, when my mind was cold and still. Even now, I cannot remember what it was or what it meant. But I know that it mattered. I know that it left me with some fortified conviction to live more adamantly than I have of late. And I know that I awoke to a wild summer storm, the lightning hissing and crashing, the world turned silver in driving sheets of rain. I was alone. It was mid-afternoon. I realized then that I was not designed to survive a world such as this one. I want too much. I feel too much. I live too sincerely. People like me do not die when we want to; nor do we exist in perfect motion. Instead, sometimes, we linger on, waiting for better and more painless days. That is what I am doing now.

This all might be reduced to a sort of ongoing, answerless question. How on earth do we determine who is worthy of our love and endurance, and what exactly we can justify forgiving, when our suffering comes at their hands? And how do we manage such forgiveness, when they have hurt us with such deliberation? Maybe I was right from the very start. Maybe we really must wait until all of our scars and our memories fade—until either our wrongdoers die, or we do—to find at last the peace that eludes us in life unending. And until that sweet and far-off day, maybe we simply learn to withstand the lovely and remorseless methods of those we live alongside. I do not want to be angry anymore. Not at my dad, not at anyone. But unrepentant fury is how I survive. I have never known redamancy, and I likely never will. I have all but stopped hoping. I do not cry anymore.

And yet, I am the luckiest person that I know. I have not died. I get to try again. I still have my younger brothers, so full of life and promise. I know no silence to be sorry for. I have people who love me even now.

Yes, I have had my chances. My father had his too. And so have infinite scores of others. But I will not be as my parents before me. I will know myself better than that. And if I live to see the other side of this fast-approaching year, I hope to have more to remember than the people who allowed me to care for them, and then took their leave with the summer. Because I want something to matter. I want to matter.

This is the only promise I have left to keep. This is a dimly burning prayer. Hear it, please, if any of you can.

I am trying. I am trying. I am trying.

One more chance is all I ever need.