andthewaterstayswarm

[andthewaterstayswarm]

it has been 2 years since that post.

a month ago, my brother went to the hospital again, but this time he checked himself in. i told this fact to my friends very casually as we sat down for dinner. they know about all of this. they give me a look, i give them assurance.

internally, i was glad i wouldn’t have to see him when i return home from school. at least, not for a little while. i was glad he lives with my father, because i still cannot bear the look in his eyes. what used to hold rage now holds nothing at all, and i wonder if that’s good or bad, and i settle upon the latter.

a month ago, i confessed to one of my closest friends: what if that’s it? if he’s found the clarity to check himself in, recognize for himself the problem, then what happens when they can’t help him? what if he decides that he’s had enough of all this? my sister had to call me when my dog died because i was away at school—it would be different, but would it be so different?

a month later, my father tells me that the hospital left him on the curb to be picked up. i think of what i told my friend. i think about the semesters i’ve spent scared of that phone call—three now, going on four.

i used to be more angry. the girl who wrote that last post wished for that phone call, sometimes, because it would mean an end to the anger and the door slams, grief be damned. she would hear that he sat on a cold curb in december and say, “good.”

but it has been two years since that post. the girl i am now has far fewer fratricidal fantasies, and she would ask the girl who wrote that last post, “grief be damned? how can you say that?” and then the spirits of christmas past and christmas present would argue, and, honestly, that metaphor only goes so far, because what is christmas future? past is rage and present is sorrow, but i don’t know what future is. i suppose i’ll reblog this again, two years from now.

today i wished i could tell him: “i hope you die.”

i didn’t tell him that. i will never be capable of that, not while i still tremble.

it was a fantasy, absolutely. i felt immediate shame.

still, i wanted to. because he spoke unkindly to my sister.

if he cannot calm down, if he cannot leave, then i figured that he must die. if he cares not for our safety, then he is no longer my brother. what other possible criteria could you fail to meet?

how difficult it is to hold sympathy for someone while also wanting them dead. how difficult it is to be sympathetic when he scares our scary dogs; how difficult it is to wish death upon him when he says he cannot trust his own mother. in both circumstances, somehow, i end up wrong.

two saturdays ago we had to call the police to take him to a hospital because he did not trust my mother enough to do so.

before that, i slammed his door with all my might. i desperately wanted him to know how it felt to have a door slammed on him, for a change.

immediately i broke down. i could not live with myself.

since then i’ve wondered how he can be told that he scares his little sisters and somehow find the audacity to live with himself.

maybe he knows that i sometimes want him dead. on some days i need him to know it is only a wish that passes me by, on others i need him to be shattered with the knowledge that it exists in my heart in the first place. in both circumstances, however, guilt follows. i am always wrong.

[andthewaterstayswarm]

im a ghost now! if i can’t hear her laughing in the room adjacent to mine then i’m as good as a ghost!

[andthewaterstayswarm]

i hate the cliche of “nostalgic for something that never even existed” because that’s not nostalgia that’s longing. nostalgia is formed from memories that most certainly existed. in fact they existed so invincibly that your present self can’t get back in

[andthewaterstayswarm]

i hate trying and FAILING to reckon with something. i hate when the same emotions always reduce you to a state that’s never any less tiny. does the skin never get thicker? does the immunity never develop?

[andthewaterstayswarm]

i do find it wonderful how ugly you look when you’re taking a bite of something. we should all be reminded that pleasure and looking “beautiful” are the antitheses of one another equally as often as they are collaborators.

[andthewaterstayswarm]

i love when music swells. good or bad it makes me reflect on things i’ve experienced in order to prepare me for experiences yet to come

[andthewaterstayswarm]

sometimes i think about how, no matter how many people have ever died in this world, there has always been many, many more people who noticed their absence or mourned their loss. and the exponential disparity between them

[andthewaterstayswarm]

today i wished i could tell him: “i hope you die.”

i didn’t tell him that. i will never be capable of that, not while i still tremble.

it was a fantasy, absolutely. i felt immediate shame.

still, i wanted to. because he spoke unkindly to my sister.

if he cannot calm down, if he cannot leave, then i figured that he must die. if he cares not for our safety, then he is no longer my brother. what other possible criteria could you fail to meet?

how difficult it is to hold sympathy for someone while also wanting them dead. how difficult it is to be sympathetic when he scares our scary dogs; how difficult it is to wish death upon him when he says he cannot trust his own mother. in both circumstances, somehow, i end up wrong.

two saturdays ago we had to call the police to take him to a hospital because he did not trust my mother enough to do so.

before that, i slammed his door with all my might. i desperately wanted him to know how it felt to have a door slammed on him, for a change.

immediately i broke down. i could not live with myself.

since then i’ve wondered how he can be told that he scares his little sisters and somehow find the audacity to live with himself.

maybe he knows that i sometimes want him dead. on some days i need him to know it is only a wish that passes me by, on others i need him to be shattered with the knowledge that it exists in my heart in the first place. in both circumstances, however, guilt follows. i am always wrong.

[andthewaterstayswarm]

there’s something so helpless, so dwindling, about being a woman in the presence of an angry man. in my eyes he is a storm.

see, when a man expresses his feelings through, say…tears— you as a woman just barely have the upper hand: for the man is doing something he should not. he is doing something you are supposed to do, and that makes him lower than you. momentarily.

however, when a man expresses his feelings through slamming doors? breaking objects? huffing and puffing like he’s trying to blow down the house? imposing his mood onto everyone with the misfortune of existing in his vicinity? well, there is nothing that can be done. you just have to wait the storm out.

this has been said before, many times: a man who is angry— destructive, rageful, hostile— is merely doing what he is allowed to, and nothing more. for he is not granted more. he is merely acting how he thinks a man should act. and you, as a woman, must make yourself small to suffer the wrath of the storm, or evade it entirely. but a storm is a force of nature; it cannot be stopped.

[andthewaterstayswarm]

on the same subject: i have grown quite fond of, and quite accustomed to, keeping my mouth shut. a screaming match is something i’d rather tune out than participate in, thank you very much, and if silence means strength then i will be enough to keep the world on my shoulders.

sometimes i cannot hold it back though. when she has retreated, and i have strategically entered the kitchen so it is only you and i, that is when i speak.

i tell you that i am on her side. no, i don’t think you’re starving yourself, and yes, i think she could take down the snarky comments a few notches, but i do miss you. same as she does. your room is always empty, and i never know where you are, just that you are gone.

“even though you leave to get away from her,” i say, and there is a lot of space between you and i as we stand in our kitchen, “you leave all of us.”

often i think that she escapes because she is the only one of us with a place to escape to. that, if given the same shining opportunity, we would snatch it up and hoard it, just as she does. hypotheticals only go so far, however; i do not have that luxury. all i have are my calm words, because i do not like screaming matches.

[andthewaterstayswarm]

my mother was a teenager in the eighties. that fact lingers (kind of like stubborn sauce on an unsprayed pan) when i learn of any event– in the back of my mind, always, i wonder, “what did my mother think when she learned that news?”

i will never know the precise answer. it is highly likely she has forgotten it. to me it feels like something lost. something i cannot stop grieving for until i find. (kind of like an item held gently by st. anthony.)

kind of like a quilt with a hole torn in its center, it can be patched, but never returned to its original state. so, this is the least i can do: i will watch the movies, and i will listen to the music. i will let her freak out over something she cannot believe my twenty-first century self enjoys, and i will listen to her story of how her sister broke her record because she replayed it so much.

i will hear the details of my mother’s life, and, even just for a moment, she will be more than just a mother. maybe it is in vain for me to try, but i had the itching idea that maybe, even for a moment, my mother and i could be teenagers at once.

[andthewaterstayswarm]

it is heavy, this specific longing. it is a bag of groceries that sits in my car for hours– it sits in that car, and i do not give it another thought. but i must open the trunk eventually. and when i do, i find the heaviness enough to break my bones.

when the time comes to take the bag inside, it feels less like a bag of groceries and more like a beloved pet that refuses to eat and cannot walk. i will carry it because it is beloved, because i need it to know that i have have not yet given up on it. but at the end of the day i must put it down, and doing so makes me cry. it makes me sob at 6:30 in the afternoon.

and so that is the longing that you have placed at my feet: it is a pile of bricks. many days i do not see you (please i just want to see you is that truly so much to ask) and so the memories of us which grow few and far between rarely cross my mind. occasionally, you come home: that is me standing on the bricks, making fun little towers with them like jenga blocks. i can keep the bricks at my feet for a brief moment in time. and then you leave again, and the towers fall. the pile of bricks is dropped into my hands suddenly, and the sharp corners cut my palms. i drop one, and it lands on my foot.

it is too heavy, the longing you have pushed upon me. i carry the half-dead animal in my arms because it is the only way to communicate that i have not given up on it quite yet.

[andthewaterstayswarm]

sometimes you’ll find that it is physical. you will find that it is a phantom pressure of ten thousand hands on your back. you will find that it is a loose fabric that dances a child’s taunt all the way down your spine. all the while, you will find that it is the empty space that envelopes you, a distance which must be closed lest you risk stepping back and into the last pair of arms that you ever feel around your neck.

you will find that it is the burn of a gaze that is not there: a pair of eyes that do not bore into the back of your head because they do not exist outside of your little universe. you will find that it is killed easily by a familiar floorboard’s creak, by the sight of a someone, anyone: a champion totally oblivious to the monster they’ve slayed.

[andthewaterstayswarm]

silently, momentarily, you wonder when you had accepted that there’s something wrong. there was no big realization, no huge epiphany that shook you to your core, turned your whole world upside down (or rather, right side up). none of that. there’s just life, days, frequent moments where you were on edge. during one of those moments, you gave in.

which moment?

it wasn’t this moment, was it? you don’t just… let that truth slip by, right? has your resistance truly fallen so easily? how hard have you been pushing against it that it exhausts you? how exhausted are you that it takes just a moment for the walls to crumble entirely?

[andthewaterstayswarm]

it’s strange to be angry towards a suffering you’re unsure of: is this suffering? it feels like suffering, but only in the watches of the silent night. in the good moments it is nonexistant, and for that reason, you cannot tell if it’s suffering. maybe it is? you don’t know, it might be.

all you know for sure is that it’s horrible, unpleasant, dreadful in the hollow-but-not-empty pit of your stomach. and so you’re not angry at your suffering (?) going unnoticed and without aid, but instead you’re angry that you’ve never known anything different.

angrily you gaze upon these memories. you pick apart this burden, one that you barely recognize as such because you’ve never known anything else. it has made your arms strong, but at what cost?

[andthewaterstayswarm]

your chest closes up, not enough to be a detriment but too much to be ignored. the dread that settles between your stomach is, once more– not a detriment, but not small enough to push away. no breath you take feels full; like eighty-five percent as opposed to one-hundred.

one by one you recalibrate your memories. you reframe them as something different. you work to think of them as the result of something inherently wrong. it might be a big leap, it might not– it certainly doesn’t feel like it.

no, it doesn’t feel like much has changed. it is strange to navigate, not only because you’re doing so alone, but because it almost feels like this is not your first time recalibrating. a thought enters your mind: the thought that perhaps your memories were reframed as soon as they happened. maybe deep in your subconscious you worked to think of them as wrong long ago. maybe it is just now that you have recognized that you should not exist as wrong.

[andthewaterstayswarm]

sometimes i think it’s weird that i have to option to gaze at myself in less detail– that i refuse myself the burden of studying those corners which i deem rough– and sometimes i think it’s concerning how often i use it. but that’s fine and i am fine.