By Maia Brown-Jackson
I. When do you fake being a person well enough that it becomes the truth?
You fear you’re fighting a losing war against yourself.
You have to relearn how people do this, this living, interacting, blithe and open. You say yes and yes and yes and you forget the other option but you know you wish for it.
You don’t trust yourself. You tiptoe, silent, fearing that everyone is searching for your flaws, ready to lay them out to make you feel like shit so that they can convince you that you don’t deserve anything, let alone them, and oh, the things you owe them, for (mis)handling the crisis of you: you, problem; you, disaster; you, unlovable—
You can’t help but wonder if you’re still capable of being in love. You wonder if you’re still capable of being loved. You wonder if there’s anyone in the world who can apply pressure to the gunshot wound of your hypervigilance, who can accept the gory, loathsome, frightening (frightened) thing you’ve become. You wonder if you deserve anyone. You wonder if being alone is your prize, in the end.
(That’s what they told you, right? And it ended with your word versus theirs. And they were so confident, especially when it came to you, and something about them had gotten you to doubt yourself for so long—)
And you’re so afraid, and you hate to admit that, and you hate even more that despite it all you still crave love, that out of everything they took you never lost that, because it makes you vulnerable, and you know it might also make you human but maybe you’re not entirely human anymore. But your foolish, foolish heart keeps tearing open, bleeding this craving like air. This raw, uncontrollable desire for someone to willingly, gently disable all your defenses (red wire or green wire!?), scale all your infinite, frictionless, towering walls, and hell, just take a non-metaphorical chance on someone as mercurial as you. You fantasize about someone who would bandage your scrapes, pressing butterfly kisses into your bruises—because you’ll never live a life quiet enough to avoid that type of damage—and you’re not quite, quite, ready to give up on the possibility of that kind of miracle just yet.
But you fear the weight of love; where others might hurl themselves from cliffs, able to say: “I trust you” and not care about falling because they’re holding each other’s hands, you can only think of the constant of Earth’s gravity (9.8 meters per second squared) and it feels like you might be on Jupiter instead (24.8 meters per second squared) and you don’t know if it’s better to hit the ground that much faster or clutch those last few extra milliseconds of life.
So if someone (somehow) did want more of the crime scene of your existence, and you managed not to run (and you’ve always been a runner), and maybe you would be trembling or maybe you would be paralyzed, but you know you would feign confidence as you tried to let someone in (because you’ve also always run straight for the things that scared you), and then they grew sick of your new “eccentricities,” what would you do when they didn’t fall, but failed you instead?
(Because you wonder how much of what they said was true, how anyone could stand this ugly-provocative-loathsome-naive-frightening-frightened-stubborn-impulsive-wounded thing you are that apes being a human—)
II. When do you get to go home?
You’re getting better: you can acknowledge that you’re not okay now. And apparently that’s a step in the right direction. Something happened to you, and even though it ended, it hasn’t really ended, with the neural pathways of your brain now hypervigilant, surprising you with wildly fun and unpredictable new reactions to everyday situations. Like when you’re talking on the phone with your mom, and she asks when you’re coming home, and you freeze at that damn fragment of a sentence, and you stutter something that you manage to get away with because you’ve gotten very good at keeping the panic attacks to yourself, but when you hang up you can’t get the question out of your mind.
This week was the first time you’ve swallowed your fear and you renewed your lease. In your life. You’d already been living here an entire year, and you could feel your fight-or-flight kicking in, and still. You knew this time running wouldn’t do the trick. It used to just feel like this itch to find something new and better because you were never content, and now, after all that, you find that standing still makes you understand the phrase “deer in the headlights”—hell, makes you understand that immobilized deer—but you know that this is something you have to face, even when it feels like a car mowing you down, so there’s no point in suffering once again from not buying enough boxes for your books because you can never estimate it right because it would just smuggle itself along inside no matter where you go. You’re being brave, even if it doesn’t look like that from the outside.
(Just in case you can’t manage it though, if you find yourself stuck in a brand new cycle of bad habits because you have the time to develop them now that you’ve relearned the basics of living which seems to involve a lot more free time when you’re not constantly in fight-or-flight, you just keep repeating your completely normal mantra: “You can always find a way to break the lease. You can always find a way to break your lease.”)
Then there are these little things that are actually kind of exciting (you don’t tell anyone—that would make you seem even less capable of taking care of yourself): every piece of your art is already on the wall; you know exactly how far to twist the shower knob to make it the perfect temperature; you started a book club. It’s almost like being a real person.
And now you have a place that you refer to as “home” automatically. But as you talk to your mom, and you hear the way she says that word, you know that’s not really right, is it? You can’t go back home. You’re not the person who called it home anymore. And you don’t know that this new place is (not really new anymore, especially for you) “home,” because when your very skin isn’t safe, the skeleton and organs and muscles that make you up don’t feel like a home anymore themselves, and this very thing that somehow hasn’t given up on you yet might still betray you without notice. How could anything made of brick and mortar possibly do better?
Your epidermis became a war zone disguised by freckles and tattoos, and you use a subtle reluctance to get too close to anyone to hide how the jagged edges of your bones can cut and the jangling of your invisible dog tags keep you awake, but still the ever-present ghosts you never used to believe in don’t take the hint. Your body is haunted. It doesn’t matter where you go: the spectres come with you.
You remember the girl you once were like she’s a fascinating stranger, by now too exhausted to pretend that’s still who you are, and you’re dripping blood far too freely to keep claiming that you’re okay. All your broken pieces have to be reassembled, stitches now crisscrossing skin that, despite its thin fragility, used to somehow stay unmarred. Now you just get to worry that the developing scars reassembling you won’t hold—or worse, that they’ll be so obvious that one glance at you will scream “I’m not okay!” And with every touch you’re reminded: you will not be that girl with the perfect skin and its ease over her limbs that she took for granted ever again. This body, this person, she’s someone you’re still learning, and she doesn’t know where she belongs.
But that’s not all you are. That’s not all you experience. You still have your comfortable bed with your rosy silk sheets and you actually bothered to fix the dishwasher because you signed a lease and you’re going to continue using it for some time so you can’t just leave it for the next tenant.
You’re still going to be okay, eventually.
It’s that some of us—maybe we’ll find somewhere new, somewhere we relearn “safe”—we just never get to go home.
III. When will you stop running?
Your instincts are still telling you to run, to finally lose yourself amongst dust particles, really just little nomads themselves aren’t they? Rootless and content in the sunbeams. And you know that dust is just human skin, and your own feels like it will never be clean— except if you could break it back down to elements forged in the hearts of dying stars, hell, hope most that your soul turns to the hydrogen that existed since the Big Bang itself, and run—
Then sometimes you remember: you are fucking brilliant and you are burning yourself. That happened and here you still stand. It’s exhausting having to be brave and brave and brave so you are not just a survivor—and you hate hearing that word given to you like it should be a badge of honor—but you are truly living again. Frankly, you refuse to be a “victim” or “survivor” for the rest of your life because you will not let this define your future.
You will not let them define your future.
You will not let them define you.
(But who the fuck are you? Because you know it’s not the same person who met them, or even the one who was with them [thank god], and you’ll never be either of those people again, and actually, you realize that those women are just one more thing you’ve been unconsciously grieving, one more thing they stole, they killed, and you didn’t even notice it happening, and maybe if you’d just noticed that it was happening then none of this—
Will you always wonder if there was a moment you could have stopped this?
What if you’re just doomed to become a pillar of salt, because you’re eternally trapped glancing over your shoulder?)
IV. What happens when you realize the old you is never coming back?
“When’s your movie coming out?” the heavyset Dominican man repeats as you pull out your headphones to hear him properly. You hate when people talk to you on the subway. “You’ve got a look. Like, there was a girlfriend on Breaking Bad, I could see you coming from a ways away, just like her. You’ve got a look, like for the movies.” He pauses, you contemplate your sweatpants, and he nods, suddenly serious. “It’s going to be okay.”
You don’t really know what to say to that, just mutter an awkward “thanks,” slip your headphones back on, and forget to restart your music.
Fuck. What the fuck was that.
It seems, maybe, that was someone who saw you as a person, whole, not missing the parts that got hidden in the shadows and that you’re not really sure you want to find again. You’re itching to run, now. Freedom or fear you can’t tell. But you haven’t fled yet, and you’re not going to let them win; you’re going to keep fighting to learn to be this new person, this new you. If you have to run, you decide, you have to stop running from, and start running to.
So you struggle not to scowl at the invisible scars along your body that look barely stitched together, but plan for that day you’ll be ready—even if you’re holding your fists up the whole time because you’re still on guard—ready to try because your world is not going to stay this small because there has to be a day that you’re ready, and you’re going to fill those cracks with gold—
After the extremely practical literature degree from the University of Chicago, award-winning, Pushcart-nominated Maia Brown-Jackson then braved the myriad esoteric jobs that inevitably follow, ultimately straying from NYC to Iraq to volunteer with survivors of ISIS genocide. Inspired with a new focus, she caffeinated herself through a graduate degree in terrorism and human rights and now investigates fraud, waste, and abuse of humanitarian aid in Taliban-controlled Afghanistan. Also, she writes.