Cutting
What do you do when memory becomes a surgeon’s knife? Do you fight or let it cut you up?
But you cannot run from your mind, it is the table for cutting. You will fight and bleed. What then happens if you choose to escape?
Madness.
I think I am insane. Not in the theatrical maddening way, but in a way that bleeds and leaks into my life. On Saturday, I looked at myself in the mirror and despised the man who stared back. First, yanking off my hair seemed very appropriate. I wanted to change my life, so I took the one-day-old cornrows out and had them put into passion twists. And when they were done, I was not happy. My life did not change. I wanted to shave it off. I imagined what my life would look like without hair touching the back of my neck or the tip of my shoulders, and quickly reasoned that cutting it wouldn't save me. I would still be unchanged. And I would miss my hair.
I once traced a kitchen knife from the base of my neck to the top of my pelvis. Picture this: eight years old, a surgeon, halving my upper body perfectly into two. Inflicting a straight line sharp enough to be visible, but not enough to open the mouth of a bleeding wound. It left a permanent imprint that took years into adolescence to fade.
Last year I wrote to you in a letter titled, “Feather To Mouth: A Self-Inflicted Bloody Silence,” do you remember?
Where I Googled metaphors for suicide. And I lied that I did not contemplate dying. I did. In it, I told you of Sylvia Plath’s quote from "Winter Trees." Where the darkness leaks from the cracks. Is the crack in my mind? or is it my life? But what I know is that I could not contain it. I was so tired. So, I dragged my body for one one hour to the express and sat on the cement pavement dividing the lanes. My heart did not run fast, I was at peace. Each passing car, each zooming trailer was the force of death gripping my entire body as if to hurl it into the middle of the road. I did not resist it, I simply sat there and waited.
Have you ever looked death in the face? What did you see?
They say insanity is not so far away from those who laugh too much. And I will forever be quick to give myself to it. My throat, on standby, at the slight of a joke. My mouth opens wide to its cutting sound, letting it rock my body into pieces whenever it wants.
Have you ever heard my laughter? Can you remember the fullness of it?
Have you ever paid attention? Hahaha.
Hey? Listen now. Can you hear joy? Ha. Ha. Ha. Ha
Laughter is what we do when we cannot cry again. Hahaha.
Ha-ah-ah-ah. My voice is catching. Ha. Ah. Ah. Breaking. Can you hear it?
If laughter is a symptom of madness, what then is…this?
Haaa…Haaa. I am sobbing, wailing. My whole body is weeping. I am gasping. Laughter. Ha-Ha-Ha-help-me. Ah- God, save me. My body is in torment.
I have cried, and you have not heard me. Why do you think I am laughing?
Last month, for 21 days, my mother wrestled in the psychiatric ward. Her body and mind were in dissonance. In the first two days, sometimes, she chanted, help me, save me, save me. When she wailed, I watched from afar, as though I was outside my body.
And when her wails quieted into gasping sobs, I held her hands.
Sedated, drifting in and out of consciousness, she whispered when the drugs kicked in, “Oyin come back home. I am waiting for Oyin. Oyin is not dead. Watching her fight like that finished me.
More cracks have opened in my life, and it leaks into everything. Memory cuts us like that.
✨
arrrgh 🥺