But Mommy can’t be with you right now.
But know she loves you
More than any other miracle.
And know that when it’s your time
It will be your time.
There is a page with various sentences blacked out, like a redacted government report, written the night before I had my abortion. I was afraid, terrified my boyfriend would read what I had written about him.
Wednesday, June 12, 1991
Tomorrow is the day. Yes, pain and all the other emotions are pummeling my soul. But that is a whole other chapter. My main frustration/X?X?X?X?X?X?X?X?X?X?etc. is basically geared towards my “relationship,” or whatever the fuck you want to call it. Maybe it’s the pregnancy, I don’t know, but at this moment in timeX?X?X?X?X?X?X?X?X?X?The sick part that I don’t understand is that I love him. But right nowX?X?X?X?X?X?X?X?X?X?IX?X?X?X?X?X?X?X?X?X?I do notX?X?X?X?X?X?X?X?X?X?IX?X?X?X?X?X?X?X?X?X?I don’t want toX?X?X?X?X?X?X?X?X?X?. I do not want to try to work it out… Right now, all I want is silence, I want my life back, my privacy, my love for myself. But it is virtually impossible when one continues to put you down. Now, I’m sure I’m imagining most of it…
Then it was done.
Thursday, June 13, 1991
Well, it’s over. I feel pretty okay. Just kind of woozy. That gives me no time to realize what I have done. Which is most likely the best right now. I was looking over what I’d written yesterday and just have to laugh. My emotions were extremely warped (I really don’t feel that way). Honestly, I think when you’re pregnant you tend to feel that way about the male figure in your life… My life is pretty wild. I could seriously write a book. I guess this kind of is.
When you’re at the bottom of a well, you can often see light, way up there, a distant sky of hope, but that doesn’t mean you can easily climb out.
It’s clear from my journals that I was struggling not only with him, but with myself. This is also one of the first times that my diary sounds prescient—it’s almost as if I could see a future in which the bill for all the guilt and unhappiness and trauma would be paid by my body. Maybe it’s just the long hours I have been spending on my bed thinking about my illness, but in reading these words from more than three decades ago, I find that I suffer a kind of concussive awareness of the future impact of all these dark events from my early life.
Saturday, September 14, 1991
Change is needed desperately or else I will fucking shoot myself because I’m so tired of living a depressed fucked-up lie. Yeah I’ve had some good, sure, but mostly plain torture to myself. Mainly by not speaking my mind. Standing up for my honest immediate feeling. That word “sorry” sucks. It’s bullshit. I’ve been wrong. Maybe I’ve caused it. Maybe I fucked up. Didn’t handle it correctly. But I can’t be sorry. I can’t feel guilty. Guilt is not an emotion, it’s a disease. A pathetic life-altering and in the long run fatal disease. A slow-process disease… It begins in the brain, then spreads the illness throughout the entire body until not only does the mind shut off, but the body as well.
“A slow-process disease… It begins in the brain.”It seems poetically fitting, and devastating, that I now suffer from a condition in which my body’s very immune system—the thing that should save me from harm—has turned in on itself and attacked the myelin that protects my nervous system. I spent so much of my life racked with guilt that it’s no surprise to me that it felt like a disease when I was younger, and has, in some ways, felt like the driving force of a disease I suffer now that I’m older.
“Long run fatal…”There is no cure for MS, and no one knows why anyone gets it, so my contention in this diary entry from 1991 makes just as much sense as anything. I didn’t know back then that one day I would be mostly bedbound with MS, but I did know that something very dangerous was happening inside my soul, something that might one dayshut off my body.
These journals I turn to read like prophecies as much as a historical record. Who knew I was the Nostradamus of Laurel Canyon?
Things began to crack. I started writing about what it would be like to be single, and started expressing self-awareness of his direct impact on my deteriorating confidence. His sway and the love I thought I felt kept me coming back, but I see the early signs of escape. It was torture, an internal battle every day. I would think,Here’s somebody who I hate more than anyone on the planet. But he gives me flowers. But I hate him. But he tells me he loves me. But I hate him.Over and over and over.
Sunday, November 10, 1991
A scenario repeated one too many times. [He] is angry and had barely spoken a word in two days. I acted wrongly on Friday, made, once again, an ass of myself. Now I must live in this punishment. I don’t know where to turn. I’m constantly “fucking up,” but with what? Who knows why what where. I used to be confident in knowing I was a good person, despite my neuroses. But since I’ve been in this relationship, my confidence in myself has deteriorated. I can’t seem to please him, no matter what I do. I sabotage everything. My motives are right, but as he always says, I’m only 19 and acting accordingly. Funny how most 19-year-olds own a house, keep it together, cook for their boyfriend, have a job, are responsible? But I suppose I’m just a fucking kid, right? Lived through life and still managed to have a fucking sense of humor. A tolerable temper. Gee!! But there are more-together, wiser ones out there… When someone is always telling you what’s wrong w/ you and not balancing out w/ what is good then it is hard to be able to stand back and evaluate. Just getting pushed down further into the depths of depression. So what do you do? Have space? What space? I am on a constant, never a chance to breathe… Please God lead me to the bliss I once felt, the freedom I once felt. Been a long time since I felt that.
SEVEN
THE ORANGE CURTAINS
IT ISCHRISTMAS,1991. I invite my boyfriend to Indiana with me. I can’t stand the fact that he is going to be alone. It broke my heart, even though he is also breaking my heart. I bought his ticket, as usual, the caretaker. Of course he ran into problems while traveling, though everything was a problem for him. I couldn’t do anything right. I’d discovered just how meticulous about things he was, how anal about the way he wanted things to be. His laundry had to be folded a certain way, and I cooked for him every day after I got home from work. Even when I bought him a plane ticket, it was my fault the flight didn’t go exactly the right way, like the relationship’s energy had seeped out into the world.
We are at my grandmother’s house for Christmas. My mom is with me, and Aunt Janet has come as usual, too. My mom has been very wary about me inviting my boyfriend, but I wanted him to see this Indiana Christmas because it was so important to me. His luggage has gone who knows where, and everyone has gone to sleep bythe time he lands in South Bend after a screwed-up layover in Chicago. When I get to the airport in my cab, I can see him through the window, lying on the ground with a small backpack and his flute and his saxophone and his 16-millimeter camera. He always called himself a musician, but I’ve heard cats getting killed by coyotes in the Canyon and that sounded better.
Shit,I think,there’s going to be a fight.I can just tell by his body language that he is pissed. Sure enough, when I go in to get him, he blames the entire travel fiasco on me, as though the airlines and the Midwest weather patterns are in my control. He yells at me in front of the cab driver all the way to my grandmother’s—he loves to berate me in front of people, loves to make me look like an asshole, and there I am, a captive audience for his abuse. The cab driver keeps looking ahead at the sleet falling, though I think he recognizes me. I feel the irony of my fame growing as this man is dragging me down, making me feel like a worthless nobody. I want the world to stop. I want the sleet to become snow and bury us all.
By the time we get to the house, he has turned into a charmer, his anger having blown through like the storm outside, all smiles and warmth the next morning over coffee with my family.
The house is, as ever, lovely for Christmas. My boyfriend loves the painted photographs my grandfather once created and was so impressed by the artwork he found in the basement that he even starts to suggest he is the reincarnation of my grandfather, which when I think of it now is nothing short of unhinged.
Still, I can’t see him for who he is. To do that, I’d have to see myself more clearly, and when I look at myself, all I see are flaws. Not only do I have sad eyes, I have eyes that are warped, the picture blurred, the perspective askew.
Christmas Eve is also my uncle Harry’s birthday, and we all goout to dinner and have a lovely, sweet time. When we get back from the restaurant, we gather around to watch a video compilation of films my grandfather made throughout his life, from age nineteen until just before he died. They are cool home videos, if not exactly earth-shattering—the usual fare of an ordinary life in an ordinary town. They mean something to us, though, but likely little to anyone outside the family.
