The darkness envelops me as I drive through the night. Only stopping at 5 A.M. to sleep with Natalie in the back of my van, in the Walmart parking lot of Tuscaloosa, Alabama. In the morning, shopping carts rattle behind my head. I wish I had become a pianist. The lessons I had taken when I was eight years old ended before the new year. I didn’t like someone telling me what to play, and my mother screaming at me from the kitchen that I had played the wrong note.
I knew it was the wrong note.
Driving to New Orleans at two A.M. I ask Natalie, can I tell you something I’ve never
told anyone? When they say yes, I tell them that when I was 9 I heard my parents hurting my littlest brother. A note in my nine-year-old crooked cursive was left on the dining room table: if this doesn’t stop I’m running away. The mother’s tone is harsh, your brother needs to learn a lesson or he’ll be in a lot of trouble when he gets older. I am crying for myself and for my brother, who at two-years-old developed severe OCD. He doesn’t want to play with his stuffed animals, he doesn’t want to pick up the cheerios and place them in his mouth, and cries when he can’t wash his hands repeatedly, but the water runs out eventually.
The chlorine of the public pool stings my eyes, as I sit on the cement bottom. Children
kicking their legs in the water, like the stingers of a jellyfish. As a triple Pisces, I envision a new life under the surface of the water. A life that might take form after my body floats up to the surface, bloated and blue. But then I remember the jellyfish children’s screams when my cousin happened to try the same thing. The lifeguards pressing on his chest, in a strange dance. His face and lips stained indigo. A mastered stillness, a meditative breathlessness I’ve never been able to duplicate.
I didn’t realize how hard it was to drown yourself
until I tried.
Falling in and out of being nine years old again, my infant brother’s screaming and crying burned into my ears. What sounds like the drawers to a dresser being slammed closed again and again remind me that there was never a dresser in that room. Sometimes, I forget that my mini-van has a mind of its own, and when I try to drive on the interstate for too long, it begins to tremble with an unforeseen anxiety. The axels, the pedals, and my brain in my skull shivering and rattling around. This doesn’t wake or stir Natalie. The rattling echoes from Cincinnati to Mississippi.
Sometimes, I dream that my parents are circling around downtown in that anxious
mini-van, to barge into my poetry class to stab me in the leg with an exacto blade. I
dream that I am eating a piece of square pizza in the elementary school cafeteria, and my mother comes
running down the hallway. I slide between the open door and the wall, crying to the lunch lady, please don’t tell her where I am, please don’t tell her.
I dream that my parents find me in my old bedroom, hiding in the closet. Time
doesn’t change the way the cool air from the garage floats in, leaving braille on my skin. Maybe I’ll write my siblings postcards and mail them to my childhood
home. Tonight, I dream of the brother lying in the parking lot, with a gun in his hand,
even though I never saw his body.
My eyes are waterfalls and my body, a crescent, parallel to the cold floor. The
sadness is mostly found for my youngest brother, who in 2nd grade went to school with two broken arms and a
broken orbital bone, causing his eye to swell up like a softball. He claimed he doesn’t know what
happened, the four concussions that year. Maybe he jumped from a swing set, maybe he was riding a bicycle
without his training wheels. The skin around my fingers is stretching so tight, it’s hard for me to
breathe.
I didn’t realize how hard it was to drown yourself Until I tried.
I count all the emails I’ve copy and pasted to therapists I have only seen
online, and their seventy or so accompanying rejections, the cancellations from the low-income clinic, and
the fresh scars that run up the inside of my leg like the Mississippi River. My legs are liquid- pouring my weight between them as I walk uphill carrying a broken
bicycle, after crashing it into a ditch, and breaking my kneecap into two. When I write books, I assume it’s a characterization of fiction, a life of a twin that was never born. When I write poetry, I know it’s real and tangible- like the stanzas are made of concrete, shape shifting into sentences before me. The poetry professor says that my writing is an orchestra. I want to believe her but
I can’t hear the music.
I remember my mother hitting me in the head so hard my pencil fell from my left
hand to my right, permanently. I still hold my pencil with all five fingers clenched around it: an
artist’s curling iron. In the living room, my poetry professor is putting together an aluminum
swing set, the kind that sat between my grandmother’s old house and her chain link fence.
The poetry professor says, it’s not what you
think. I dream that her house is lined with pink splenda packets instead of
wallpaper. The poetry professor visits me and I say, welcome to the mental
hospital. All the patients wear the light blue pajamas, each of us are little pieces of
sky. I’ve been reading Greek Myth, recently.
Slowly the sky is growing black, like we’re all lying underneath a vast
trampoline. I am thinking of the day I was wearing that hot pink tank top and we are lying on the
trampoline and under another one, sprinkled with stars. I am counting my breaths as you whisper
things in the porch light. Your fingers, tree trunks crawling up that pink top, sticky with the humidity of
a summer evening. I am worried that I didn’t know what to do at that moment. Lost in the relationship between father and whatever I was at the
time.
I start having flashbacks of things I can’t remember. The hospital bed turns into a trampoline. The hospital bed is submerged in a pool of water. I am still lost in my dreams. falling through the black ice. One day I would like to take you to a corn maze and maybe we would both get lost and then find each other again.
Finding myself looking out the window, the nurse tells me to take a step back and breathe. I dream that I am living in a group home in California. The kind for orphans who have escaped to the sea.
I didn’t realize how hard it was to drown yourself Until I tried.
At a wisdom shop, Natalie introduces me to Palo Santo, saying, don’t let a bad
apple ruin a good tree, while we’re driving down the interstate in a trembling minivan. When we reach New Orleans, I learn the twenty two cards of the Major Arcana, on a Wednesday afternoon instead of going to therapy. My coat pocket is full of cherry tomatoes. I am intuitive to the tides like the High Priestess. The moon is seated at my
feet. Walking in the November wind, I see images of paintings I have painted before, legs curling out from behind the stump of a tree.
I didn’t realize how hard it was to drown yourself until I tried.
In a documentary of a cult in Russia, everyone lives on a mountain in misogynistic
bliss, eating ice pops in two thousand white dresses on the Holiday of Great Fruits. When I get there-they
take my passport and hide it in a tree- too tall to reach. If I ever want to return home, I must first
become a virgin woman again- marry a man who is a carpenter- who will build a house in the Russian
countryside. When I grow old and gray and chop off my hair and then chop down that tree, to receive the
passport- the old photo describes my hair as a sort of brownish-blondish-reddish-green. In the photo, I wear a stranger’s face. Maybe
I wouldn’t be thinking about drowning if I lived somewhere so close to mountain air- that I never
had to think about breathing. The mother writes to say, I’m sorry
we didn’t protect you, I think it’s too late for that.
I am crying so hard, I am lying in the street-
reading
tarot kissing my fingertips as I hand out the tower card like candy- knowing that everyone’s world is falling down around me
as I try to
rebuild my own. I am afraid I lost my sanity in New Orleans.
Homelessness in November sent the cold radiating through me. The tall man at the youth homeless shelter, threatening to strangle me. I didn’t know what to say, so I never went back. I couldn’t breathe for two months. Instead, I wandered the streets alone, in the cold, without a coat. I slept on floors and couches and between the seats in my minivan. I walk to the library, sit on the floor, and read the first three pages of every book
on the shelves. I have always had wandering eyes and a lost mind. At sundown, I panic and try to find an open door somewhere warm enough.
In the morning, I fill the bathtub and let the sculpture ideas flow through me as I
lay underwater. I’m rewriting my own childhood in a notebook while sitting in a
bathtub. Perhaps it would be easier to write this if I were sitting in a bathtub filled with ice, like we
used to do after a long volleyball tournament. The ice turning our lips and muscles indigo, our minds
frozen on the past. Perhaps it would be easier to write this if I were actually lying in a pool
of water, allowing my body to sink to the bottom like a forgotten statue. My hands are carved
from marble. I am a method actor, armed with a typewriter. I travel to find the right words to say but they
never reach my lips.
I didn’t realize how hard it was to drown yourself until I tried.
While driving fast in a trembling minivan, I cry and hope the engine will stop before I hit the sea- head on- the waves welcoming my tires, my windshield, with invasive silence we might never arrive home from New Orleans, the minivan disappearing without a trace.
The first night that I fuck Sally Joe with the strap on was the same night I dust off The Doors record and placed it on the record
player. Jane feels dysphoric and goes to bed
counting
the months until she can get neutered. My body is pool of water
held in by
the vessel of my skin one wrong move and my insides cry out until I am dehydrated and deflated on the tile
floor. My words come out in puddles. I am afraid I do not make sense. I am afraid I do not
make sense. I am afraid that my words are circling around my lips instead of drooling out
of them. My bare feet pressed between the cracks of the floorboards. The cracks, pouring patches of light up between my legs, a futile spotlight.
The skin around my fingernails turns bright pink under the ceiling of stars.
Sally’s face,
aglow,
kissed by
the flame of our last gray lighter. The
doors to the motel down the street open
and shut all night long. I paint the sky
back
to a sky blue. Sky, what a nice name. The violet sky- like lavender wildberry ice cream. The same sky that reaches out from behind an elm tree. The same sky that I sit in front
of with my sketchbook
trying to
depict the notebook paper white
of winter
in
a single sentence. The sky is still reaching out from behind that elm tree- standing alone in a
desert’s sand made of crumbled brick. The crumbled brick pokes the basin of my feet. I am barefoot and
unapologetic, although I carry a pair of sandals in my backpack just in case someone’s eyes were to fall
upon my long, finger-like toes. My eyes drown in dreams that float before me a telepathic television screen.
The
black and white pixels are screaming out to me. I am afraid I can not rewind and change the past. I am afraid.
I start having flashbacks of things I don’t remember.
I should have realized how hard it was to drown yourself after holding my breath for eighteen years.
A method actor armed with a typewriter, a mini van trembling with an unforeseen anxiety, and a
mind frozen in the past like a telepathic television screen — Sky Dai is an award winning poet
and creative non-fiction essayist who primarily works as an oil painter. Inspired by how
traumatic stress causes the brain to collage fragments of memory, Sky Dai rewrites their
narrative within a surreal dimension where traumatic memories become less distressing. They
identify as a queer, disabled, rainbow person, who is part of a dissociative system with a
service-dog side kick, Cloud Monet. Sky Dai and Monet have taught meditative movement
classes at School of the Alternative, been an artist-in-residence at Bunker Projects, and received
a BFA in fine arts and creative writing at Columbus College of Art and Design. When they’re
not reading tarot, painting on large canvases inside a tiny bedroom, or working on an organic
farm and eco co-op in Rhode Island, they’re probably watching scooby doo reruns and trying to
solve some mysteries.
Pronouns: they/them/we/us/ours
