The Architect of My Own Cross

I was today years old when I learned SSRIs can make your period super heavy and painfully biblical.

Perhaps you’re wondering how.

Well—after almost two years completely antidepressant-free, I started to suspect I might be a little down. Cue evidence that now feels underwhelming: I was bored at my new job (too much free time is its own kind of problem), frustrated that the economy and Trump have more say in our ability to move than our effort or finances, and we were crawling out of a long, dark winter.

In hindsight, maybe that wasn’t chemical. Maybe that was just… life.

Addendum: at one point, I also worried I was masturbating too much—which, historically, antidepressants solve by turning me into an asexual eunuch in a chastity belt.

So I started 12.5 mg of Zoloft. A quick Google will tell you that’s barely a dose. My body will tell you it’s still plenty.

I used to take 50 mg daily for years—seven, to be exact—then 100 for a year, then 150 for a few months before I finally tapered off two years ago. Every increase made me feel worse, not better. And every time I said that, the solution was the same: more, or different, or both.

Adjust. Increase. Repeat.

Anyway. It turns out there are things worse than being bored with your life, listless at work, and vaguely sad when it’s pitch black at 4 p.m.

For example: feeling like someone is repeatedly driving a knife straight into your gut until all you can do is cry and—literally, yes literally—throw up from the pain.

Did you know orgasms can lessen menstrual cramps? That regular orgasms can make periods lighter, easier, more manageable?

Three months ago, I was writing about how light mine had gotten. Maybe it was the masturbation, I thought.

Then my brain, in all its wisdom, decided: no, actually, you’re unwell. You just have too much time on your hands to fuck off. Literally. 

So I took a pill that killed the desire to do the one thing that helped—

and replaced it with something that makes it worse.

I am the architect of my own stupid cross to bear.

I went into the woods, picked the tree, hacked it down myself. Dragged it home. Carved the cross. Hammered in the nails.

And now here I am, two oxycodone and a swig of Pepto-Bismol deep, while my husband paces and asks if we should go to the ER, and I’m like, “It’s natural—what the fuck are they going to do?”

Watch me, the martyr, refusing even a sip of water like it means something.

But here’s the thing—

I haven’t cried at a single commercial for kids with AIDS.

So.

You know the SSRI is working.

Reverence.

They shot three men and a woman into space,

and they went farther than anyone before,

snaking around the dark side of the moon.

And they named a crater after one of the guy’s

dead wife—Carroll.

It’s sweet.

It’s sweet.

I know it’s sweet,

because that’s what is said every time

it’s brought up on the news—heartwarming,

sweet, inspirational, and other synonyms.

But all I think of is how craters are made:

violence. Hunks of rock hurling through space,

smashing into the surface—not enough to burst

out of orbit, but enough to embed in the surface,

to forever scar and mar the back of the moon,

the side it hides from the earth, like keeping something

behind your back so your mom can’t see.

And that was the legacy of a dead spouse.

Puerarchy

I turn to my blog because I know better than to turn to you with my unfiltered, raw thoughts—thoughts I probably won’t even believe or agree with tomorrow.

One day.

At 74, you get one day to throw a pity party, watch Charlton Heston movies back to back, and wander around the house quiet, sullen, and not eating. I concede that. But the pity party has to end tomorrow.

You know, if I tried to throw a tantrum all day, you’d read me the riot act. You’d tell me to act like an adult. Bitch, I’m half your age—take your own advice. I’m too nice.

Everyone who has ever said they were in love with me eventually treated me as a burden. I’m so sick of it, because you are actually getting the best version of me anyone has ever seen. I hold down a job. I don’t fight you. I don’t demean you. I do laundry and change the sheets every week. I make dinner almost every night. I clean. Yet it is still not enough. It has never been enough. It wasn’t enough for my first husband, who I did even less for, and it isn’t enough for you.

I’m so sick of the double standard—how the men in my life get to be ~ depressed ~ get to wallow in their own shit for a day or two or a week or a month, but me? Oh, jeez, if I shed one tear over something hurtful said to me, it must be my time of the month, because God forbid I have a stupid, measly, fucking human emotion like hurt.

You don’t love me like you used to. Then again, I don’t love you like I used to. I don’t know which is worse: people who give up, or people who won’t.

Oh, by tomorrow, after I’ve written it all out, taken a shower, slept, and started a new day, I’ll be all sympathetic. We all get down. We all are flawed. We are all human. We are all trying our best.

I probably will apologize again, even though I apologized multiple times today, and for what exactly, I couldn’t say.

Tomorrow morning, you’ll feel foolish. You’ll see how you went to bed at 4:30 p.m. and threw away a whole day we could have had together. You’ll see how I made dog food, did laundry, changed the sheets, cleaned the kitchen floor, and watered the garden while you were feeling sorry for yourself—for what?

And I’ll be grateful you made me mad enough to get that much done in one day.

It will continue—some grand pattern, some horrific tango—in which you feel more inferior and, each time you show it, I prove it.

Tomorrow, I will see you pilling the cat and crooning sweet things to her, and I’ll remember why I stay. I will think one bad day is nothing against months of good ones. I will realize that, deep down inside, I wanted to be a little shit all day too—I just channeled it into a shitty blog and stupid chores. I’ll see you sleeping with the innocent face of a baby. I’ll recall that you were not even eighteen when they handed you a gun and made you kill someone. I’ll catch the flicker of a boyish grin as you describe a motorcycle you once owned. Use the garage door I broke and you fixed.

I’ll somehow find a way. And so will you.

In Loving Mockery

If I cannot make fun of a dead man, then who, exactly, is left for me to mock?

If ridicule is reserved only for the living, for the warm and oxygenated, then what are we to do with those who once laughed, once sulked, once slammed cabinet doors, cried in on the shower floor, and said ridiculous things in the kitchen at 8:14 p.m.?

What special immunity does death confer, that life did not?

Perhaps you worry he will haunt me for it.

I can only hope.

There are days I think I would welcome a haunting—some small, petulant disturbance in the night, some evidence that he is still, in some infuriating way, available to me. A door shifting on its hinge. A lamp flickering. The sudden feeling of being watched while I say, to an empty room, You always were a drama queen.

If I am honest, there are moments I miss him in precisely this register.

Not in the grand, cinematic ways grief is supposed to announce itself, but in the stupid, ordinary way of missing his annoying habits, his predictable indignations, the particular shape his face took when he was offended by something that was, almost always, true.

I miss making fun of him to his face.

I miss making fun of him behind his back.

I miss the way he would pretend not to enjoy the attention of being known that well.

And if your objection is that the dead cannot defend themselves, I would gently remind you that he was never especially gifted at defense in the first place.

Besides, what is haunting if not rebuttal?

What is a ghost, if not someone still refusing to let the conversation end?

Because this, too, is how love works.

Not only in tenderness, not only in reverence, but in teasing, in laughter, in the exquisite familiarity of knowing exactly where another person is soft. We learn each other’s weak seams, the little unguarded places beneath the armor, and—if we are lucky, if we are close enough—we press there gently, sometimes not so gently, just to feel the proof of life beneath it.

To love someone is, in part, to know where they are ridiculous.

To love someone well is to know it with and without cruelty.

To be loved well is to be seen in your absurdity and missed anyway.

So why should death make saints of the people who never were?

Why should it sand down all their foolish edges,

bleach them into solemnity,

make them too sacred to laugh at?

If I loved him in life by joking with him, by needling him, by rolling my eyes and laughing at the exact same flaws I once secretly found endearing, then perhaps the truest way to keep loving him now is not silence, but continuation.

Not canonization.

Not polite grief.

Not the false dignity of pretending he was better, smoother, kinder, or less ridiculous than he really was.

No—let me love him as he was.

Annoying. Stupid. Defenseless. Awful. Rude. Selfish. Pouting.
A man I would marry and divorce, and possibly be stupid enough to do it again.

Shouldn’t death, if it means anything at all, at least permit us the mercy of honesty?

And shouldn’t love, if it is real, survive even that?

Back to Our Regularly Scheduled Programming

Buddha had three temptations under the Bo tree.
Satan tried to entice Jesus in the wilderness.
And we, modern people, have the false shine of Instagram.

A variable buffet perfectly curated by artificial intelligence,
which I’m beginning to think might actually be smarter than us—
or at least smarter than me,
who did not know these desires were in me
until someone, partnered, sponsored,
showed me what I was missing.

And somehow I am seeing thousands of people a day
without ever leaving my house, and they are all different,
yet not. They all greet me—“Hi guys!” “Hey turnips!”—
or whatever pet name they’ve given us,
we the lonely, we are together and apart,
while they all wear the same cheeks
and lips and makeup
and hair.

Perhaps, I tell you—just between us—
for months I have been wondering
if maybe any of it is real,
or maybe all of it is, maybe this
motioning, motioning, motioning
all around me
is what real looks like now.

Ugh, shut the fuck up.
Real, real, real—
relative.

I am listening to two boys argue over how real
pro wrestling is. We are in grade school.
Those are the same people now,
only debating A.I.

I’m so fucking tired.
I do not want to keep pretending
this is a meaningful distinction.

Not Like in Diagrams

Don't share this with the rest of the class—
I woke up five minutes before my alarm,
envisioned the uterus—not like in books,
not like in diagrams with the ovaries raised
like victorious, celebrating arms, but how
it really is: tucked and balled in the guts,
like a scared child hiding in a closet.
Then a cat started chewing on my hair.

She doesn’t normally sleep with us, but
an X-ray showed a moth-eaten jaw—
bone infection or cancer, too much
for her little body to say for sure.
So we give her a strong antibiotic
while she fights us, then invite her
into the bedroom like a Make-A-Wish kid.

We lavish more on her because she might
be dying. Maybe that’s all any of us are—
curled into tight balls, denying ourselves
what we want until we’re lined up on death row,
finally requesting the last meal
we’ve been craving
most of our lives.

Masculinity in 1980 Film

In Superman II, with Christopher Reeve—
you know, the one where Lois Lane
finally figures out Clark Kent is Superman
and he takes her to his Fortress of Solitude,
where they fuck in the largest metallic
beanbag chair ever committed to film—but first,
he gives up his powers,
partly so he won’t split her in half,
partly because she’s already made it clear
no woman is meant to love a man in halves.

The second he becomes ordinary,
he gets his face beaten in at an Alaskan diner
while General Zod walks into the White House
like management.
The world immediately goes to hell
because one guy wanted, for once,
to come as himself.
That’s the plot.

So of course he gets the powers back.
Of course he saves the country.
Of course he flies the flag back to the President
like the empire’s house pet.
And of course he wipes Lois Lane clean—
memory, consequence, evidence, all of it.
That’s the ending. That’s the lesson.

Never let them see you powerless.
Not for love, not for sex, not for honesty,
not even for a night.
The second you stop being invincible,
your face gets smashed in,
the country panics,
and the woman has to be punished
for having known you at all.