It is Winter again. I am not myself.
Cherry nausea tablets dissolve under my tongue every morning, ostensibly tricking my mind from dry-heaving, and sleeping requires triple the dosage of Trazodone I shove down my aggressive dog’s throat before a bath. Often I forget I have a name.
My first Winter I was seventeen and deranged. It was a depressive episode spanning over a year, and I spent it studying how millions of Russians survived freezing, starving, scavenging and rotting amidst German blockades and sub-zero temperatures during the three-year Siege of Leningrad. In photographs, stooped spines held upright xylophone torsos and bracketed faces. The millions who survived outrivaled the millions who died by remarkably few; I categorized the survivors who lived to see spring as 1) religious Zealots, 2) human Butchers, and 3) patient Recluses, inadvertently modeling my own survival tactics after theirs.
Faith that I’d recover in a day devolved into psychosis, and I endured my first Winter as the Zealot: one who survives off spiritual investment rather than productive action. The Zealot’s faith keeps her alive, but she’s never far from starvation. Hoping and praying did not fix me, nor did the shards of obsidian I neurotically caressed hoping my skin might absorb good fortune. At my worst, I spoke to Greek gods inside scented candles and waited for the flame to flicker just so.
That Winter ended with a mummified dog on the side of the road, flattened and bloodless in the ratty entrails of a blanket, fur matted together on a body so flat his skin resembled the texture of crumbly steel wool. He’d no blatant expression on his face, neither pain nor peace, to prove he ever lived at all. I upturned my lips in a half snarl and blinked away quick tears. Dumb dog, I spat as I walked on. They all watched you die. The Sunoco on the corner found me with a wet face and trembling bottom lip, and I turned back until I met the dog again. I’m sorry puppy. Every piece of roadkill was once very brave. The encounter killed my need for my pain to be seen knowing perception wouldn’t save me.
My second Winter correlated with its respective season, and I decided to become terrible in January. Nineteen in my first year of college, my refusal to publicly weaken myself left me an ideal candidate for loudly frightened peers with a sudden need for guidance, and all I could do was seethe. Their pain seemed trivial and opulent. I hated them like I hated the mummy-dog like I hated my own tenderness. After I beat vulnerability out of me, pseudo-intimacy renamed as love was given freely and carelessly to people who didn’t deserve it. Pity seemed their intention, and I was envious of anyone who could humiliate themselves for their pain to matter. Pity is spitting on something and calling it clean. I’ve never allowed myself to believe I was entitled to being known.
Chewing the dead ends of my hair like barley gave me something to do while I listed everything I hated. Alone in my dorm, I once swallowed a bowl of buttered noodles without chewing just to see if I could. I regurgitated perfectly-intact pasta, and I could’ve eaten it over again if I really wanted to. My dog eats his vomit in the backyard and bites to draw blood.
As an unspoken rule, one must exhaust every possible source of nutrient before humans in a survival scenario. They ate cigarettes and drank leather soup in Leningrad before turning to their neighbor. I sublimated my fury and desires to wound and dissect by hitting wood until my knuckles bled. Habitually I attended parties as a plus one and left without saying goodbye knowing my absence wouldn’t be noticed, justifying my anger. I reserved space in every story for a stand-in character from my life to get their “pudgy face beaten until it looked like vanilla pudding, or even cottage cheese.” Half moon stigmata decorated my palms. Cruelty was the only way I could guarantee any justice for myself.
The human Butchers in Leningrad often evaded guilt because circumstances forced their hand and they were seldom responsible for the death of their meat. And not every survivor could be a Butcher; Some were merely born and made for the uniquely terrible responsibility of dismemberment. I am uncertain if the person I became that Winter was created or provoked.
My Butcher’s art was scrutiny, and I never exited a state of silent rumination, feeding off my own psychoanalyses of myself and others. A meticulous regiment of furious contemplation kept me alive. Starvation is a black hole—the stomach shrivels and turns itself inside out until your own blood stings like poison. I’d felt that black hole daily, almost swam inside it in the early days when I indulged in trips to the lake. I surveyed each one to decide which I ought to drown myself in. Water, fresh or salt, filling the lungs is closer to burning.
Habitually writing reduced my visits to the lakes; Manipulating words did not differ from ripping membranes off meat like peeling a bandaid. Writing is an act of butchering, not invention. Everything I write is an explanation or an attempt to be seen without having to ask for it. It’s the compulsive need to understand and be understood.
My present Winter arrived with summer. I vomit behind the restaurant dumpster as the air sizzles from radioactive temperatures, and heat lightning storms sandwich morning and night, leaving midday painted by trailerpark fog. I serve a large, sweaty man and hallucinate his shirt says FAT ELVIS. He smells of death, the same odor that sacks of roadkill flesh exude to invite the maggots over to play. Armadillo corpses serve as mile markers during my neighborhood walks. Mom won’t stop the car when I beg to bury the doe along old Route 17. I consider sawing off my legs around 4am when sleeping pills fail me. This is the only time in my life poems make sense to me, and any love in my body grows like an infectious fungus. I’d like to sit someone I love down and count every single mole on their body and tell them I will accomplish so much someday, just so I can watch them nod in agreement.
If faith defined the first Winter and rage the second, this third Winter is shame. Stubborn silence eclipses its violent withering of my selfhood; Perception not only cheapens pain, but falls short of translation. A disease of the mind is failed by clinical explanations. This is total decomposition of the spirit. Have you smelled death? Have you felt rot?
The Recluse isolates to protect not only themselves, but others. My disease does not dress me in tears and open wounds, but appears as a foamy wall of plaque and poison breath expelling hate. I bite because my shame is the starving stomach collapsing in on itself, and I am viciously envious to see anyone standing before me healthy, tender, and alive. Let me remind you I’m still here. Don’t you smell it?
Silence can be merciful. The Recluse leaves no opportunity for rot to seep the way the Butcher might’ve. A killing dog bows its head in shame after salivating during a hunt. The Butcher shields his eyes to slice the carotid while his stomach roars in pleasure. His guilt doesn’t make him any less full. I cannot undo any harm done for the sake of survival. The Recluse accepts Winter will always come again; It’s death with dignity to keep my ugliness hidden away.
Leslie Jamison’s post-wounded woman is blasé and desires nothing, she is an agnostic monk with no faith in anything except her own prognoses. My suffering does not make me interesting or more deserving . “These women are aware that woundedness is overdone and overrated,” Jamison writes. “Pain is everywhere and nowhere.”
Hypothermia begins with a chill to the epidermis, piercing through the skin and infecting your bones with an unscratchable bitterness. The heart slows and organs follow suit. The minutes before death are kind; The dying are given a final gift of stupid, euphoric warmth.
The babysitter jumped off the bridge in April. In the three hours it took to fish her body from the river, her parents received bouquets of flowers she sent ahead of her suicide. I was so young and grotesque when I knew her as the cheerleader and the babysitter and God. The split second before she died on impact the babysitter didn’t feel the sting of icy water at all, but was ignited with the warm volts that were every bone in her body shattering. She succumbed to her Winter as mine began. In my third Winter, I feel nothing at all and avoid looking in the mirror. The water is warm.
I whisper Leningrad Leningrad Leningrad like a prayer to pass the time. Spring will come again.
