It’s a dark place, like all pits, except armpits probably, but it also smells like those do, because fuck man,
I’ve been running from my mother’s rage and I am drenched with sweat
and if I just listen to her, twist her words around back at her in a way that shapes itself like a cup, it can
hold her. I’m good at that, I’m her mother too, I can hold her when she suffers in pain but there’s really
not enough of me to do that. So when she overflows from my cup she drips down there, into that pit,
and lord, she’s heavy, and in I go too, dropped like a Starbuck’s latte she bought me on State Road 37,
going into deep detail about the problems with her marriage to my father.
I go there whenever I fail, when I can’t make her feel good, when I say the wrong thing trying to get her
to do something right, and I don’t disguise it enough, lord she sees it, she sees that I don’t find her
perfect, and she yanks me down. Down there, she hates herself, and she hates me too, and my brothers,
my sister, my dad, the entire world, it all hates her and she hates it back and there, it’s safe. When we’re
there, I can hate myself too. We can all scream into the void together, squish the tar between our toes,
feel the hot hair climb up the back of our necks because it’s so humid that it feels like a bath, one we can
stew in, but we’re never clean. We have to dilute it, we need to find someone fresh to pull down here—
Quick, grab the neighbor, you haven’t told her about this new victimhood yet. Pour a glass of black for
her. When her face falls and her blood pressure rises, you can stab a metal straw in it, because she has
electrolytes like a coconut. Now you are important, now she holds you, until she walks away anyway,
and you realize, you realize, you realize that she still doesn’t love you.
So we distrust fall back down, back into the pit. Maybe if we take some pills it will feel cozy and warm.
I have lived here for many years. I’ve carved my name in the walls. Cecily was here, 2007, it says. I
jumped in on my own finally when I swallowed all of my mother’s blood pressure pills. I stopped
resisting, because it’s easier to just let the mud rise to my eyes. If it fills my throat, then I don’t have to
speak. I can just bubble up now and then.
I want to leave, but I have to apply for work release from this prison. I can only do that if I would like
to assume, once again, the form of a cup. That’s the only way we can survive out of here. Form a cup to
hold them. So many eyes I make contact with are foreign. The light in them confuses me. I don’t
understand social cues anyway, but I do understand the spark of black in the eyes of someone who needs
holding. I lay myself down— I know how to do this part. My mother taught me. I create a
comfortable, squishy, happy reality and together we keep ourselves floating. I keep you floating. It’s
my job. I’m a Codependent Consultant, senior level, and I think they’re going to promote me to VP
soon, but that’s only if they recognize my value and fuck, spoiler alert: they never will.
The months sobbed into years, and the years screamed into a decade, and I only learned one thing for
certain: one way or another, my cup always breaks.
If I have no one to hold, then that means I have to hold myself, and unfortunately where I am concerned
I am more of a sieve. I drip through each crosshatch, slowly trudging, flowing, back into the black.
Alone, there I remain.
On the patio of my single-mother escape, nursing a gin and tonic, I finally understood that holding
myself was not something I was equipped to do. So I put my drink down, went outside, and I demanded
that the world do it for me.
I hit the mats at jiujitsu. They were happy to oblige. Not only did they hold me, they choked me, they
threw me. I threw them right back. No cups here, just smashed glass, laughter, asthma attacks, sweat in
my hair, and the kind of pain that goes away with ibuprofen.
I walked to the Platte River, and I demanded she continue to flow past me, but now on my command.
She must stay beautiful, but right now, she’s beautiful for me. And I let her hold me. I drift away and
bounce over rocks and sparkle when the clouds dissolve.
I drive through the mountains, and god, they look exactly like the highs and the lows that live inside my
body, don’t they? I climb them with my eyes, and they hold my weight. I climb them with my legs,
sometimes, a little, but I’m just a fucking hobbit. I search and index every little slip of icy stream
because I think altitude and mountain water are the only things that can wipe it all away, and if I need to
find one, then I know where they are. Cutting through rock means that it’s effective against blackness
too, right?
Here’s the thing. I know that the insides of my lungs, my stomach, my throat - they are all still coated
with tar. We lived in the pit too long. It’s thick and it chokes my breath away still on a night when the
world thins and I am left with myself who is black and myself, the sieve. But then, I have taught myself
to be still, and let the swinging door of my struggling breaths hold me then. If the universe can enter
and exit my lungs, then I can enter and exit the universe. Maybe I can be held by the stars, by the wind,
by the cold. I don’t want a sweater. I don’t need to go inside. I can stay here and wait for the sun to
come up, because this is a holy kind of darkness.
I meditate and the metta flows down my throat like ice water. I am a coal mine. I am ash and have been
plundered. They scraped me out and left behind their garbage, but I am a governor, I am a petition, I am
a clean water act. I am a regulatory body that has declared that I am protected land, because within me
there are ribbons of gold telluride. I am steam rising from the sulfur hot springs of Colorado. I am
stretching and moving and running and pumping my heart, moving the blood in my veins. My life is a
prayer to the gods of pain that I am not a victim, you are not a victim, we are not victims. We are
runners, climbers, worshippers of the sun.
And you — you are safe from me, my love.