Changing spaces
06 February 2012 09:42 AM Categories: Writing prompts
One stall, of course, with a toilet that was constantly clogged, that you hovered over while letting loose, closing your eyes in relief. If you were lucky, your friend came up with you and could guard the door, which never latched properly, or perhaps you would make friends with someone behind you in line who would be your sentry or maybe you were so drunk that it didn’t matter anymore. You were so drunk you might sit on that stained toilet seat.
Yes, (dc) space was the place. You ran into Peter there once, from Chestertown to Silver Spring to Washington, DC, a bike messenger in the city (now a cross country ski pro in a faraway place). You met the bassist from the Thangs there, leaned on him after their set and danced to the twanging sounds of the band that played after them. That relationship is truly blurry. You don't remember how it ended, you were drinking so much and everything was so dark and maybe you were depressed even then, or dealing with delayed grief and self-hatred. Maybe that was just how it had to be with you, isolated, wanting, covering everything over with alcohol and ill-advised sex.
One of salient questions in that first visit with the new therapist two weeks ago: has this pattern of isolation been in place for a long time? You thought, remembered cold empty rooms and the strangely barren college years (yes, you had friends, close ones, but they didn't know everything; you didn't reach out), the oddness of graduate school, the times in the early years when you almost broke down from grief and loneliness, from the feeling of having no footing, nothing within you or without to hold onto. Even in the busiest years in DC, you so stable and professional, with the job and the occasional dinners out with friends: yes. This has been you since fifteen, keeping close, holding yourself safe.
Yes. dc space, where your roommates left you one night, you drunk and belligerent and insisting you were fine. On the prowl, in search of something, someone. The boys, the men, the lying down and standing up, the going along. The desperate searching. The turning away from that life, an act of will and of choice, to something flattened and grey but safe. The way you've kept it grey, as if that were the only option.
You are learning that it doesn't have to be that way. You are not destined for this aloneness. You have a shining core.You are true and real, damaged as we all are, but not cruel. You deserve to be in the world.
So you write about it to understand it, you capture the past and see the rambling narrative, to let it go, let it loose. Of course these feelings are not all of you. But you will not deny them, for denial gives them strength. You write and you feel it and give yourself footing before you turn to something else.
Image of a toilet at dc space by Dot and Charles Steck.
From a photo prompt that has nothing to do with this. For some reason, the stairs and bathroom of dc space came to mind last night, that long-gone world. Today dc space is a Starbucks, all light-filled and caffeinated.
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