Here Comes A Feeling

Here comes a feeling you thought you'd forgotten
— Vampire Weekend, "Horchata"

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For a long while I’ve had a dream (literal and waking) of falling off a bicycle and scraping my knee. Skinning my knee, really, like we said as children. Don’t you remember that? When the blood would pool and scab over, the knee of course being the most inconvenient place to break skin. Wherever you’d walk for the next week, you’d remember the pain and feel it again — duller but still fundamentally connected to the visceral memory of tissue leaving itself. Perhaps, like me, you had a rather disgusting habit of picking the flecks of dried blood off your body, cracking the chrysalis to get to the scar. I liked the scar almost as much as the scrape; the scrape put me in my body, and the scar reminded me that there was a time my spirit felt so one with my physical self that I had cried out in pain witnessing it come apart in just a centimeter.

These days I feel a lot of disconnected pain. It’s crude to say, but I’ve often felt jealous of people who experience bouts of intense sadness, those who know a feeling so heavy it could press you into bed for weeks. I beg feeling to come to me like it’s an alley cat; I spend a lot of time beckoning. I’ve never stayed in bed for weeks or known a sadness that wanted to surround me longer than a crisis period. Sometimes I have dreams involving caves or labyrinths, and my feeling hides there and screams at me, wondering where I’ve run off to. We must be chasing each other. Or hiding from each other.

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If a house burns down, it's gone, but the place—the picture of it—stays, and not just in my rememory, but out there, in the world. What I remember is a picture floating around out there outside my head. I mean, even if I don't think it, even if I die, the picture of what I did, or knew, or saw is still out there. Right in the place where it happened.
— Toni Morrison, Beloved

I’ve been running into the picture of that place in my rememory a lot recently. Clinically, the experience is “retraumatization,” but when I’m unwell in a clinical sense, my mind can not often comprehend clinical language. Instead, I read this Toni Morrison passage over and over in my mind, the one that was read aloud to me in a high school literature class. My memory is shot like a backyard beer can from, among other things, backyard beer cans and teenage weed-smoking and, yes, probably trauma. But the most amazing thing happened with that passage; I remembered every word of it immediately after I heard it the first time. On the thirty-sixth show of my headlining tour, I forgot a line in a song I had written myself and sung hundreds of times over. But this passage has never left me, not since the first time it found me.

Whether we are hiding or chasing, my feeling and I have begun to meet in whatever the opposite of a clandestine place is. A few weeks ago, I experienced something that left me in a detached state for days. My best friend could hardly recognize my voice on the phone — it was alien, robotic. I had witnessed the house in my mind burn down in front of me, but when I looked back, I might as well have been recalling a memory of watching a goldfish circle a bowl.

In this time, I made breakfast for people and scheduled activities and kept the small family of my life afloat. When I sat down in the nosebleeds of Dodger Stadium a few days later, it was the first time I had been idle since it happened. I still feel bad for disrupting my fellow Americans with my hysteric sobs, excusing myself loudly, flapping my hands away from my face, leaning over the balcony where I saw thousands of tiny plastic Dodger cap cups being loaded into the stadium, which made me cry harder because of all the trash.

I know that the hammer comes down, but I can’t watch it ratchet up. Sometimes it feels like everyone in my life can see the hammer above my head, getting higher by the day, wincing in proactive pain, asking me — are you sure you don’t want to take a nap? Why don’t you lay down. Try a meditation? Call your therapist. All the while I’m living regularly and calling my accountant, they’re standing in the square waiting to watch my brains hit the pavement.

I don’t cut myself anymore which is why I’m begging the universe to let me scrape my knee. Today, my boyfriend said something entirely innocuous to me in the bagel shop and I rose with a fire, tears suddenly in my eyes, and said “that really pissed me off.” He looked at me with a fair bit of terror, given that anger is not an emotion I experience or express regularly, especially not at him. I couldn’t explain to him that the hammer had fallen and it wasn’t his fault, he was only watching, and so I walked briskly out of the shop and leaned against a tree, trying to find a convenient place to shield myself from a three-dimensional city. He was only watching as I pressed my cheek against the grain of the tree, my tears spilling over, a mosquito priming my upper left eyelid for a bite.

Here comes a feeling you thought you’d forgotten, I sing the line to myself as I walk home so that I don’t come apart on the sidewalk. One time, a male masseuse massaged my butt as I tried to run through all the state capitals until my resounding feeling was not of violation but embarrassment for my geographical ineptitude. Here comes a feeling you thought you’d forgotten, I fly briskly past a mother pushing a stroller (incredibly cruel sight to me, particularly, on this day). Here comes a feeling, lighting a cigarette on my front stairs. Here comes a feeling. Sometimes I just need a reminder.

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I don’t cut myself anymore which is why I spent $200 at the art supply store. Kate came over, which is a thing they can do all the time now because we live in the same city. The long thread between us has survived many things, and it’s amazing to be able to reel it in and call them up any time.

We made a mess of the place, which is fine because the place contains nothing. My house in my mind burns down and I move into an apartment thousands of miles away and I sit on the floor with Kate (they let me play the Wilco album I am chemically addicted to) and we get out all the materials. They’re working on compiling a zine and I’m working on drawing a huge fucking portal. I stare into the void I made, maniacally scrubbing at the pastel circles with paper towels to soften the edges. We bat the cats away from our projects, but they lie down right in the middle anyway. Something is always lying down right in the middle anyway, so this is a lesson I take in stride.

All my lies are always wishes
I know I would die if I could come back new
— "Ashes of American Flags" by Wilco