There is a before and after to our lives, one or the other, even as we know you are both the child and the grown, even as you know you are both the hero and the crone.
When I was 13 there was a sick girl with a wrongness, sick only in the abstract, and after 13 I am the after version, a sick girl with a category. Unwell, unstable, somehow still asked to be a person over a ghost. How do you make sense of world with no anchor? Unmoored, sinking, on fire, I am both the electricity and the drowning.
The first question I asked my doctor was, “can you cure me?”
He said, “we can make it manageable.”
Before and after, but no one talks of the terrible in-between, a kingdom of the healthy and the managed, and the land of the other: the body that betrays you. A mind that you cannot trust. A place only spoken of in whispers and behind your doors of medicine and repetition “it gets better (for some)”.
You become better. You get worse again. You reach land, you’re out to sea without noticing. How do you live as a dual citizen of the well and washing away? The mind is not such an obvious thing to see breaking. There is little language to convey how badly you want to be loved and how hard it is to be seen, and whether you can be both in the hellish in-between.
Before and after, living as the “and”, but when you look around the river Styx, never reaching shore or anchoring, there is an entire world unspoken of, many hushed in a question with no answer. How do you get better? The ferry man won’t take you home or take you any further. You must manage.
But maybe if we reach across there is a hand, stuck here, ready for you, and maybe if you keep reaching we’ll lace our fingers together, press our palms flat, and maybe we don’t make it out of the river Styx.
Maybe I just stay here with you.
