09.28.01

It was a relief, really, to talk about it. She had spent so many years feeling it claw at her throat, opening her mouth only to find herself choking on words that she could not say, burping up undigested bits of silence that floated out and hung around her ears.

It, that formless, nameless thing that continually flitted around the corners of her consciousness, refusing to allow her to catch itÑexcept for at night, when, solid, it would pin her down until she begged to escape, woke tangled in sweaty sheets with unfamiliar syllables lodged in her throat.

It hadn't always been there, that much she knew. She remembered the days when it hadn't clogged her airways, blocking all words except these: "I'm fine."

And those were the only words she uttered for seven years, the seven years during which she had never been less "fine"Ñbut each time she opened her mouth, her lips would open and close soundlessly, goldfish style, until finally, the words "I'm fine" floated out like two bright bubbles, daring someone to pop them.

She wasn't fine, she wasn't even a human being anymore, she could have been a goldfish swimming in frenzied circles around a glass bowl, burping up "I'm fine" at seemingly random intervals. She stopped going to therapy (everything was, after all, just fine) and resigned herself to being consumed by flitting shadows and jello-like silence and lumbering around gracelessly, encumbered by the sandbag ankle weights It had strapped upon her.

Until, after two weeks of unreturned phone calls, her therapist showed up unannounced at her door. She opened it without thinking, and when she saw him, her lips opened and closed silently and from the depths of her ocean of silence, she retrieved the two words, like precious golden baubles, and set them squarely across her nose. "I'm fine."

She had been eating fish food out of a tupperware container with chopsticks. She would eat the orange flakes first (she imagined they tasted like carrots), then the green ones (peas), and then the tawny golden ones (grain of some sort?), chewing each one precisely ten times before she swallowed. She was feeling rather nautical that day, and was wearing flippers and a snorkeling mask. Earlier she had hypothesized that they would help her navigate the molasses underwater that had become her life. She had not planned on seeing her therapist, or any other human beings.

He looked at her rather strangely. "No," he said. "You're not fine at all. May I come in?"

She nodded, and pushed her snorkeling mask up onto her forehead.

***

xoxo,

moonbird

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