Full Grown By Leslie Cairns

Buffy May CC



Full Grown
​

     Up the airways,
    & you sit in a chair. You may or may not float. I’ve tried every SSRI, until it’s a lullaby no one ever designed to be one. Zoloft, Lithium, Prozac,    Abilify–
     Don’t they almost sound like canoes dipping their paddles into sand?
     Zyprexa sounds almost like a beautiful girl’s name.
     Availity sounds like a hotel chain, with the pretty towels attached to the handlebars, the ones people wash their faces with every night.

                                                                                                                                          ***
     Sniff like you’re crying, she says, as I inhale the stimulant up my nose. Spravato, for depression. Even my boyfriend makes fun of me for taking it, as a mom/friend/worker/now non-worker. This treatment made you lose everything, he says, on his more cynical days.

      What other choice did I have? One day at work I grabbed a handle to a door on the 20th floor. Luckily since it was abandoned, it was also locked (sounds about right for how I feel too). Locked up tight. No one getting in, unless you act the same with me everytime. No disappointments, no flat notes. & we know – we know– that only really works with ghosts.

      I don’t know anyone on this, I say. Lean back somehow in the soft chair as she puts a blanket around me, like I’m a sick child. Maybe I’m half of that, maybe I am. Half the days with clinical depression, I spend my time thinking I’m making it up. The sorrow, the flat notes, the way I can sit on a bed for ten hours and crave more (not realizing it’s weird until I go on my monthly coffee date with a friend, something I force myself to do–)

My nightmares, once I get past the worries of my baby kid getting sick or ill, or anything that can affect him – ever – in the encyclopedia of the scary world..

     My next worry is that he’ll grow up and realize mommy has anxiety–

     Mom has depression. Mom stays in PJs too long but doesn’t tell her friends. She can comb her hair and go out to lunch when she has to, but her face makes that frown that Winnie the Pooh’s did, from that childhood movie, when he ate too much  honey. As if he’s going to get stuck there. That’s how she looks, he’ll say, to his future therapist. And it will be a cycle of weird mothers and too-late fixes and crumbled tissues & so

   That’s why I come here. Taking medicinal amounts of ketamine for suicidal ideation and depression & hoping – just hoping – the monitoring for two hours once a week
      Will reveal something.

      There’s been good days, there’s been bad. Much like life, except it’s my sessions with my psychiatrist. A world within a world.
     A snowglobe? The nurse coordinator says. Crinkling her nose a tiny bit. I must be speaking out loud. I used to be a graduate student in English. I knew then that it was a useless degree, but I pursued onward, because I got two years of a reprieve. You think grad school & might think loans and papers. A professor got a way to get me a scholarship– a free way to be there– and teaching besides, so I got paid. It was in a familiar state in a familiar city, a college town I overstayed for two more years. To get my feet wet in blizzards, to reflect on my college friends
      Who had already left. To have time to read in dorm rooms and to learn about Siegfried Sassoon and other WWI poets. Now they had something to be depressed about. & now we honor them with poppies, as if they were in favor of remembering all of it. & yet we never asked them, my professor would retort. Holding a worn copy of poetry in his arms, in a tiny town, about to get a blizzard. & in that moment, I felt intellectual. I felt like I could move mountains and yet stand still. I felt like my brain was working through learning and trauma and graduate papers of 20 pages. I felt like I was propelling to something, although getting a way to stay cozy in a small part of Western NY that most forget about– 
      There were trains there, ambling slowly and cooing in smokestacks. You could rely on hearing them, as they drove & slunk away, through the night.
                                                                                                                                   ***
    My psychiatrist is one of the good ones. I’ve cried in front of her, asked for groceries. You name the thing that makes you lose your footing, and I’ve done it. She’s put a wet washcloth in my palms because the ketamine made me think I was at work (a job I ended up losing). It’s funny how my belly swelled and my mind motivated me to move from NY to mountains, yet I curl up in a ball in her office and cry. She was a CNA to psychiatrist. Four kids and still calm. She’s smarter than almost anyone I’ve ever met, her voice sounds like the way I picture lilypads on lakes sounding– and I’m not being gushy, there’s just truth to it. A sort of familiarity in recognizing that there ae people (my professor with the worn book, here where she is rumpling down her skirt), there are people still worth meeting.

      How, in such a bustling and fumbling city, one I got lost in like a fly in amber– 
      Did I find a kind doctor, a mile from my house?
                                                                                                                                    ***
     The ketamine is hitting me now, and she’s staring at me calmly, biding her time. Checks my vitals in three minutes. There’s a routine to dissociation if you find your way to it. If you tell a professional they’ve somehow saved your life (or, at least, bided time), I know they look at you sideways. People don’t talk about this in the real world. Or, you’re latching on to attachments that won’t last, or a book is going to tell you that something is wrong with you–
       Or, my mom’s voice in the void black background, saying, you don’t just say that.
                                                                                                                                    ***
      Where are you right now? She says/I say/the whirring of the white noise machine says. It’s hard to tell which. I place my hand upon my head and wait to go wherever I’m told.
       No more masking. No more going to brunch dates with friends that make me want to cry as soon as I get home, for the fear of spending money on runny eggs, for the lost time with my son, for feeling like I’m not who I used to be to the outside anymore.

      All of a sudden, my breath hitches.  I’m not thinking about my friend Willow with her straight blonde hair, or the loud friend of mine who used to pull me close when I cried.

       I’m not at work, and I’m no longer in the room. 


       I’m in my childhood backyard. The place I never leave because I never got to say goodbye to it. There’s something poetic hidden behind the ranch styled nostalgia of that small town house.
      Picture it– we had neighbors, and my Dad built an outdoor goldfish pond, the same kind he built at my grandma’s house. We started good, right? I say to myself. We had fish ponds and parties and kickball matches with our friends. One time we got the fish out too late. The frost came early. My dad let me know they would all be gone.
      Come spring, two fish were at the bottom, swollen and huge, but breathing. They had eaten all the babies. A devastating thing, except I was still mortified but excited to see them, fins twisting around. How did they live that long in muck? How did I not know they were down there, all winter long?
       & somewhere along the way, I was a pooh stick left in a raging tide instead of a lonely river. Falling upside down and backwards–

       Or, maybe, you’re just a failure, a tigress says in the background.

      The yard had & held my favorite part: huge pine trees, three, that decorated the perimeter around my house. One day I’ll use those trees to run away – barefoot – from my mother with a knife.

      But that’s not where I am right now. I got poison ivy on my foot that night, my mom screaming into the night, clutching a half-broken wine stem glass-

       Where are you? Her soprano voice turned into 
       Growling, as I ran away. I remember that night, thinking I was glad I had done track in high school. The cul-de-sac had thirteen houses or so & I pretended I was holding a baton for a relay race with Betsy (the girl who got pulled over drunk after high school, and panicked and ran across the four lanes of highway– and got hit and died. Our captain– gone). There’s something to that.

       I never made the relay team, but that night, there I was. Barefoot and running past the neighbors at midnight, to get to my getaway car. Taylor sings a song about a getaway car, meant to be a love song– and when I hear it on my slow runs in Colorado, I stop and have to wheeze and cry. It brings me back to that night.

      But before this night, the one I propelled myself away to poison ivy & safety– where I became heat rash turned ivy turned spire turned runaway–

     These trees were my safe space. You could literally crawl into the hollows there. The belly, as if it was waiting for you. Had been the whole time. The pine sap sticky and lingering on you, as if it wanted to be close to you–

       “Pine sap,” I say to my doctor.
       “Hmm?” She says. “Scurrying slowly around me.
       “Your vitals look great, close to the same every time.”
       I think of how the nurse has mentioned my vital signs are the same every time, minus a point or two. My notes barely change, even though I have to uniquely write them each and every time.
       I’m back in pine sapped fields, thinking of how the trees hid me until I felt buoyed. I daydreamed about hiding out there if she ever kicked me out. Becoming nest and sap and roots of trees, if they’ll have me.
       My vitals like pine tree roots. Steady. I think of how these two doctors have memorized my vitals (beat, beat, beat- please see me - beat), and how the trees held branches around me. And how those two beasts that will last longer than me, those pine trees probably still in fields I know no longer live in– these doctors that see me for 2 hours only at a time– have wrapped themselves around the notes and lullabies of my body,
        More than anyone in my family did.

       More than anyone else I know did.  

      I reach for the lavender scented tissues. I don’t tell them I don’t think I deserve the fancy ones. I cry into them and tell them I lost a job (again), another tempo that has become rhythmic.
      The failure spindled into slow-grown roots.
      My mind is in full tilt now, the medicine working, even on a poor
    Waif, with a unkempt mind like me. I remember being a kid, and seeing the Statue of Liberty for the first time. It’s sad as an adult to remember how I felt just like her–
     Give me your tired, your weary.
     The look in her eyes looked like rejection, a downcast rebellion.

     The water lapping at her bones, taking almost everything
     Until she was a metallic gift that no one would take back. Seaglass, now, 
      But someone who used to think she was going to be pretty–

     “Your thoughts might be spinning now,” someone says.
      My hand is somehow grabbing towards someone else's.
     “Trees communicate underground with their roots,” I blurt. I read that somewhere and it was said by a teacher long ago and gone.
     The hand on hand of us together, trees connecting
      For a moment, buckling down
      For the storm ahead.

     My psychiatrist once read me poetry from a farmer in the Midwest I had never heard of. My English degree is tired, I think sometimes, by candlelight. I apply to Waffle Houses and nanny jobs and think if I was an embryo again
     Applying for a spot in this world
     I need not apply.
     I was not qualified–

     “You’re wiping tears from your eyes. This is supposed to be relaxing!” One of them says; I think of twin pine trees in my childhood yard, living beyond the memories of my tiny feet hiding from the outside.

      Do they remember me cowering there, thinking of poetry and Shakespeare assignments read in fall, only to the trees? Times I began my days by letting my jeans suck in mud in spring? Letting the pine needles be a blanket, for a moment,
      Covering me completely?


     “What do you do when you exist and no one wants you to?” I say. But they have left. Ketamine distorts your sense of time. My breath hitches, I didn’t see them leave. I forget they left with slightly trepidated feet. There’s a call button, but my mind flips the script again, and I forget what I meant.


      I’m in mood lighting; I’m a waif that was somehow born to a glass shard, a piece that fell off from the start–

      & I made it here, to shut my brain off for a few hours,
      To dream of the names of pine trees from New York
      & to make my shards frost. To try to uncover a piece of what unravelled all of it.

      My boyfriend now grows seeds with wet paper towels. Putting them gingerly outside, and I wonder if - as a baby – I was ever rocked like that. If any of the families that took me in ever wished they had treated me softly, for a minute. If all the houses and the splintered roots and childhood homes that did not say goodbye to me matter one bit. If anything is solid, or if trees are meant to outlast us, but they, too, are someday soot.

      Those tiny seeds that grow from droplets only, that sit side by side, hoping to become full grown but may never get the chance to–

     Plucked gingerly, wrapped around with a damp paper towel.  Covered in the cheap kind, the kind you can find anywhere. And no one asked them if they mattered, no one asked them if they wanted to take root.