Poetry by Jamie Gamboa

               ​Nathalie CC




Psychological Autopsy II

 
We moved out of the old apartment on Figueroa Terrace.
I had to say goodbye to the balcony overlooking the city

where I sat huddled for hours, your voice
on speaker phone so I could imagine you sitting next to me.
 
I worry that if you came back from the dead
you wouldn’t know where to find me.
 
Our friend Lauren believes in ghosts.
She said she saw you
 
in our new kitchen on Halloween night, clattering
dirty dishes in the sink as if trying to help.

I don’t want you to be trapped in this world
you took such lengths to leave, but you are here
 
in the red and gold Hello Kitty tea set you gave me
on my wedding day. You are here
 
in the Totoro mug and the medicinal tea bags
you mailed in a care package when I was sick.
 
The walls are decorated with 13 years’ worth of Halloween cards
from you with your handwritten messages inside,
 
wishing me— Happy Halloween, Teamaker!
I still have the first Valentine’s Day card you made for me,
 
cutting and pasting words from a magazine to spell out a message
that resembles a ransom note from a criminal-
 
How it will end? Heart-burned.
Dear roommate, please don’t eat me.
 
You decorated the inside of the card with a photograph
of two gory blue eyes torn out by their bloody roots.
 
It is pasted on gray construction paper, now sun-bleached
and worn, so delicate I am afraid to touch it.

I cannot imagine an afterlife for you
where you are happy,

just as I cannot imagine a world where you are well,
but I let myself imagine a world where you decided to live

with your illness, where you learned
to curl lovingly around your agony

and whisper to it soothingly, as if to a colicky child,
until it quieted.

Do you remember how I begged you to move here
 with me to California?

I imagine a world where one day you accepted
when I’d almost given up on asking.
 
I imagine re-parenting you. When you were sad,
I would refill your teacup and listen
 
to the sound of your sorrows spilling on the ground
between us. I would show you how to shrink them,
 
heavy as they are, small enough to fit in your pocket.
I would tell you that I love you.
 
I would dump your whiskey down the sink,
the way I once threw my grandfather’s cigarettes
 
in the garbage and piled trash on top of them so he couldn’t
dig them out again.
 
I would teach you how to separate fear from love until
they were no longer intertwined in your mind.
 
Do you remember when we were roommates how hard
it was for me to accept the reality
 
of day, how I climbed down the ladder
from the top bunk over your sleeping body
 
every morning to hit the snooze button on my alarm clock,
and then fell asleep on the carpet,
 
the alarm still in my hand, snoozing
in eight-minute cycles until you stood over me
 
face set in an expression somehow both patient and annoyed
and told me-It’s time to wake up now.
 
You can’t stay down on the ground forever.
I never told you how, after falling back asleep one morning
 
on our dorm room floor, I dreamed you and I were old
women together, sitting on our front porch in rocking chairs,
 
a pot of tea between us and steaming mugs in our wrinkled hands.
It was so real that when I opened my eyes,
 
I couldn’t believe how young you were.
Already, you believed an unknowable someone
 
was videotaping and watching you in the shower,
although you hadn’t told me about it yet.
 
I remember how you tilted your head strangely
at a plastic monkey on my desk with a painted-on grin,
 
said-I think Cornelius wants to eat my liver, or maybe
my spleen,
 
and how, thinking you were joking, I told you
Cornelius only feasted upon the internal organs
 
of first-year students, so you didn’t have to worry.
After that, you requested to borrow him

whenever you had an assignment due, so fear
of his plastic gaze would motivate you not to procrastinate.
 
Cornelius lives on my bookshelf now. I packed him
in a box and when I opened it, he was in a new place.
 
You are here in this new place with us. I bring you
back to life every time I imagine a world
 
where you believed me when I told you
you wouldn’t stay down on the ground forever,
 
where you let yourself grow until you were ready
to sit on the porch with me,
 
holding your younger selves in your arms
and rocking them lovingly to sleep.

​




Theseus’ Paradox


I. 

In high school Chemistry, I learned
you shouldn’t make a liar out of a label,
the danger of storing things
where they don’t belong.

You can’t predict how something will react
when you don’t know what it is.

In my childhood bedroom, a blocky desktop computer bore a label
proclaiming her Kyoko. My mobile phone was Sallie,

my second-hand silver Mercedes Stella, so similar to Estrella,
the name I adopted myself in Spanish class
because Jamie isn’t Spanish pronunciation and Jaime is a boy’s name.

I needed everyone to know what I am and am not.




II.

The polka dot plant is called Yaya.
Yaya’s slender stalk I sheltered all the way home from New York 
gave birth to one small purple bud before wilting and withering
away. New growth burst up from beneath to replace it. 

I wonder sometimes if the plant is still Yaya.

I tell my clients in therapy sessions, 
the ones who don’t believe change is possible,
that if you ask a 20-year-old how much they’ll change by age 30
they might say: not much, 

but ten years later:
Oh my God, I’m not even the same person.

When do you think this stops?

Surely by 80 or 90, you’re fully-baked, right?
But no, if you ask a 90-year-old woman how much she’s changed in ten years
she will laugh and say: Oh my God, I’m not even the same person

which implies we’re not finished until we’re finished,
and by finished, I mean dead-

and not dead the way a perennial plant dies
for a season,

or dead the way a plant grows through propagation-
bulbous, tumor-like rhizome slowly swelling
from the place I severed with sterilized scissors-

but the way you died, Jenn-

finished but still unfinished. 
Nothing new will grow out of you,

dead at 31.




III.

I didn’t choose the label of suicide loss survivor,
but how can I complain when you fought so hard
for a label to organize your experience,
make it make sense.

There was no space for you in the regular ward
after your overdose on Mother’s Day.

You were told to go to a different hospital. 
Why do you want to come here?
You just discharged from this hospital.

You didn’t fit. They put you
in the geriatric ward.

Took you off anti-depressants,
then back on them.
Took away your anti-psychotics
even though you thought they helped.

The doctor thought you were too organized
to have a psychotic disorder,
diagnosed you with borderline personality instead.

You struggled to understand what this meant about you,
as a patient, as a person.

You thought they were really saying
you were difficult, messy, attention-seeking.
You asked me over and over to remind you
your suffering wasn’t your fault.
​
You work in research, the resident said.
Why didn’t you research the amount of pills you needed to kill yourself?

You thought they were really asking if your overdose
was a cry for help or if you truly needed help.

Help me. I don’t understand
the distinction.




IV.

After your suicide, I used to wake in the night with images
of your body decaying, things

growing where they don’t belong, defacing you,
the boundaries between soil and human form
degrading into nothing,

your body undertaking that gradual change,
turning into something else,
rotting instead of aging,

no way to know the exact moment you cease to be-
Theseus’ paradox:
if every part of a ship is replaced
gradually
piece by piece, when does it stop
being the same ship?

Maybe time is a blood transfusion, and over time
the despair living in you could have been diluted,
smaller and smaller until you could bear it,
your suffering no longer terminal,
instead a pin-prick from a past life,

or maybe things were taking root
in your open wounds.

It was a relief to remember you were cremated.




V.

I tattooed a teapot on the left side of my chest
next to two round teacups ready to receive
whatever comes out.

When I think of you,
I put my hand over the ink, over my heart,
like I’m still in elementary school and I have to
stand up to recite the pledge of allegiance,

and maybe when I’m 80 I will still
put my hand over my heart, like I did in elementary school,
like I do now.

​

​
Jamie Gamboa studied poetry as an undergraduate at Sarah Lawrence College. She is now a clinical psychologist and co-founder of a suicide prevention organization, Spotlight on Suicide (SOS). Believe it or not, psychology and poetry have much in common: both rely on the power of metaphor and storytelling to create meaning in ways that help us move forward. Previous work has been published under her maiden name (Gersh) in Tryst poetry, Little Red Tree Press, and Gutter Eloquence.