But he gets angry and chases her, and brings her back, and once she is his again, controlled, order is restored.
I don’t know if any of this research will amount to anything. That’s a new fear. I used to be good at pushing forward, focusing on the process, creating, creating. Now I am sometimes paralyzed by the fear that I will have to throw everything out. Terrified that months of my life will disappear again. Added to the fog.
I don’t know if it was the ECT or the meds, but many of my days feel like dead weight. They pass before I know they are gone. And the next day I cannot remember them. The last year exists for me in bolts and flashes, a club with bad lighting. Memories bouncing off a disco ball.
I am no longer the person I was, and I am also not the person I dreamed I would be. If you asked me two years ago where I would be right about now, I would have said I’d be thin again, propping a toddler on my hip as I went between gallery shows, eyes dark with kohl, making cutting comments, teaching people to love my art.
Well—that didn’t work out.
That said, if I am not where I thought I would be two years ago, I also am not where I was one year ago, and that is a relief.
NOVEMBER 12 1983
How do you talk to other people, afterward? After the worst, I mean. After your brain swells you up and spits you out, a saliva lump of a human being. How do you communicate with people who spent that entire time in charge of their own mind?
This was something they never taught us in Nangussett.
They assumed we would be restored by the time we got out.
Reset to defaults.
And we would have no memory of what had happened to us in the meantime. No memory of our parts failing. No memory of the screams, the night checks, the boredom, the loneliness, the ways we accommodated the fear that we might never leave.
NOVEMBER 17 1983
Jake has been busy. He got offered a course for the spring semester. A good job, but between the class itself and his commute and his moving his studio over there, he’s gone a lot during the day. Then at night he goes to openings or parties, drinks, does what you have to do in this industry.
On weekends, we go together to funerals. Five friends dead this year. I wear the same dress every time. Put it on, take it off, throw it in the hamper, wash, rinse, repeat.
The days Jake is teaching, I have all this time alone with Theo. I didn’t realize how much I have avoided being alone with him. Just not trusting myself. And then I have all these long days, just me and him. There’s a nice girl in the apartment downstairs who comes to watch him when I need to be in the darkroom. But otherwise I spend the days pushing him in a stroller through the streets, like maybe that will make me accountable somehow. The buildings rising around us in black smudges, like prison bars.
Everything is more dangerous now that he’s walking. Clumsy steps. Careening back and forth like a drunken sailor. He’s scared of grass—fortunately we don’t have much of that around. Now everything in the apartment is a hazard. My mother came to visit and put zip ties around all our cabinet doors, cushioned the table corners, things I never even thought of.
At night I stay home staring at him sleep, watching his chest rise and fall, checking to make sure he hasn’t died. Checking to make sure I haven’t killed him.
I’m holding a ticking time bomb, and I have a shaky grip.
Jake doesn’t have to be gone so much. He’s avoiding me. But I can’t blame him. I’ve changed. He chained himself to another Miranda, and she pulled a bait-and-switch. Now he has a worse version. Unstable. Uncertain. Stomach doughy and striped.
So let him roam. I don’t know what we would do without him. It’s better to give the dog a longer leash than to risk that he pulls himself free.
It won’t last for long. We’ve been talking about leaving New York. Moving in the spring, using the libel settlement as our down payment. Jake has always wanted to live out west, and I like the idea of going somewhere by the sea. Somewhere with new views and inspiration. Somewhere quiet, where maybe