a house of hoarders

obsessions, reflections, & compulsions in the grief lands

It’s funny to be thirteen. It’s even funnier to be thirteen and be asked to choose a song for your father’s funeral.

Your mind, having cut off completely the second they told you he was gone, suddenly whirs back to life. It’s been a week of black nothingness, and the only thought you can muster is to tell them to choose the hymn you watched him sing with tears in his eyes two years earlier. It’s the only song you seem to recall. All those car rides full of albums and radio plays fade into the background. Titles and artists are so easily forgotten in the face of death.

At the end, the only music that ever seemed to matter to him was the religious shit. He told you it was his favorite. Something about how easy it was to find God in it. The thing is, you never met that higher power in the sanctuary he dragged you to every Sunday morning, nor in the choir practices where you sat trapped and dormant. Out of common courtesy, you closed your eyes during the prayers, but nothing behind your closed eyelids ever called your heart forward.

Was it that you never found God, or just that he never chose to greet you?

Once the three repeated words leave your mouth, your mind hits the off switch again. The emotions, followed by the temple-pulsing pain and endless sting of tears, are cut off at the source. From then on, the only pain you know is derived from the physical sensations of panic—racing heart beats, labored breaths, and shame. It all comes up to meet you in the singular moments when everyone gathers to watch you fail—sitting and shaking on cold tile floors in public bathroom stalls. Grasping at the ground, gnawing at the cheeks, and rubbing furiously at the pulled-up shins—it’s all a manifestation of all the things you cannot voice without acknowledging the original sin.

You were born into a home that was already broken.

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Thjis is me typing a message to you from the recesses of my obsessive breain. The urge to coirrect, the compulsion to alter and make new and make right is sititng behindmy eyes and ready to go the second i hit the wrong key on the keyba=e. See, I mess up all ht time, and it is only te compulsive editor who knows how to fix the phsessive writer. Ulfilted in a way I canot examplain. I am breahtless tryting not to fix evert little typup, re-typing the worlds over and over and over aond over until they are just riught and I know the wrod i;ve typed is corect. Emails taek hours to sne,d. Books take months to read and rearead and rereasnd and reasnda.

I cannot stop. This is my plea. Take awya the thoughts pklrsde.

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My dad left me little in terms of objects, but lots in terms of baggage.

An auto-immune disease. Mental illness. An unwillingness.

I miss him more in the Winter. I am constantly reminded of snow days and morning cartoons and snowmen and playrooms filled to the brim with tutu’s, toys, and trash. I am reminded of the rough, worn texture of his flannel button-ups rubbing against my cheek as he picked me up.

I feel cut off. There are the before times and the after. Before, I knew so many people. I lived such a different life.

The other day, I told my roommate that my straightener was one of the only things I had left of that time in my life. The one with the forever blue stain from when my brother dyed his hair in 2009 and used it without my permission. The same one—a wet-dry straightener from the early aughts no Gen Z kid would be caught dead holding today.

Well—except me. I’d prefer to be buried with it. Perhaps the Egyptians were onto something.

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“taming the monster”

you don't know until a kind voice suggests it
seemingly an accident, just a trick of the webcam light,
how could you share so much of your insides,
with a total stranger no less?
you speak as if you didn't live it,
as if you watched it all play out on an old VHS,
a movie projected on the screen of your unconscious mind.
an overly cautious man with a video camera stares at you from across the decades.
you can't bear to stare back like you once did—
his little performer
the perfect pretender.
a late bloomer.
the ceiling tile counter. 

you want to die more than you want to live 
until the day you turn twenty-five,
when life finally takes you aside 
and says "fear is in the eye of the beholder."
you can't seem to believe anyone but yourself. 
when intellectualizing everything stopped working,
when curiosity finally killed the cat,
you stand there naked, surrounded by the blizzard of your own thoughts
obsessions and compulsions that once meant the difference between
life and death, 
panic and calm,
crazy and healthy,
broken and perfect. 

you scratch the back of your neck three times,
let the bass line lead you down the street.
without the familiar chord progressions
played in the exact same order, 
over and over and over again,  
you can't move.
the monster leaps from your fingers
and onto the page to threaten you.
Get this right or else.
You are dying.
You are dying slowly.
You are being invaded. 
You are nothing. You are nothing. You are nothing. 

You exhale. 
So long as it comes in threes. 

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