The Door Girl, Part 29

The words in my head, the voices, they were quiet at first. They blew through my mind like tumbleweeds on an almost windless night. They didn’t disrupt things.

        But then they grew louder and larger and started to damage my soul.

        They had to be given life, and by life, I mean voice. And that is why I write.

        Because the voices never die. Writing is a lonely profession, but the inside of a writer’s mind is filled with the most vivid colors, people with a million stories unto themselves; it’s the playground that never sleeps.

        But God, sometimes, I wish it would. This is what I was talking about earlier—the haunting and begging for attention, waking me in the middle of the night like a small child for a drink of water. The words are restless, and so I am restless.

        I breathe. Listen. And let you drink this healing balm from my aching hands.

The Door Girl, Part 28

Words are like flowers; when you put them together properly, you can create a work of art.

        I used them to escape the jail I had created for myself. I used them like a dying man pushes his morphine button. They were my escape—my pain killers, and I used them in large quantities.

        Bleeding to death by ink is a fantastic thing. The pain, the fear, the voices and the shadows where they lurk--it all gets washed away with a  pen in my hand.

        It was difficult to write on anything at the mental hospital because writing utensils were seen as weapons (again, understandable). So they gave me short, stubby pencils like you use at the library. But I took it anyway because it calmed me more than the Ativan I begged for.

        I wrote my way to crazy. And that is to say, I wrote my way to sanity. Yes, restored mental health. Which fully includes the crazy and the ugly. Those are the parts that make us beautiful and evolve in to more lovely human beings.

        I wrote until I realized that life is never as black and white as it looks on paper, even though I had hand-crafted every detail. For the first time, I realized that I was in control of everything and nothing. I was invincible with all the fragility of a flower.

The Door Girl, Part 27

My mother was always hot and cold. Always a contradiction. Fire and ice. I blazed with her and froze to death with her, as long as I could stay close. We were a raging fire and a frozen marsh in the tundra, where it’s always too cold for anything to grow.

        That’s how my mother would remain for days, but all of a sudden, the clouds would lift and I would see the embers start to twinkle inside of her. The Magic Woman was coming to life. And she would be lit ablaze, everything around her smoky and on fire. She was lightning in a five-foot-two-inch body.

        And me, well…I just loved to watch her burn.

The Door Girl, Part 26

I am ten-years old and our church is having a revival. I am in fifth grade. We watch videos of dead babies in the streets and people disappearing mid-walk with a friend. The song from the video is “You’ve been left behind.”

I get home from school and the house is empty. Logically, I know that my mother is at work, but all I can think about is that song. And I know that I have been left behind. That all the good people were taken, my mother along with them, and I did not make the cut.

My mother comes home and plops her purse down on the table. “Hey kiddo, good day?”

“Uh-huh,” I say, my heart beating a million miles a minute. “Hey ma?”

“Yes?”
“What if I don’t believe in God or any of that stuff they teach at church?” I ask her fearing for my life.

“Baby,” she says calmly, “you just gotta fake it till ya make it. That’s what you do in this life.”

And I did it well. Until, I didn’t.