The Door Girl, Part 30

She mailed me her journal after my stay at the psych ward. Maybe it was to help me understand. Maybe it was to remind me that she was still alive despite the absence of me. Maybe it was to hurt me. I don’t know why she sent it, but as I read the entries, my heart ached for her. My mother was not a monster, but she was mentally ill. My mother did the best she could and the best she could was all she had to give.

July 2, 1974

The thing is, I’m happiest when I’m not me. When I escape and hide behind whatever I can. I guess I never learned that lesson—to be a big girl and face my problems. I think what gets people is the monotony of the everyday. I wake up, make coffee, take care of my child, set my timer for fifteen minute increments just to make it through to bedtime. And during those fifteen minute increments, I feel lost. I don’t know what to do with myself that has any value. And so I sleep. I get high. I drink. I break things. And after, I feel so bad that Junie has witnessed yet another breakdown, but I can’t help the madness. It’s clawing at me to get out and all I know to do is shatter glass.

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 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.