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The Five of Swords
Having Gone Mad in November
CW: themes of severe depression, war/atrocity, death/decay
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My friend asks me what she can do to help.
Babe, do you need anything? – to be exact.
It’s a Wednesday evening,
the early darkness drawing over the skyline like a shroud and
I haven’t spoken a word to anyone all day, not a soul,
til this call, so the bony earth of my voice surprises us both for a moment.
I consider the question – what it means, why it’s asked;
her power and mine. I try to tally what we each have left. If anyone has anything,
when we walk a world like this one.
I think:
Drag me from beside the grave, beloved – I need help to swing my legs
out from where they dangle,
he is never coming back, none of my dead are, not ever.
I need you
to wrench my shoulders up and away
from the bloody ground, my face crushed madly against more news of war, the dead
pressing in – from home, from afar,
every day more unfathomable loss;
to find my empty eyes and pull.
I need you to help me wash my hair.
To tell me firmly that joining the dead is not for me, today;
that the way my feet tingle, their long hover just above the yawning cold,
is the lie.
I need you to hang up, immediately, and get in your car and drive to my apartment,
bring over the food that I can’t afford if I am also going to pay rent,
let me cry for as long as I need to into the shoulder of your favorite sweater.
All this is too much for any one person to ask another, and I know that,
so I say: oh – just coffee darling! Send me love send me luck. My voice light and unrecognizable,
a pretender in a glittery hat.
She tells me I’m so positive. So brave. When we hang up, I realize
I’ve failed again to say no, no, it’s rot, I am decaying, I am grieving even for those still breathing.
For whatever reason we are still pretending that I am part of the world, but
nothing makes any sense – no work, no love,
not even this despair –
and so I am crouched in my own grave, not dead and not alive.
I want at last to be seen
not as a list of terrible things that I have improbably survived,
not as the worst of my sins,
but as these and more, more,
a galaxy, a grave undone,
a hard rain that ends somehow in searing faith.
I want you to call me when you need help. More than this,
I want to come when you call. Mostly,
I want you and I to look with steady eyes on the worst things
and not falter, but to feel everything;
to move toward the nightmares,
to be permanently ensnared by the desire to do good
even as we walk the quaking world.
I do not call her back. I can’t tell
if the shame I feel is about the wanting itself
or if perhaps it is more about
the immortal grip I keep on this grief,
how it howls under
the horrible miles of earth bearing down upon it.
About the Creator
Sophie Colette
She/her. Queer witchy tanguera writing about the loves of my life, old and new. Obsessed with functional analytic psychotherapy & art in service to revolution. Occasionally writing under the name Joanna Byrne.
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