MY WRITING DESK CALLS TO ME. I am standing at the foot of my spiral wooden staircase wondering if my heart will beat out of my chest before I get to the top floor. My head is pounding. It feels like iron spikes at my temples. I bend over and lay both hands to the cool polished step. The knot in my stomach is so painful it feels like there is a fist sized rock rolling inside. It chafes at every nerve. It sends reminder signals to my legs and arms that I am still in crisis. It has been three weeks since my detox near-death experience. Nineteen months since my body began its dying process with each Oxycontin tablet that dissolved into my pain.
Hands and feet. Climbing like a crippled cat. Stopping and breathing. Praying not to black out again. Toxic sweat drips into my blurry eyes. In the upstairs studio, I watch my bare feet press heel toe across a checkerboard pathway to my desk. There are thousands of notes written on random napkins, sales receipts, and anything that happened to be available in the moment clarity struck me over these last thirty years. They are all stacked in dusty towers waiting for my creativity to birth them into a book. Piles topped with header notes. Pre-School Memories, Teenage Years, Suicidal Thoughts, Babies, Divorce, Psychiatric Hospitals, Molestation. Every age, stage, and rage is represented by hand scribbled, tear stained papers torn and tattered from years of shuffling. They are puzzle pieces in the fragmented landscape of my forty seven years.
Sitting at my desk, I lay my fingers to the home row of the key board and look out at the floor covered in my life story. Chapter 9, I type at the top, “I promised I would do it,” I write, “It happened when I was shitting my brains out in the bathroom of a detox facility, arm raised to the skylight with a nurse’s crucifix pressed into the palm of my hand, and screaming at the dark sky, if you just let me live through this I promise I will tell my story, the whole thing and I will do it without fear."
Then, leaning to the studio floor, I begin picking up the pieces, one at a time.
