The Choiceless Place
The skeleton has been removed,
there is nothing now to prop you up.
The body weighs a thousand pounds,
as the weight of the world presses into you.
All around is darkness,
though there’s just enough light to see all you're missing.
All around is silence,
though its ringing in your ears is deafening.
There is no way not to be here,
you are in the choiceless place.
You whimper:
“I don’t know who to pray to, I don’t know what to ask for.”
A stream of words drip down, slowly filling the hole you are in:
“You are not broken, you are whole.
You are not broken, you are whole.
You are not broken, you are whole.”
The skeleton reassembles as the buoyed body lifts to the surface.
Light glimmers in the darkness,
Silence softens to a hum.
There is no way not to be here,
You are in the choiceless place.
During the summer of my tenth birthday, we went to the ocean, like we did each year. Early on in our stay I stumbled onto a solitary game that I became obsessed with.
My little sister and I had been running in and out of the surf, intermittently building sand-dripped castles, when a errant large wave caught us off guard and smacked us hard into the sand. When we emerged, every crack and crevice of our bodies was packed with grit and seaweed. We jumped up, squealing, shaking, screaming, picking at our cracks and rubbing our sand-plastered eyes, desperate to free ourselves from a million pins. Finally, one of our parents or older siblings yelled out, “Just run into the ocean and rinse yourself off”. We turned toward the water that caused our despair and dove in. The relief was instant and so sweet. I fell asleep that night, as the lighthouse across the street streaked its beam across the wall, replaying that moment over and over again, like a first kiss. I was hooked.
In the morning, I was in the first heat of Saners to make their way to the ocean, walking barefoot on the street’s white lines to save the soles of my feet. On the five-minute journey, I dodged most of my brother’s punches as I listened to my father whistle back and forth with the bob-whites. When we got to the beach, I ran ahead, chose a spot, threw my towel and bag down and ran into the ocean.
First step: get wet.
Second step: Get out and roll in the sand. I twisted and torqued, pulling my suit away from body as I turned so that sand and pebbles could make their way in. I sat up and scootched my butt along the beach, then turned around and shoved my face and hair into the sand. “What the hell are you doing, Lynne?” my father screamed, but I ignored him. When I’d covered myself with as much muck and grime as I could, when my eyes stung and my ass itched and my ears twitched and my head scritched, then third step — legs crossed, looking out at the ocean of relief — I sat and sat and sat. I sat as long as I could, and then I made myself sit some more, and then more still, until finally I set myself free, sprang from my tortured stillness, and leapt into the ocean for the rush of relief.
That day, and every day after that — until I climbed into the way back of the family station wagon with the punching-prone brother to head home — I spent hours each day perfecting the art of torturing myself, elongating the amount of time I’d force myself to sit and endure the pain and discomfort, playing and fighting with the urge to jump up and bring myself relief, allowing the impulse, then thwarting it.
My brother called me a retard. My little sister cried because I wasn’t playing with her. My father turned his chair away. And my mother tucked her head into a book, grateful — I imagine — that I was pestering myself and not her.
A year later, she would not be able to get me out of bed. A year later, I would have somehow fallen into a hole that I could not find my way out of. It was the first of several descents to come, but this last time several memories came to me. This summer of tortured play was one of them. It came with a shocking clarity that my soul was reminding me, “Come on, Lynne, we have trained for this.”
