the dishes.

No, this is not my kitchen. "Good Will Hunting" - Sean's kitchen.

The decision to let yourself buy the paper plates is a big decision.

Is there a rule about writing during depression, or whatever this is? something like it's not interesting to anyone outside your head, so you don't share it. And aren't there similar "rules" regarding writing about writing, for the same reasons? like Fight Club? First rule of Fight Club: you never talk about Fight Club. First rule of writing about writing: nobody wants you to explain Your Process, with your monocle squinched in one eye and gesturing with a snifter of brandy, as though you're holding court, like some badass itching to ramble about your ramblings. And maybe first rule of writing about sadness, whatever variety of mental illness, or general downness you're wrangling is something like you don't write about how you simply cannot make yourself deal with something like a pile of dishes in the sink. It's incredible, how quickly they pile up even when you don't eat, and equally incredible how impossible they are to deal with.

The first time I thought why not just buy paper? my immediate reaction is to tell myself no. Because be better than that. do better. that's lazy. you're one person. and your job involves sustainable this-and-that and reducing waste, and also in the back of my head is the voice of my pastor, lover of all creation, who is as human as anyone else and would be the first to tell you so, but whose passion for the earth and its health is so excellent that I wilt a little before it on a good day, and I look at my cart and imagine paper plates in it and I bargain with myself for permission, like okay, I don't use paper towels, does that count for something? or and it's not like buying a pack of paper plates puts me on par with those people who are chopping the tops off of mountains and pumping all the crap into the air, right? But then, the hard-line interjects, maybe it does put you on-par with them; how many trees for forty plates? what kind of industry am I supporting? how do they treat their workers? all for the sake of my convenience? when I have dishes sitting right there? 

And the bargaining cuts all ways, because okay, I did good here, so maybe I can get the paper plates, like maybe I took a shower today, so to balance it, I'll get the paper plates; but then again, you took a shower today, so you're doing better, so maybe you don't need the paper plates; or possibly you woke up so early and didn't wash the dishes, so you don't get paper plates, or, on the other hand, you didn't get to sleep until some VERY LITERALLY UNGODLY hour and your sink is still full of dishes, so nope, not this time. No laundry? no plates. Could've worked late, but didn't? Nope. Didn't call your mother (again)? Sucks to be you. Sorry. I don't make the rules. 

And yeah, why? the chef in the back of your head pipes up, the one who speaks in clipped, brusque Brooklyn-cadence phrases, to-the-point, bottom-line: You got plates. Why you gonna buy paper? And it's true; would I bother to spend money that I should be saving when I have a perfectly good stack of putty-blue plates above my stove? where they sit on the pale-grey-and-white quatrefoil I got specifically because the blue of the dishes is what brings it together with the teal wall color and all of it ties in perfectly together that it's so pleasant to look at (but it's all theoretical, because they now live in the sink).

A stupid set of dishes.

Seriously, it's almost funny- of all things in which to stumble across significance, that it would be a stupid set of dishes. Eventually, I start finding them in every room: one in the living room, maybe from when I was trying to organize my books; one or two in the other bedroom, probably from when I started taking down the drapes to paint the walls, but decided to wait until I bought the paint because otherwise it probably wouldn't happen and my windows will just stand there naked to the dark; one or two in my actual bedroom, and I think of the fact that I'm leaving dirty dishes lying around, and of the fact that they're not even piling up in the sink anymore, but if I were to look in the sink, there's definitely a pile in there, too; that now, they're everywhere I look, and I don't remember how they got there, and they stare back at me unblinking, like bright blue eyes, like evidence of something.

I just can't deal with them. I don't want to touch them. They hurt to look at. Because I bought them at the beginning of my identity, and I absolutely fell in love with them: simple, almost boring, and when I call them putty-blue, I mean that they're the perfect deeper-saturated shade of sky blue with undertones of rock and almost-mushroom; they are calming, and every food in the world looks beautiful against them. And they made me so happy when I was twenty-something, when they were my first set of dishes, when they signified my life and my kitchen and my shared life with you, whoever you are, reading this, who has eaten off those dishes; when I had need for twelve settings, when I made people feel at home in my home, when I trusted myself enough to trust the people to whom I passed those dishes.

I thought last week: it's time to get rid of the dishes. No matter how wasteful it feels. I don't want these dishes here anymore. And besides, they broke in the boxes, sometime in the past three years, in my mother's garage. They are no longer a set of dishes, and they really aren't "perfectly good." Four plates left, five saucers, two bowls. The survivors are hopelessly damaged; their edges betray the flat absence of color beneath the varnish, and when I pull one out of the stack and feel it bend at the crack down its middle, I imagine that the weight of what lies on the plate is just enough that it might snap in half on my hand. I want to bend it until it breaks, just to see what the break is like: if it's a cartoonish poof of ceramic dust, or if I even have the strength to break it apart, or if it'll make a clean break from itself, if its pieces will mostly maintain their shape, like some kind of putty-blue dignity, or if the entire thing will abruptly crumble in on itself and rip my skin in the process.

Today, I threw them away, and I got the paper plates. On sale. Two packs four $4. I bought one.

I feel better.

red-haired, purple-chaired despair, or "some trainwreck bullsh*t."

It's not gonna be particularly compelling or well-written, but: I am not any good at being angry.

I suck at it. Spent my whole life determinedly not being it. Emerged from childhood completely disconnected from it.

I remember once, kneeling at the altar post-service in my Tennessee church, feeling the rage pressing at the boundary of my diaphragm without realizing that's what it was, wanting to feel as though I were about to explode, hearing myself say to one of my pastors I am just so angry knowing the truth of those words, but feeling fraudulent at how empty and dispassionate they were as I placed them on the altar before me and looked at them and felt nothing but overwhelming despair at that with which I could not connect.

I know you're in there. 
How do I find you. How do I name you. 
How do I get you out and bring you home. 

_________

I was fourteen.

I'd barely been living with my family, and I'd made the mistake of disclosing my struggles with self-injury and suicidal thoughts to someone who alerted my parents. I watched my father take the phone call, watched him walk outside and slam the glass door behind him; watched him as he saw me watching, as he angrily jerked away from the window; retreated to my room in a panic and listened to him stomp down the hall and slam the bedroom door shut. That evening, there was a blowup, and a crying mother, pat-talk of do you want to get counseling? on their part and emphatic NOs on my part, because what's the point of even trying when it's all buried so deeply that you don't even know what's there anymore? and how do you deal with the chance to tell when you're living with people who demand your silence? and what consequences would I face for having just now broken silence?

The next day, though, it was as if nothing had happened, and the incident faded into the background of things.

But a few weeks later, we were in the car, my mother and I.

"So. I need to tell you something." Her knuckles were white against the steering wheel. "And I, um... you listen to me." We pulled into the driveway; she parked the car, turned it off, and began to fidget with her keys. "So, I know you're not gonna want to hear this. But, um.. I think you have an eating disorder. And I know you don't wanna hear it, but I think you need to go to a counselor. So I'm gonna take you to a counselor."

She continued talking, the conflict in her voice - the clamor between breathless panic and plays at authority - this woman, so uninitiated in discussing Things with this strange daughter who now required discussions of her - she continued talking as the buzzing in my head expanded to cushion me against her voice, against the presence of her in that tiny car interior, where, on a normal day, time spent in a car with my mother was so heavy: the odor of Marilyn Miglin's Pheromone Musk, the manicured nails glittering on a steering wheel, a purse smelling of leather and cinnamon, everything meant as an outward statement of worth and meaning, all of it held tight behind lips pursed in tired martyrdom before the fantasy of a whole world judging the failures of the slim, coiffed one against the part of her sitting beside her, hiding in sackcloth. On a normal day.

Got out of the car and went straight to my room, where I half chuckled to myself: the words "cutting" and "suicide" and "abuse" were mentioned, but the thing she'll say out loud is the one about me being fat.  

god. 

_________

I trotted behind my mother as she glided through the corridor circling the exterior of the huge church building where my father worked; she seemed to know where we were going, although everything looked the same to me. She pushed open a wide, gray door and we stepped into a waiting area - brightly-lit, gray walls, purple-cushioned chairs hooked together, pew-style, at their sides, generic wall prints in thin, chrome frames, basic metal filing cabinets arranged around a reception-type desk toward the rear of the room, and three rooms on the right, doors closed, each dimly lit from within.

I sat in a purple chair as my mother shuffled papers at the desk, and I eyed those three rooms. What's supposed to happen in there? Oh god. Why are they so dark? Do I have to go sit in the dark with a stranger? How is that a good thing? Why do I have to do this? 

A door opened, introductions occurred, and I was ushered into one of those dark rooms by a woman with large, frizzy red hair. I nearly tripped over the chair as my eyes adjusted to the dim light of a tiny nightlight-lamp on her desk. She sat across from me, leaned forward, folded her hands in front of her breasts, and fixed her eyes on mine like someone invoking Insight which I didn't share.

I don't remember the first question she asked me, and I don't remember my attempt to answer it. But instantly - from the dark room, to the intimidating lean across the desk, to the way she seemed determined to disbelieve anything simple and unspiritual, to the reek of her overall boundary-flouting hyper-spirituality - I knew this was gonna be some trainwreck bullshit.

And it was.

I wish I could remember specific moments from the weeks I spent in that godforsaken black hole of an office. It was my first time in counseling of any kind, and she always stared at me with such intensity, as though she were trying to see inside my soul, and something in her eyes told me I was blocking her view as she asked me questions about whether I thought I had an eating disorder, and what kind, and how I felt my actions reflected on my family, and how my musicality made my parents feel, whether I had a boyfriend, whether I'd had sex with him or anyone else, and how often, and didn't I know my parents loved me? and wasn't I comfortable talking with her? and can I pray for you? I'm gonna lay hands on you, okay? as she's already halfway around the desk toward me, because it's never a question, and the only correct answer to that unquestion, ever, is yes, which really meant SURE, WHY THE FUCK NOT, LIKE I HAVE A CHOICE HERE as she stood behind me in a dark room and planted her palms on my back and moved herself closer into ecstasy with every inch she pressed into my flesh. As she moaned and jerked behind me, talked about how tight my shoulders felt, told me to relax and breathe with her, I sat in a chair in the dark and died to that moment: I have to leave this moment here; I cannot take this with me and come back to it again; it has to die here; I don't have the answers you want, I don't use the language you use, and you work with my father, the arbiter of my silence is sitting four feet away on the other side of that door in the bright light, and whatever God is telling you will kill me if I don't die first. Week after week after week after week for I don't know how many weeks of me failing in that chair, weeks of her ending "sessions" with a passive downward flick of her eyes and a deliberate set of her face toward neutrality to hide her irritation at my lack of "breakthrough." Weeks of my mother half-grilling me on the way home, half-hoping for my silence; do you feel like it's helping? and her palpable relief at my repeated nos.

Until the final session, which I remember in snapshots.

I sat in the empty waiting room flipping through a magazine, and suddenly, the sounds of a man wailing at the top of his lungs rang out from one of those dark rooms. The high pitch broke into gutteral sobs and unintelligible syllables as I sat frozen in the chair, my skin prickling, glancing back and forth between the door to the office and the door into the corridor. I had never wanted to get up and run away from a place as much as I did that one; is that what you want from me? nothing less? Over several minutes, the wailing slowed into moans, then a few minutes of silence, until her office door opened. I stared at the floor; I didn't want to see him, didn't want to see her, stared at the purple carpet until the corridor door clicked shut behind him.

The dark room was humid and heavy; it smelled like lung and sinus. I sat down in the dark as she sat across from me, shaking her head and breathing deeply in her red-haired ecstasy, whoa, I'm sorry you had to hear that, whoo, man, he really had his breakthrough, her eyes glittering in the dark, and I sat in the chair and watched her guide herself down to earth before an audience, continued deep sighs of satisfaction. Someone in my head whispered at least she gets to spend your session happy about somebody's breakthrough; I almost laughed aloud.

This moment: as though I were hearing it from across the room instead of across from her, when she asked me: Do you want to keep coming here? I was instantly brought back to myself by the difference in her voice - softer, almost gentle, less expectant, less dissatisfied. Her head was cocked to the side, her eyes looked almost sleepy; it was maybe the first time I'd ever felt like she wasn't trying to lead me toward an answer.

I said no.

And then, standing in the bright waiting room again, my mother standing at the desk, the red hair standing in her office doorway, all gentleness gone as she stated across the room to my mother that continuing this really is pointless, she doesn't want to be here and she's not participating in the process and not yielding to the Holy Spirit and not open to receiving anything and so tightly closed up. Not really not worth your money. 

And that was that, until I left for college.