I’ve been writing down the words I hear in my head, but they don’t get me too far. I think it’s because I can’t see the finish line. If I don’t know where I’m going, how can I get there? But writing anything is still good for me. My head hasn’t been in writing mode for a long time, and I need the practice. Anyway, here’s a short piece going nowhere that I wrote last night. Everything after the last sentence started to feel heavy and overwhelming, there was no action, so I stopped. The word I kept hearing in my head was “dirty.”
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Dirty
When Lena stepped into her parents’ house for the first time in six months, she felt dirty. Dirty like her stretch denim jeans and leather bomber jacket after she had knelt and lain and stumbled in the Pit at her high school graduation after party. Dirty like her mouth on all the boys she hadn’t loved before. Like the desk in her college dorm room where an ashtray and beer bottles instead of readers and term papers had taken residence. Dirty like the burnt-orange carpet at the psych ward.
She stared at the snowy white carpet on the stairs she climbed to her old room. Her parents had spoken to her before she went upstairs but she couldn’t remember what they had said. Her mind was so foggy from her psych meds that the moment had slipped away like an alcohol-induced blackout.
But she couldn’t forget her father’s denial at the family meeting in the psych ward. “Filipinos don’t get depression!” And then, he had told her, her case worker, and her psychiatrist that she needed to find God. When her mother found out she had purchased a gun, her mother had nearly fainted. She said she intended to be happy, and had walked out of the meeting room.
To be fair, her mother had tried.
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BEING KATINKA 