We all have those times when someone says something and we think: Man, I wish I'd said that.

But sometimes someone can say one thing that makes you stop in your tracks an re-evaluate how your little corner of the world really is. It can be anything, it can be nothing, it can be the most important thing ever. All it takes is one thing that someone says to you that catches a little hook in the tender ribbons of your brain, and when it sets in, it's in.

I've had a few of these.

In the midst of a complete and utter loss of my temper 11 years ago, I flung a box of pencils across a room. My then boyfriend looked at me and smiled gently and said:

Throwing things in anger is a big waste of energy, you know.

And I stopped and considered what he'd said. All of the anger drained right out of me as I thought: Fuck me, he's right. I never threw anything in anger again (until last week when I threw my phone, but I wasn't angry, I was just full up from the all-you-can-eat stress buffet).

Other sayings have stuck with me, some little, some big.

Bright blue eyes looking into mine with my back to a Bangkok hotel room as he whispered I would never hurt you.

A cheeky grin as he smiled the eyes-disappearing smile and said: Well, cheese goes on everything, doesn't it?

He was looking away from me, not meeting my eyes, one hand under his chin. Your looks are going to grow more ethereal with time. A casual comment that meant the path to growing older was paved with smoother stones, as long as someone once believed that about me.

Stupid things, big things, things that were recorded in my head, digital images of analog moments, and things that became little pieces of me.

And then another one of them snuck into my head on Tuesday at the therapists (It's the Crazy Clearing House! Everything MUST GO!). Tuesday, stuffed onto a cracking leather couch with my feet tucked under me and throw pillows covering me (this is what I do, this is how I sit, I use a barrier of throw pillows to protect myself behind. Some shields can be made of feathers instead of metal and be just as effective against the most deadly of arrows.) Tuesday I was sitting across from my therapist and at the end, something he said struck home and has become something I have bubble-wrapped inside of myself, to protect it from my bouncing ribcage.

We were talking about how often I moved as a child. As we were military it meant every 2-4 years, but pockmarked in some of those years were the challenges and disturbances of domestic turmoil. Yo-yo times of being uprooted when the family nuclear unit light switch was in on-again or off-again (otherwise known as the epochs called I'm Not Supposed To Talk About It, only in therapy I'm going to talk about them.)

When I became an adult, I continued the nomadic way of life. In university I moved constantly, so much so that the apartments all became a blur, I couldn't trace the residences of the last ten years of my life if I tried. Kitchen counter tops that all look the same and bathrooms that were remarkable in their unremarkableness. Part of the moving was needed-my ex-husband didn't really want to let me go (it was the usual case of just because he didn't want me didn't mean he wanted anyone else to have me) and as such we played Stalking for Dummies.

But the other part of it was because I had to move. I had to. My skin itched and crawled too long in one space, if my neighbors knew me it was time to move. I couldn't bear to be in one place as it was time to move, time to go, had to move had to go. And in all of these places, brought home by my ex-husband stalker and turbulence in my past, were many, many locked doors. Several locks on all the doors, home alarms, dogs, a gun. Behind my front door was an apartment of fear.

Looking back, I don't know what I was afraid of.

Sometimes, the thing to be most afraid of is the person that you have locked inside the house.

I told my therapist about this.

He asked me about where I lived now.

Looking out the window in his office I recounted the little cricket village I live in. The cats that I love, one sleeping in the bathtub and one bringing me live victims. The fact that sometimes I walk to the village High Street just to buy a coke, just to be there. That during the day the front door just stands open so my cats can come and go.

He asked me how I would feel if I had to leave, and I felt a painful squeeze and constrict in my chest, the beginning of a sob, a wave of fear. I looked up at him incredulously. "I would beat to death someone that tried to take me away from here. I love it here. I can't leave."

He smiled.

"Well, I wouldn't beat someone to death." I hasten to add. I am actually a pacifist, and one that worries about being committed at that. You know. As pacifists do. My 24 hours in a mental hospital proved that there truly is no place like home, especially if it is a Thorazine-free zone. "But I would put up a hell of a fight."

"Have you ever felt this way about a place before?" he asks.

I look out the window again as I think. "No," I reply, surprised. "I've always been ready to move, always ready to go. I used to keep my important things in one location, in case it was time to flee. I've always been thinking about the next place to go. The truth is, I still am-we're buying a house 5 miles away, and I can't wait to move into it. But the vision ends there-I don't see anything after that, I don't feel any panic."

He looks at me and smiles even more kindly. I am not used to kindness like that when it comes to the inky blackness inside of me, he is kinder than Baba Papa, my very own blue plasticene helper. "Helen, I think you've spent your life perpetrating the turbulence you knew as a child. We try to surround ourselves with that which we know, whether it is comfortable or not. You've spent your life filling your environment with turbulence. And when you talk about where you live now, your face lights up and your entire air changes. What do you think of when you think of where you live now?"

I gulp some air. "Peace," I choke out. "I think of peace. It's a stupid little corner of England in a country I'm not even a native in, but I have never in my life felt like I have been home ever before, and I never want to leave that feeling."

And I step out of myself in that room and see a tall woman made small by the first moment of internal truth I had seen in many years. She's holding on to throw pillows as though she may drown and every inch of her is marked by the one emotion she never tries to let herself be-she's vulnerable.

"Helen, this is the first step to trying to get better. It may seem like something small, but you are beginning to belong to something, Helen, and belonging is a part of letting go of the turbulence."

He says all of this and a bit more, and I know it will stay with me.

And I step back inside of me and for the first time with my new therapist, I cry.

-H.

PS-Jim, I just love you. Thank you for my lovely yoga present. Hand over heart, I promise I will never fart on it. Now you just need to come to England and go to a class with me. You could be Gumby. Totally.

PPS-Who says the English are sexually repressed?

Posted by: Everydaystranger at 07:56 AM | Comments (12) | Add Comment
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