The farther away from my childhood home, the better, I think to myself as I drive the long stretch of highway between Santa Rosa Beach, Florida, and Huntsville, Alabama. I’m saving my life! I’m going to survive. I’m crying again. There’s no one on the road but long stretches of houses, each with their own personal lake. There are cars, recently washed in a storm. On the road’s edge grow lilac wisteria tendrils, tall pine trees, unnamable birds, the sky so bright blue it hurts my eyes. I’m dehydrated. I can’t tell if I’m crying because I’m happy to be moving or if grief has finally caught up with me. I’ve only slept for three hours at a motel in Kentucky. "Did you even rest?" asked the too-talkative woman at the desk. She has bright pink hair. I want to tell her if I didn’t sleep an extra thirty minutes it’s technically her fault, as she was asking where I was from when I checked in at two-thirty in the morning, telling me about her plans to run away to Texas with her boyfriend. I’m headed to teach at a week-long conference on the beach, having received a fellowship for my poetry. I love the beach, I tell myself. I’m going to go in the ocean for once. I will be unafraid of stingrays and sharks.

This doesn’t happen. At the end of the conference, multiple people have been stung by jellyfish and the most exciting thing that’s happened to me on the beach is the day I wore long pants in the surf, then spent hours afterward flaking off granules of sand.

I’ve convinced myself this job is going to save my life. I survived my doctoral program, managing to relapse only a small handful of times, which pales in comparison to my sixteen-year long battle with self-harm. In the shower of my new apartment, I hold my razor in my hand, shave my legs, stare at the soap as it bubbles in the drain. This is the first apartment where I’m not going to hurt myself, I tell the object. The object doesn’t care. It has a purple handle. I try thinking of ways I can write this into my poetry without being too obvious. I settle for comparing it to different types of birds, later abandoning the idea. I don’t want to be reminded I’m unwell. I want to be able to write without shaking hands, to tell this story without trying to erase my own face.

Huntsville is filled with trees. My partner comments it’s like New England, but in the South. I tell him it’s nothing like New England. People here greet me when I see them. No one has told me to go screw myself, no one has yelled at me. Though the drivers are similar to yellow cabbies in downtown Manhattan, and in the first few weeks at least three people try to run me off the road. My new coworker finds out I’m from Massachusetts and asks what it was like. When I tell her the experience was sour and painful, she comments, "I’ve always thought New England was like The Gilmore Girls." I don’t have the strength to tell her it’s like if women had knives, spilled too much blood, drastically reconsidered what it meant to be healed. Like if the main character were abused, burning her life to the ground over and over again, lost in the forest, suicidal. But we’re at work and I can’t share these things with her. Not now, not ever.

Dentro de la cocina, detrás del refrigerador, hay un cuarto cálido, con flores y fotografías, recuerdos y una gran cruz con los rostros de todos los niños. And in this room behind the kitchen and the stove, beyond where the mice gather in wreaths beneath tables whose surfaces were once coated in flour and egg, there is a cross stolen from Saint Patrick’s Cathedral and later my mother and her sister will argue with each other on who gets the cross, they don’t realize it belongs to the apartment, and the apartment—falling apart and fading in a decaying Manhattan, four-bedrooms, a living room with a now disappeared red carpet and a dining room with a rug the color of faded rose petals—contains the souls of family members. When my grandmother used to sleep, before her body became an eternally awake ghost, her mother used to visit her on the edge of the bed and we could all hear her laughing. But my mother wants to ruin the fun, shaking her till she’s crying. I begin to wonder when my own mother will leave, whether my cousin will eventually see her mother’s faded shape. Will we greet each other with merriment or disdain. And what will my mother do with the human-sized cross when I return.

********

I don’t post the job announcement on social media, even though I’ve become entirely obsessed with getting this position. I’ve filled four journals with ruminations, wasted packets of pens. No one here, aside from my best friend and my partner, knows anything about me. I will keep it that way for as long as possible. Push everyone away from reading my work, fabricate webs of lies when pressed about my metaphors, my similes, my allusions and rough-around-the-edges images. I am rough around the edges. I am waking every day at four-thirty in the morning, gasping for air, body too hot, weighted blanket reminding me of once-sweaty bodies bearing down on me, men who took me to the forest to abuse me, forever altering my relationship to nature. I begin writing stories about my abusive family in which I am a stuffed animal and my half-sister is in the backyard building wings out of mushroom caps and poison ivy. I am a stuffed lamb in her pocket, mouth sewn shut, not able to comment on the yelling. This is similar to when I return to the Connecticut house, a quiet mess of a thing, not quite a person. Each time I think if I angle my body in a certain way, my father will forget I’m here. He’ll see an empty space in my chair, fling his anger into another corner of the room. He tosses his anger instead onto his wife, my stepmother. They argue about whether I’ve gotten enough avocado for dinner, did she put salt and pepper on bright red beefy tomato rounds, but who will take the pork roast out of the oven while he’s in the shower, and do I want to visit the basement to look at his collection of fish fossils and amethysts?

During these visits my stepmother swears and swats over the stove. She sifts through bins of raviolis bursting with ricotta cheese, everyone eats crispy bread disks, burgers so rare they’re the color of rubies in the center; sometimes I consider telling my father I love him, unclear if it’s because he’s taken part in feeding me or housing me for one night every six months. In the center of the table is always an envelope for me, filled with money. It’s enough to put gas in my car, enough for subway fare. We don’t hug. He’s proud I’m attending conferences, has no idea I’m going to present a book of published poetry, that the title, Grief Birds, is a reference to the mourning doves I heard outside our childhood home. He wouldn’t care if I told him. He thinks I am brilliant and awful. He says I look like my mother. When I return to see her she tells me I’m like my father. I joke around with her too much and she calls me a bully, says I’ve always been "awful in this particular way." I get the feeling when I’m traveling that I don’t belong anywhere, but I’m going anyway, in disbelief at all the ghosts in all the homes I visit.

If I had it my way, I’d never return to these houses. I wonder what my mother found when she finally stripped the paint-stained rug out of my old bedroom. Beneath all my furniture—too-small night stand painted aquamarine, bureau, mirror covered in apple and pear stickers, desk painted with sea creatures and broken hearts—I’d hid dollar-store razors, gauze packets, rolls of medical tape, cloth bandages. There are rings from ex-girlfriends, discarded buttons and beads, blotted tissues, popsicle sticks, bottle caps from beers I snuck sips from. Each time I travel I am reminded ghosts exist. I can feel them on the sides of the road, all emerald amongst the trees, sticky from summer heat, some in the lake like glaciers. They peel their bodies off the wood like bugs, like wet paper. They lurk around my head at gas stations, chasing down the yellow line in the center of the road. Everyone wonders if I’m going to start again.

********

At the conference, I text my mother pictures of seashells. She says she’s proud of me, though neither of us is sure why. I went to my father’s first, then my mother’s. "Why bother," she asked me on the phone. "Just go to Florida, or come straight to Sudbury. He doesn’t need to see you. He doesn’t even care." We spent the month of June mopping up a floor in the basement, pressing towels into the dirty water, fingers and hands throbbing from hours of wringing the cloth dry into buckets. She’s still grieving my grandmother, will be grieving her loss forever. At several points when I was home I’d find her wailing in the kitchen, my stepfather trying to prop her body up, her mouth a perfect circle, a void, a black hole. We ate watermelon on the porch, talked about the rest of our family, woke early to see if there were red birds on the birdfeeder, two for my abuelitos and one for my abuelitita, Wita, whom we nicknamed little grandmother.

I think I’m going to see her on the beach, in the supermarket. There is an expensive food store by the shore, selling nine-ounce filets and ribeye steaks. Everything costs seventy dollars, everything looks delicious. I buy spicy chicken sandwiches with fries; a woman I meet at the conference buys me a piña colada. I’m so broke I can barely emphasize to her how helpful it is that she’s basically lent me eight dollars. She tells me she understands and I instantly feel bad for complaining, a habit left over from my parents yelling at me, at each other, my sisters, all the cats and dogs. I press my face to the glass and memorize the shapes of scallops, fried calamari disks, salmon so orange it looks like fallen leaves. There is a woman bent over, picking up meat in crepe paper, weighing it, her dark curly hair falling over her shoulders. I think to myself, that’s the ghost of my grandmother, but I don’t text my mother. She doesn’t need me to ruin her day, and anyway, she would be pissed if she knew I was in a deli.

Later, I’m in the ocean, but I’m not really in the ocean. My mind is elsewhere. The water is so green it looks like an emerald. Upon first seeing the water I think to myself, I don’t deserve to be here. My body hurts each day I walk to the conference center, my legs hurt when I walk on the sand. I continually forget to take my medication and a woman I’m rooming with tells me she’s going to be my Conference-Mom, making sure I have distilled water every night and ibuprofen each time the soreness worsens. I consider relapsing, to release some of the tension, a thought I have each time I step into a shower. Later, on my way back home, I’ll stay at my colleague’s house, a beautiful wooden cabin tucked away in the woods. Everything in her living room is flooded with natural, amber light. There is a cat who greets me once and never again, there is a spider in the bathroom. I avoid the rooms without lights on, worried there might be ghosts in there, phantoms I’ve never encountered, perhaps new breeds of poltergeists that would take me years to exorcise. I spend all night reading Erika Krouse and Rebecca Makkai, allowing their words to transport my body back to what I’ve dubbed the killing forests, forests in which my body didn’t die, but it may as well have, changed permanently from violence.

********

Upon returning to Huntsville, I miss my first therapy appointment, too caught up in the supermarket, trying to figure out the difference between a chuck roast and shoulder cut. My partner always makes fun of me for being a food writer and researcher who can’t tell cuts of meat apart. He tells me to get bouillon cubes, shredded lettuce, beef seasoning, peppers and potatoes to dice, kernels of corn. I search for the rice he hates, I get snacks for my students who are having trouble finding time to eat before class. I wish I were on the phone with my mother but I’m too busy and pissed off to call her. Instead, I furiously text my partner I can’t find the beef he wants, that I’m going to be late to a therapy appointment I initially wanted to cancel but now I’m so obsessed with going, I’ll die if I don’t go. He tells me he’ll skip dinner, but I’m determined to be a good person today. I find the chuck roast in a different cooler, bright as copper or fire, so raw I consider biting it.

At the apartment, I’m rushing. I drop cans of peas on the ground, a bag of popcorn that explodes from pressure. I rush out the door but it’s already too late, I can’t make my 5:30 appointment in the next six minutes. It’s in the next town over and I call apologetically, almost begging for them to make an exception for me, as if I am the only hurting person they’ll speak to today. The woman on the phone is kind, tells me there’s a fifteen-minute grace period (which I’ll miss), and a ninety-dollar cancellation fee I can get waived if I fill out a form. I hang up the phone.

The last time I went to therapy was in 2020, right as the pandemic began, the first time I went being in high school when I was eighteen. I remember nothing from our sessions, except for lying to her every day that I was fine, please don’t tell my mother otherwise. I think I told her I was going to write a book someday. In Illinois, my first therapist disappears, likely from a family emergency. My second therapist and I start meeting after lockdown begins. I know she doesn’t like me. Every meeting, I am performing for her, saying what I know she wants me to say.

"You’re very strong and you’re doing a good job talking about what happened to you," she says. "Thank you," I reply. I have been working very hard on making sure she doesn’t send me to the hospital.

Earlier that day, I had created a makeshift black light out of layers of scotch tape, purple and black sharpies, and my phone’s flashlight. I stood in the darkness of the bathroom, trying to figure out if I could see old scars, now faded, though in a few months I’ll have new wounds. I don’t know this yet, but I’ll relapse, I always have.

"Why do you think you were making the flashlight?" she asks me. 

"I wanted to see where my old scars were," I explain. Sometimes in bright sunshine I can see strange bumps from my wrist to my elbow, scratchy skin I don’t see on other people’s bodies. I think these might be keloids, and this skin tissue might still be damaged. Late nights I clutch my arms, in phantom pain, wrapping ace bandages around my wrists and hands when I’m feeling itchy enough to relapse. But today I don’t want to. I just want to talk about it.

"The battered women I used to see in the special victims’ unit never wanted to see their scars and bruises," she says.

I ghost her, but not before she tells me my relationship with J is abusive, and not before she tells me she suspects I have both PTSD and OCD. "I have the big one," I tell my partner. He says he is sorry, but neither of us knows where to go from there. The only other positive interaction we had was when I told her what happened to me, about the abuse. She was the first adult to tell me it sounded violent, non-consensual. She is the only other woman to label my abusive relationships as abusive (the only other one besides R, who always knows what’s up, sometimes before I do).

I haven’t met my new therapist yet. I’m worried we’re not going to get along, that he’ll insult me, discount my truth. A colleague of mine tells me to be careful, that some of the therapists in town try to create prayer plans with their clients. I am no longer religious and this terrifies me. I start to think it’s a good thing I missed our meeting until last night, when I felt my mind unraveling over salmon, of all topics.

********

"I know this is going to sound insane, but I need you to tell me a time I can ask you about whether or not we’re going to the supermarket on Sunday," I tell my partner.

He is rubbing his head, enduring a multi-day migraine.

"What?" he asks. "I don’t understand."

"I just—you get so stressed about going to the supermarket and you haven’t gone in weeks and you said you wanted salmon. And I don’t know how to order salmon at the counter. Am I supposed to talk about its size or something?"

"Just don’t get the salmon."

This seems easy enough, but I’m more concerned I won’t be able to pick the correct time to ask him about the supermarket. Not the correct time to go, not whether or not the salmon should have skin or be skinless, a filet, breaded or bare. The correct time to ask him whether or not we should go.

"I just want to know what time to talk to you about the store."

"Not when I first wake up. You do this thing when I wake up where you want to talk about the next month at eight in the morning. Just, no."

He winces, his headache getting worse. I let him be, head to the bathroom to brush my teeth, to stare at myself in the mirror while I try to figure out what exactly is wrong with me. The shower lurks behind me, a gamble I’m always interested in risking.

********

I fall asleep quickly, but at four-thirty in the morning, I’m ruminating. My cat stares at me as my eyes dart around the ceiling. Why do I care so much about what time R might have gotten salmon? We weren’t even going that morning, we’d be going on Sunday. Why did the time matter, why was this happening? Bored and awake, I start listing off crucial events that happened to me like I am on a talk show, explaining to the distressed host every single terrible thing. "See?" I am telling her in my head. "This is why I am the way that I am." She is nodding wisely. She doesn’t care enough to ask me if I’ll ever heal.

********

It is clear to me that in order to tell this story the way I want it to be told, as honestly as I can recount, I’m going to need to return to therapy. I’ve avoided this for years due to a lack of money, and a lack of believing anything was wrong with me. Even when I was clearly deteriorating at work—drinking four iced coffees to get through the shift, digging the wine key into my shoulder in the employee bathroom, relapsing on a Zoom call during a presentation—I believed I was fine. This was just something that happened. This, too, would, maybe could, pass.

I have convinced myself it isn’t relapse if I just draw little Xs on my fingers. If it’s small enough to hide underneath a bandage, then it’s small enough not to matter. Not deep enough, these bandages are nothing.

When I was younger, I had scars on the backs of my hands, so long and deep it was hard for me to shower. This was at the height of the abuse, which lasted several years. I was an artist, thinking hurting my hands would be sufficient, make me less hungry and terrible, and other lies I’d learned to tell myself. Witnesses and participants told me I was awful, I told myself I was awful, too. I shouldn’t have survived, but I did, I am a cockroach. Just me, hard-shelled bug, capable of scuttling away quickly, too disgusting in a pack to be stepped on, hiding in your shower drain, your sink, lining the walls of your New York City apartment.

The following excerpt written during quarantine, written when I was trying to think of things to write about. I had been toying around in the kitchen with a paring knife, which, if anything, shows how disillusioned I feel, how casual grief had become:

I don’t consider it a relapse but I was hurting myself with the paring knife but I also hadn’t assumed that I was going to draw blood and I only drew a very tiny little bit so therefore, at least in my mind, that means to me that I did not succeed and it was just a random response. I mean there was even a chip inside of the knife, that can’t be something I did on purpose because I wasn’t looking to actually hurt myself with a real-live knife. I don’t know how to explain it, I just really needed to put pressure on my wrist. As I type, my right hand looks puffier than my left and that confuses and scares me. I think I also need to go to bed because I am starting to lose track of what I really want to say. I don’t like any of the words that are associated with me or any of the things that happened to me. I feel like I embarrass myself frequently and I don’t know how to get over that. I think I need to reconcile the fact that it is okay to talk about how I have been hurt and to think about it and I need to be productive, as in, not just stay inside those feelings but channel them in productive ways because otherwise if I let myself ruminate in them too much I wind up getting dangerous and then I am concerned I will do something. But I don’t want to. What is wrong with me?

I’ve left, again and again, but a part of me will always remain in those houses, the killing forests, a ghost growing red mold on all the floors of my mother’s tubs.