Black and Blue

Jen left therapy tasked with owning her triggers. Feeling overwhelmed already, she told herself, “You are only being asked to own them. That’s all. Nothing more, nothing less.” After all, she wasn’t being pressed to manage her triggers just yet. “Don’t get ahead of yourself. Just stay present. One step at a time,” she rallied herself, looking into her own eyes in the reflection on the glass door as she exited onto the street. Jen’s grandmother passed away less than a month ago. At the time of her death, Jen was wrapped up in the business of making arrangements and receiving and acknowledging condolences or rather managing everyone else’s grief before she finally had a moment to acknowledge her own. Grief hits when everyone else around is done grieving and you are left alone with your thoughts. Everything and everyone grew quiet after the burial, even Jen's tears bared a heavy silence. “Pajamas and Pimm’s would be a great next step,” she sarcastically uttered a little too loudly to the grim stares of a mother and her two children walking by.

The problem with owning triggers is the sheer number she had already identified. She ran through a mental list as she opened her car door: “Loud people, rudeness, aggression, violent words, abandonment, people who stare at you on the street when you are talking to yourself.” Abandonment, she decided, was a place to begin. To spur herself on, she nodded enthusiastically while turning the key to start the car, too perfectly choreographed to be genuine at all unlike the delay in the music streaming of the vehicle, which always seems choreographed to her life as the sounds of Lauv’s Modern Loneliness began to blare from every speaker:

If I could break my DNA to pieces

Rid of all my demons

If I could cleanse my soul

Then I could fill the world with all my problems

But, shit, that wouldn't solve them

So, I'm left here alone

“Oh Dear God no, no,” she giggled to herself and turned off the music. “How about I abandon this endeavor?” Jen sighed deeply into her admission, “I am paying a lot of money for therapy, makes no sense to abandon abandonment.”

“But what now?” she thought. She turned onto the highway and settled into a lull from the whizzing lampposts until interrupted by the pop of a rock striking the windshield and forming a crack in a familiar shape. The shape taking form reminded Jen of her deceased grandmother’s gratitude game. Grandma would draw a spider on a piece of paper and label the body “thank you.” The arms were where Jen’s words would be deposited. They were just the words of a youngster eager to please her grandmother, still blaming herself for her mother leaving. “Even then, I would talk to myself,” she thought. She remembered, as a child, wondering why gratitude always came in six words and feeling pressure to invent six things to be grateful for especially on her worst days. Jen wasn’t sure she could name six things even now.

Traffic came to a dead stop. Jen had a small scare to press the brake in time to avoid hitting the car in front of her with the license plate ‘Big Kid.’ She wondered if the owner of that plate owned any his own triggers. Jen held her own stare in the mirror as she searched for the little girl that once populated the space behind the caramel brown eyes. It seemed unfair, she thought, to own abandonment—a pain that at times grazes and at times gnaws at the fringes of your being. It seemed hurtful to be asked to own your abandonment, something done to you, not by you. Had anyone ever bothered to ask her mother to own the abandonment? I wonder how that conversation would go. What is the point of therapy anyway? Is it to help you remain yourself, or to help you become more like others? Do I want to be like others? What does it mean to be an 'other'—someone free of abandonment? Maybe the point of owning abandonment is to become so completely intimate with it to the point that others are forced to accept you just as you are.

“These questions would surely annoy my therapist,” Jen thought with delight. A slight smile of satisfaction rose to Jen’s lips. She let her mind wander to the hours these questions would occupy and how they would suspend any hope of moving from ownership to the management phase of any trigger. She laughed aloud. “Afterall, the therapist is paid not to abandon me.”

Traffic began to loosen a bit as she passed the two-car accident that landed mostly in the right lane. She thought, “Maybe abandonment is like a two-car accident. No one has intentions of crashing and doing damage, but neither side leaves unmarked.” The drivers appeared congenial through the matter, exchanging insurance information like they were showing off school pictures of their children. Jen found herself admiring their interaction. She contemplated showing her mother the same grace as a way of showing herself some. “Maybe. We’ll see with time.” She was then cut off by a Ford pick-up truck that nearly caused a collision and looked like it had been in a few already. “Some people are very careless with others,” she declared, “That was probably a sign that I should stay away from Mother all together.”

Jen looked into the mirror once again mostly to measure how honest that contemplation really was, when her attention was drawn to a spider methodically descending from the rearview mirror, a wider, genuine smile replaced sarcasm. As the spider paused at eye level, memories of her grandmother’s care flooded Jen. “I should have told you often and persistently, I was grateful for you grandma: you, you, you, you, you and you!” She allowed relief to pace her breathing, as the happy tears rolled down her cheeks. “You were the best thing about my childhood.” The spider was motionless, seemed to stare back in acknowledgement or at least Jen hoped so anyway.