“My fears are insatiable, but so are men.”

“How ‘bout we unpack that; what type of men do you tend to be attracted to?” my therapist said. 

“The masculine ones. The nerd. The innocent type who’s traded materialism for sadism. The loner. The idealist who speaks to his mother like she’s a cashier. The one’s whose flaws match my own, basically.”

“When we change, a part of us dies,” father said. 

We were standing on our back steps. The chilly, night air mixed with the secondhand  smoke in my lungs. My body was warm, teeming with soft sensations. I didn’t know what he meant, but I did everything in my power to understand.

That year, my thirteenth birthday coincided with Carin’s departure for college. The night before her flight; we smoked joints and drank expensive wine in her best friend’s wine cellar. It was a fever dream. None of the words I spoke were honest, deliberate or derived from introspection. I didn’t know there was babel in my mind until I was sitting in my closet holding a knife to my chest. The swinging doors inside of me revealed flooded corridors and stairways that lead nowhere.

I’d managed to assume an identity malleable enough to survive, but felt myself dreading the next chapter with all my heart. The unknown always made me panic, but Carin thrived under pressure. We were seldom one minded; it was hard to resist quarrelling when your older sister slept with your ex and your little sister tried to throw herself from your car on the express way.

“Days are like cups of morning coffee: the variables of heat, cream and sugar are always in flux,” father said. 

The convergence of changes – my only sibling going away, myself entering high school  and dealing with puberty – were impossible to cope with. I felt my limbs flailing in dark, chilly water.

Father tried to comfort me, but there’s nothing like first-hand experience. Carin was busy making plans for her new life eastward. By the time I was grown, she would be a psychiatry resident in rural New York. She kept in touch with me as much as she could, but I decided I couldn’t rely on her to solve my problems. That was probably because my psyche was rapidly betraying me.

My anxiety became unmanageable in sophomore year – I didn’t want to be around anyone and my grades slipped drastically. It got so bad that summer that I barricaded my bedroom door  with a mattress in a misguided attempt at renunciation. Still, over those few days, father left food at my door. His full baritone gently redirected and illuminated my racing thoughts through the doorframe. 

“A free mind is a double-edged sword,” he said.

My therapist had been trained to reject the ambiguity I held toward my own existence. The reprieves – lively conversation and good sex – were mocking in their suddenness and brevity. Daniel had been my therapist for a year. He was a little older than me, bright and adroit at listening. A total normie.

Being raised in a small town by secular parents immediately put me at odds with the power structure because I would not conform. 

Carin had been around mom longer than me but, whenever I looked in the mirror, I saw her face. After she took her own life, everyone in town assumed feigned regard – one of the local newspapers even did a front-page celebrating her acting career. My problems were that they didn’t know her and there was so much of her inside of me. She was a theater actress who found moderate regional success. However, motherhood, career mismanagement and father’s affairs  lead to several stints in psychiatric facilities.

“Am I talking to my wife or one of your wooden characters,” father exclaimed one evening.

The sound of her muffled sobs that night have yet to dissolve from my memory. I was lying in bed; a thin shaft of light from the hall mingled with starlight from my open window. The familiar scent of exhaust fumes billowed through the curtains as he sped out the driveway.

“I’m the only one left stuck in the past,” I said.

“Grieving differs for everyone. Last session, you mentioned that you’d resumed talking with Carin. How’s that going?”

“She has a full life. We speak about her private practice, my nephews and how the Great Lakes surround and divide us. We mostly become nostalgic and weepy at the same time. I started going to self-defense at the gym last month. We mostly attack punching bags for two hours; it’s cathartic.”

“I think we could all use some of that. So, would you say things are going well for you?”

“Maybe. I hope so.”

…

J.L. Moultrie is a native Detroiter, poet and fiction writer who communicates his craft through words. He fell in love with literature after encountering James Baldwin, Hart Crane and many others. He considers himself a modern, abstract expressionist.