“Sasifraz is not an outside force, you know. Not a delusional power. He is something real inside of me that I’ve disassociated myself from. Sometimes, I can feel him—his energy, his anger—and I’m conscious of making a decision... That energy is so strong and weighs so much. I can feel myself using it to swing the balance this way or that in my life—to create or destroy. That is the choice facing me now.”
Occasionally, the adult me would strike upon the clearest way to say what Sasifraz was to her friends. But often, the dawn of recognition brought with it too great a sense of responsibility. Immediately after saying it, I would put it out of my mind, because I didn’t know what to do with the information. I just knew I was getting closer to figuring it out.
* * * * * * *
(1972)
The twins were cute. Most babies are. Wendy and William. (Named after Frobisher’s father, they called him Willie.) Two delightful bundles of joy caught in a pattern of abuse laid down long before their conception.
Snared in a web they knew nothing about, Frobisher’s daughter felt sorry for them. She knew Frobisher’s history like nobody else could.
* * * * * * *
(1987)
(DO YOU THINK FOR ONE MINUTE THAT I’M GOING TO TALK ABOUT ORAL SEX? I certainly do. NO, I’M NOT. Yes, you are. WHAT MAKES YOU SO SURE? You had a dream...)
* * * * * * *
The adult me woke up debating whether to shake or not. In the dream, a friend of mine was trying to lick my crotch. It was in a friendly sort of way, but I didn’t like it.
I woke up pondering why I had never liked oral sex. Had my father….
I stopped. I could feel the emotional storm clouds gathering on the horizon. Had he what? I tried to play a scene in my mind. Obscene, I thought, absolutely obscene. Something snapped inside me and a long anticipated situation occurred.
Slowly the words formed themselves in my consciousness. Critical Mass. I had waited for it to happen during this whole remembrance process knowing it would come. So clearly in my mind, it laid out like this:
“J, this is too much. You have gone too far… If your father did that, it is intolerable, and you need to cut your arm. And if he didn’t, you are a very bad person for making up such an awful thing, and you need to cut your arm.”
Finally, a no win situation. This was the excuse I’d been waiting for. Now, I could cut my arm to ribbons. Because no matter how I looked at it, it was perfectly justified.
I laid looking up at the darkened ceiling. Deep inside me, I felt a laugh. Small at first, then growing.
“Ha!” I told myself. “I have been here before. I know where it leads. I don’t need it.” I visualized an arterial cut at the wrist. The call to 911 and a visit to the local hospital’s psych ward. I could see the dominoes fall neatly into place. I knew that I could do all that or just lay quietly in bed next to the Gentle Wind and fall back to sleep.
“I appreciate the opportunity, Sasifraz. But really, I’ve done it all before. No thanks. I’m not interested. I know just what happens.”
* * * * * * *
I was in St. Pete’s psych ward. Dreaming. “Fine. If I’m not going to do it in real life, I might as well do it up big in a dream.”
There was a certain part of mental hospitals that I liked. The freedom. I could act however I wanted. It is one of the privileges afforded someone who everyone believes is crazy any way.
I gave the staff a hell of a time. I organized the patients, rewired the intercom system so the patients could listen in on the staff, and made a commando raid outside the hospital for some better food.
Sometime that night, however, while I was out on the raid, a patient threw herself off the top of the building. I didn’t pay much attention to it until the next morning when the staff brought me a copy of the local paper.
Across the front page in bold headlines, it read: “Joceile Moore commits suicide.” The hospital had mistakenly released my name. Apparently, the person who jumped fell six stories into a pond and drowned. There was a picture of the pond next to the hospital, and people were standing around it shaking their heads. (Although, how someone can shake their head in a picture is still unclear to me.) It was such a shame to survive the fall only to drown in the pond.
I read the article: “Joceile Moore committed suicide last night, etc., etc.,” I was truly impressed. Talk about getting the notoriety without performing the act. I was especially pleased that they spelled my name right.
On second thought, though, I could see some problems with the situation. “When friends read in the paper that you’ve committed suicide, they don’t usually call you up to check it out.” I decided to just call the important people and kind of surprise the rest when I met them.
I called my grandmother first. She’d heard about it and was crying when I gave her the good news. I decided to go see my grandmother. When I got there, my mother was there.
My mother wanted to be alone with me. I wanted to be alone with my grandmother. My mother started blaming my grandmother for getting between her and I. I saw the opportunity for saying something I’d always wanted to say.
“Don’t blame her for breaking us up. It’s you that broke us up. Don’t tell me how much she hurt you. I’m the one that’s hurting.” I crumpled to the ground sobbing. The sobs brought me to a waking state helping me to feel the pain.
Which is what I needed to do all along in the first place rather than cut my arm.
(DO YOU THINK SHE’LL EVER GET IT? She’s working on it.)