That File

I read that file. I know what I am.

And now maybe we're both damned, maybe she is broken, and maybe I have broken her.

I can't help what I require. Nonetheless I'm sorry.

We're both screaming. Then I'm on the floor, crying, saying I'm sorry again and again.

We got closer this summer, we thought. The only closer we are is closer to breaking.

Now I'm in the basement where maybe it'll take her longer, nexttime, to find me, to tell me she can't be everything to me, that I've goddamn killed her, that she can't take any more, as I plead, wait, wait until tomorrow.

I don't know if it's the time of the month or the time of our lives, but this is the worst day of mine, right down to that day last spring, when at least I had family, my mother. The worst day.

Why does she keep calling me up? She keeps asking me to look at her. Then she turned out the light and left, told me to shower and do my homework. She spoke in a voice neither warm nor cold, like the voice you use when struggling with voice recognition, a tired, mechanical voice.

In the basement, I won't turn on the light. Maybe a spider will come out of the darkness and bite me and I'll die. Or maybe the water heater will explode again, really blow, this time, and I'll die all but alone in the basement, burn all the way up.

I won't say I want for these things to happen. Just that they might. It's possible. Then, what would I do? I wonder what would happen. I think maybe when you die you relive your life, over and over again. That wouldn't be so bad. I'd be happy again, as I was happy once. As I was happy for a long time. For the longest time. And happy as I was last spring.

Now I feel like throwing up again. Strange, how pain turns itself to nausea for me, always has. And I'm thinking fragmentally, in ten different languages at once, like colours sifting out of a prism.

You know, I read that file. I watched those tapes. I know the problems I had as a little one, the problems I still have. I laughed at them. I acted like they didn't bother me. But they did. All week, I've tried to apologize, though I'm not sure how I can. I've tried to apologize for having been what I was, the child I was. But...

She just said they did it because they loved me. And I don't know where that leaves us now; perhaps merely exhausted, perhaps something more. She tells me, these are your problems, not mine, don't you dare pin your problems on me. No. I won't. My problems are mine alone. If anything, I pin yours on me, because I read that file.

I read that file. I'm sorry.