Allison's Archives

Peel your eyelids back with the strength that it takes to shoulder the weight of your mother when she is old and can no longer walk. Run your hands through your hair and stop at the nape of your neck, feel for your heart. Is it alive? Are you alive? You do not see the ceiling when your eyes adjust to the light of noon; you see your grave and it is shaped like your cradle. You want to drift back into unconsciousness but I’m telling you to get up! I’m towering over you without love, with worry like a bandaid to a bullet wound. Get up! One limb at a time, march into the bathroom. We have to go, we have to go, it doesn’t matter where. You stop by the door and say you need five minutes—you only need to wet your hair.

At the dining table, you lose the definition of comfort. You shift in your seat and adjust the distance of the chair to the table but nothing seems to close the gap between you and the meaning of life. You drag your fork around the plate like you drag your legs like you dragged your blanket when curfew rang in your childhood days. You push your food around like a child refusing peas like you refusing that there are two ways out of the same tunnel. The juice to your right remains full, no lip stains on the glass rim, but I know you are all emptied out.

You sit across from me with your mouth sewn shut with the thread your grandmother used to fix fallen buttons back onto your Sunday shirt, and the urge to throw every sharp object in the house down the trash chute, and throw every layer of duvet I own over you washes over me. You say you are scared but as a writer, I know that is the incorrect word—you are numb; I’m scared.

If I cannot write your peace into existence, I will ruin my books to build four walls around just so you could feel safe. I will line my pens against the sky to fashion a roof over your head. I will sit with you in this unbearable, terrible silence and hold my tears until your lungs remember how to expand again—and they will expand again. For every dig of the shovel you slash into the ground, I will fill it twice until we have a castle fit for a stitched-back young thing. And I know it is heavy, I know it hurts. I know it feels like the sky is out of reach and the ground is hollowing beneath you, but the weight and the pain are proof that you cared. At the gates, God will ask you for evidence of your living and I need you to be able to show that. I cannot survive heaven alone. I cannot survive your sadness.

And is it so difficult to comprehend?—the concept that I might transgress all seven sins and conjure out of thin air an eighth and walk barefoot around hell’s circles and mount Ceberus’ head to a wall with a blunt spear just so you might have a sliver of a chance at being happy again? Even if that happiness does not consist of me?

In your sleep, before you peel back your eyelids that constantly threaten to roll back down like a Sisyphean boulder, your arms are always outstretched like you are reaching for something to prove that reality exists and is worth fighting for. I need you to reach when you are awake.

So get out of bed. Tell me you only need five minutes. Wet your hair. Look in the mirror and will yourself to be alive. I am right here to hold your hand until you decide to let it go (and you have). I am right here to tame your bedhead morning after morning until I can no longer find you in your bed (and I have).