This blog is a Monument to the City of Reading, my home away from home since I was a young child.
When I was 24 it became my home in reality for two years; I was made a ward of the state there.
I fell in love with a man name David in a very sick way.
I had learned to associate love with a man I feared–my father.
I feared David.
I made him date me because he took me as he took so many other women and I refused to be used and thrown away like that. It just couldn’t be.
Somehow in the course of things he fell in love with me and I responded in kind as a woman does.
But it wasn’t a well love.
My marriage spiraled off of that but became a thing in itself. As David stayed in the hospital and I had left. I couldn’t get away from it. For years I went back to visit, wrote letters, made phone calls. OF COURSE it was very inappropriate but my whole life was. I was so sorry to hear that he has died. I can’t be sure of it but that was what I heard. I know he strove towards Christianity at the end and I was so glad to know that. I know that he struggled horribly with the devil and I am sorry that I so publicly associated my struggles with Satan with my relationship with him. It was just something about the City of Reading at that time. It was at a certain point in the state of decline. I know that they were trying to welcome new people, new growth, and join with society that was making its way towards them, the City is so lost in the outlands, so far from major cities. My psychiatrist on the inpatient Unit at the Reading Hospital before everything that happened to me told me a little about this.
However strange and awful what happened to me in 1986 and afterwards and again over the last year was, there is a weird beauty that attracts me–It all started with my reading Tolkien there. Daemons and sprites populate the imaginations of the people; and I met a man from Mars and a man whose wife was in outer space. Or maybe he was just playing with me. I began to see Jesus everywhere and this felt crazy to me and it was! But it was my NON-belief that was the crazy part of it, I slowly learned as I made my whay around the WHOLE United States after I finally left four years later.
This morning I was sure that I was finally moving into my dying after moving through all that I did. I slept a bit and rested a bit and still felt that way. Finally, I slept for two full hours and now I feel more positive.
I will be closing this blog.
I leave it as a monument to the strangely beautiful City of Reading.
They hurt me.
Now they have put me back together in the strangest way.
I will always remember David.
And Tolkien.
and getting trapped in a book by a man MUCH MUCH smarter than me
after going to Harvard…
somehow I met the man I was to marry and we left.
He is gone now and my child is here.
I have learned that I don’t have to know everything.
If I in some Godforsaken way ended up back there again please no that I do not engage in illicit sexuality any more. When I was a young woman I was not taught properly. You can know this because I CANNOT do so any more, those parts are gone. I was asked if I had sexual protection the first time that I was at Wernersville and I said that I did. I said that I had a diaphragm. This was such a shocker. She did not bother to enquire further. OF COURSE the diaphragm, which my mother had provided before I went to college, was at home in my drawer at my mother’s house. I DID NOT bring it to the state hospital with me. Somehow I did not get pregnant.
That had to be cleared up once and for all.
The several men that I got involved with knew how not to get me pregnant.
I went to a deep and sweet and strange place and strange place in my soul at Wernersville (it will always be WSH/WSU to me) after the incident of sexual torture in the ICU because of the clamped catheter in the ICU at the Reading Hospital. Because of the recent incidents at Haven Pagoda and Tower Units and the recovery period at Philhaven I think I can begin to let these intense periods go and begin to grasp the more normal and mundane parts of my life framed within those times for what they are. A somehow beautiful marriage. A torturous motherhood because of two abortions. A beautiful love for my son because of the incredible journey of the last year and a half since June 29th (?) of 2021 when I got the wart/mole removed from the left side of my nose and moved hard toward a diagnosis of organic personality disorder. This has slowly cleared up the bizarre diagnostic puzzle of my life.
I’m remembering my friend Robyn in Florida and when I got out of the Hospital after the serious Klonopin overdose that gave me brain damage and my face and eyes got so weird, I had to walk about 5 blocks through the neighborhood to his house to pick up the keys to my house. It was very frightening. He gave me some (?Amish?) friendship bread. a small slice. I guess he didn’t know what else to do. I stood there and ate it.
I said to my mother, if you have to leave a person or a place, you put one foot in front of another, take one step, take another step, start walking and keep walking…
AFTERWORD
Oh, so, I was naming a lot of Saints at Haven Tower Unit and I want to name one in Florida, Robyn’s wife, Joann
Un.Bon.Mot 