Sick Work

This is sick work, but it has to be done.

Now that I have been able to relinquish the pitiable condition with which I have been enmeshed in the WORST SUFFERING since I was in my late 20’s, I can turn my focus to the cause I planned to pick up two years ago, along with several others that have been met.

Oh how weird. This is the way that I used to write in high school, sort of. Please bear with me, some things are changing.

So, I wanted to talk about the bombing of Japan in World War II, how it continues to influence us, (and them), and what to do about it. The way I phrased that was as “Acting out the soul of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.”

I remember banging my head against the wall in my bedroom at night in grade school, just once, just slightly. Because of my mother and my brother carrying on in his bedroom. I used to jump from the door onto the small carpet, and from there onto the bed. Once on the bed, I got under the covers and pulled my limbs under the blankets and pulled the covers up to my neck and pulled my hands under the covers and laid there motionless. After that, I don’t remember.

Actually, I do. I remember in my mind I saw the faces of neighbors looking in at me through the gaps in the curtains. Sometimes I pictured walking on my parents’ graves. Oh, please realize that I wrote a story in preschool called “the Bloody Cemetary” and liked to visit graveyards. Later on, things worsened, and I dreamed of dying in my sleep, I TRIED to die in my sleep. And then the alarm went off in the morning and I had to get up. It was the worst moment. Every weekday was the same. Then once I got to school I morphed into me at school. Some of the teachers didn’t like me. It hurts me to think of how much I was hurting and how they treated me.

So, what does this have to do with Hiroshima and Nagasaki? Obviously, I know about pain, weird pain, lingering, endless pain without a reason. I have already talked about infant torture but just let that go right back down again as quickly as it came up. I was going off inside like a nuclear reactor myself, half-lives of pain.

Kent School was where I got over this. A place of peace and blessed assurance. Even though I didn’t understand at the time.

After I got out, after something that happened at home, I wanted to join the army. I didn’t want to go to college. But 1) that wouldn’t have been permitted in my family and 2) I was way too fragile.

I had written my college personal essay about running away from home over the summer which I did do. It mentioned Samuel Johnson’s “Rasselas” about a Prince who goes out searching for meaning in life and a long time later I read Ecclesiastes in the Bible, a similar story. My college rommate A, over the years, after the state hospital, said that I was on an “allegorical journey” and that about sums it up. I read the Tolkien ring cycle when I was at the state hospital. I so desperately wanted to do the normal thing and hold a job but that wasn’t possible for me any more after something that happened because of the overdose that I took.

So, I met a man and we had a kid. And that was the meaning that I was looking for.

As for Acting out the soul of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, I just realized that I am not equipped to do this.

I have a friend who is (A) and I pray that she will accept this commission.