Dear Vincent,
The best will be if I heal my knee, and maybe also my personality before
irreversible climate change sets in. Hopefully, that will leave enough time for
the low-grade literary masterpiece, and the Oprah Projects too.
Today my Pragmatic and Optimistic Darling Bestie gave me bodywork in
exchange for when I cleaned her house for free during the second week of July
when I was relatively underemployed.
It seems the part of me that wants to kill myself is at the back of my
right rib cage, just behind my liver. Maybe it’s too much trail mix and/or
maybe some kind of detox tea will fix it. Inside my shoulders and chest, I am
crying and also worried I am dying of the inflamed mole that sits around my
sacrum and lowest vertebrae. If I die of the inflamed mole, it will be all my
fault for not washing the pesticides off of the grapes, and for being such a
bad sleeper, and pathologically accommodating. Life causes a lot of damage and
healing takes a really, really long time. I wonder where all your sadness
is.
Love Erica.
Dear Vincent,
Dr. Joel does not think I meet the criteria for borderline personality
disorder. Clap loud. He also said it does not sound like I ever found myself. I
am not sure where else to look, and I said this to Dr. Joel. The recommendation
is to stop seeing you within a few months and try therapy with someone else,
either a sliding scale option or subsidized by my father. Dr. Joel said
that therapy is not about drying your tears but figuring out what is wrong and
acting on it. He asked if I was an empty person, and I said I never understand
what that means.
Simon, my dead ex-ex (ex-point five?) boyfriend who jumped off a
building is not quite famous for saying, “I wonder what I’d be like if, like
you, I’d been sent to psychologists from the age of eleven. If a bunch of
people had played around in my head the way children play in the bathtub-I
think that by now I would have died ten times already. I’ve already died ten
times anyways.”
The bathtub analogy is not spectacular in English. Do you think it
works better in French? Sometimes I feel like I’ve died seven times before
breakfast.
I know we can’t date, but there’s a nearby blood donor clinic on
Thursday. Wanna give blood platonically? Just kidding. I recently menstruated
most of my blood away anyways.
Thanks for all the times you’ve dried my tears.
Love, Erica.
Dear Vincent,
I forgot to say that Dr Joel calls friends with benefits, friends with
privileges. I think that was my favourite thing about him. When he stood up, it
looked like he was still sitting in a chair.
Basically what he said was, get your fucking shit together. In my life
whenever someone has told me this, I freeze or sob momentarily, or for weeks, then
I might make some vague progress, but often whatever I come up with entails
some sort of half assed coasting. And so I confirm how much I suck, although to
cut myself a break, most people’s lives end up following some kind of sad and
generic default setting.
The next thing I might write on
my wall could be, Fuck Mental Health. I appreciate your relative optimism, but
this may very well be my sad and generic default setting.
All that’s left to try is lifting weights, cervical orgasms, improved
lunch strategies, and perhaps a more well-paying and/or prestigious job that
doesn’t involve cleaning up other people’s messes. Though as you must know,
most jobs entail cleaning up other people’s messes. One way or another. The
last thing I might like to try is learning how to skateboard. I have a sexy new
compression sleeve for my knee. See you tomorrow.
Love, Erica.
 |
| Housemaid’s Knee, Clap Loud if You Believe in Borderline Personality Disorder |
Friday, August 17, 2018
Dear Everybody,
Vincent could not come to the blood donor clinic. He said that blood
made him uncomfortable, and so I apologized for discussing menstruation so
extensively in so many of our sessions, and he forgave me. The blood donor
clinic was full. They gave me some water that came in a plastic bottle which
innovative entrepreneurs can someday turn into fancy yoga pants.
Vincent and I will see each other again on Thursday, September 6, and
then one more time on Monday, September 17. After that, it will be Mondays
without Vincent forever, unless Vincent decides to make an unlikely generous contribution
to a beautiful blogging fairy tale, or to art.
On my way home from the blood donor clinic, I wept delicately on one
park bench, and in one alley.
Last November I thought maybe I could walk across Canada for mental
health the year I turned 33, but then I started micro-dosing on mushrooms, and then
I became a low-grade famous cleaning lady, and I got distracted, and now I have
what’s called, Housemaid’s Knee. Life plans always seem to stress me out or
elude me. I will be 33 on October 29. My favourite things to do are to walk and
to talk and write letters. My favourite things to buy are laundry soap, dish
soap, and vinegar.
This morning I woke up at 2:20 a.m. Six hours later, I was still awake,
and I wrote the names of The Beautiful Dead in smelly markers on the wall
underneath my mildly distorted foot whose chronic toenail fungus is not
illustrated. The names of the beautiful dead sprawl over to underneath my
highly disproportionate right leg, and symbolic pelvis and Vincent’s quote, “I’ve
heard worse.” Everybody likes Vincent’s sentence the best. Sentences that start
with everybody are my favourite. Both of these sentences are written on the
wall, beneath my highly disproportionate right leg, and symbolic pelvis, and
Vincent’s quote, “I’ve heard worse.”
At 8:47 a.m. I left to clean the Self-Mutilating Parrot Family’s house.
Everybody knows their parrot now flies free in a refuge in Oka. Or else it is
dead with the rest of the Beautiful Dead. Either way, the shit on the walls is
long gone.
Vincent said that my love for him was presenting a challenge to his
narcissism, both professionally and as a person, a person I only know eleven to
thirteen and a half real things about. Vincent says that everybody has
narcissism.
It was the second week in a row that I wept not all that delicately while
bending over the Self-Mutilating Parrot Family’s bathtub. I did an excellent
job, both on the weeping, and on the bathtub, but then I set off the Jacuzzi
function and the bathtub threw up, and I had to clean it twice.
Likely it was better that I ended up keeping all my blood for myself. I
needed my blood for the tears and for the bathtub. The second time, I used
bubble bath instead of dish soap. The Self-Mutilating Parrot Family never tends
to have all that much dish soap. Now their bathtub smells like a baby.
The Beautiful Dead are Simon Girard, Penelope Parkes, Jadwiga Lukasik,
Michael Stone, Tolulope llesanmi, Lia Kidner, Yarrow Viets, Doreen Wilson, and
possibly the Self-Mutilating Parrot.
Sometimes we are so lucky to weep not all that delicately while bending
over some overcommitted and chaotic household’s bathtub at 9:33 on a Friday
morning. And sometimes we are not all that lucky.
Everybody has to dry their own tears sometimes. Everybody has hard
days.
Love, Erica.
There will be one to three more Mondays without Vincent posts. Then I'll get to working on the screenplay. Unless Vincent decides to make an unlikely and generous contribution to a beautiful blogging fairytale, or to art. Either way, your letters to Vincent and to me remain forever welcome at the secret address ericaschmidt85(at)gmail(dot)come. Everybody has hard days sometimes. Someone is there for you when you feel most alone. Love always, Erica.
