Excerpt: Mama's House for Waifs and Strays

It's hard to say these words. Know that above everything else.

I've had a thousand people tell me that talking will help – but that help can't come when your words are trying to sprout from a desert. My mouth dry and my tongue heavy, and all of the right words simultaneously turning invisible, hiding behind my teeth, crawling down my throat. The words are choked back, in my glottis, in my soul, in my blood.

So instead, I'm writing.

They told me that pen on paper must be the best substitute for my speech, driven hard into into that direction. Telling all, baring all. Not to a man in a white coat, legs crossed behind a desk. Watery smile, boxes of tissues, the smell of fear all around us as I stutter through my refrain of -I can't, I can't- all the while he still smiles. Smiles empty like my mouth. And he breathes through his mouth, wheezing heavily, then says,

“Say it slowly, forget the details.”

But the details are what I remember: the cold wall; my foot burning against the radiator; my tears blotted on the pillow case. Details are all there are and will be. There can be little else for me to say. I remember. Vivid. Vividly. But the sounds to make the words don't come. They just hover in my head, soundless, sometimes whispering, words of taffeta, tulle, danced across a bathroom floor. So, I croak, at this man in white, this wannabe angel who says he can help me, I croak at him. Tiny, voiced liquids, dark vowels and voiceless bilabial plosives. Dental fricatives dance with velars, glottal stops, alveolar affricates. They all fall, and I feel his gaze fall with them, our eyes both searching the carpet by my feet. We both watch them sink, under, beneath the floorboards, into the Earth. I start to cry.

Then I imagine him saying,

“It's okay. You said them. We can sort them out.”

And then he begins to claw through the carpet and grab at them, at all of these frail, tiny sounds, and then I help, and we're grabbing grabbing grabbing, and all they want it freedom, but we retrieve them, and we lay them down on his desk, bleeding, panting, trying to turn themselves into something else, anything else. Aspirated, glottalized, or animal shaped biscuits. Anything but. We try to slot them together, but they change too fast and fall apart in our hands, soggy, silently sobbing, and when I step back to give up, my hands are covered in blood.

But it's my blood, and my words that are bleeding. And this doesn't really happen.

Instead, he's handing me a box of tissues as my tears stream down my cheeks and onto my lap, onto the hands I'm staring at, imagining what a voiceless alveolar fricative would look like shivering in my hands, alone. And he scrawls in his book. Spidery words which always stay on the page, are always there, captured and unmovable. And then, for the first time I listen when he says,

“Why don't you write it down?”

So here I am, writing it down.