Disconnect

(in response to Grief, a poem by William Matthews)

Disconnect. Hard to get a hold on. Domestic life. Have you turned it off at the plug? Disconnected the wires from the source. Lying in bed. Comfort of connection or huff and puff, the turning away of disconnect. The pronouncement “you’re mean!”. How to find one’s way back. Back past the hurt or beyond. Accepting the small slings and arrows of everyday life. The accidental indifferences. To wallow or pass by; to brush off incidentals as snowflakes on a toughened wool shoulder. Wool. Coarse, firm, compacted, protective. Brushes off easily. Keeps me warm. Why do we hurt each other so casually? Is it really hurt? Are we “just teasing”? Or trying to wound by stealth. To punish for unacknowledged disappointments. The falling short of expectation, of ideal. I’m thinking now of how the disconnected relationships in my family of upbringing are so connected back through the generations with previous familial disconnect. The cold, punishing father, whose own father was inexplicably (to him) sent to boarding school, the only child in the family to have been so. Being bright, an indicator you could fend for yourself. Unspoken traumas. Rippling out into subsequent generations, themselves a ripple of something former. All my aunts and uncles across the world, all emigrated. Before Skype. Even now my sister in New Zealand. Skype itself so easily disconnected, unanswered, unavailable. You want contact when you want, when you need me. You do not care to make the ongoing effort of regular contact, or connection. Yet I can do the same too. We come together, in harmony for a time. And then it seems too much, too intense an obligation, curtailing my/your freedom. We withdraw. The intimacy receded. Gone but not forgotten. There to be reclaimed. We keep coming back. Reassuring. No matter how much you piss me off, I still care enough to find a way to let you know, gradually over time – well to an extent anyway. It seems endlessly ongoing sometimes, seeking acknowledgment. Finding clarity through denial.

Glass around me. I can see but I can't touch. I can't feel anything that doesn't come from myself. The world doesn't touch me. I am constantly cold. I am disconnected from myself, from others. Am I alive? I feel pain. Pain of being unable to feel. Sadness so loud inside me I can't hear anything else.

In a corner of a room I have no attachment to, I roll myself up and cut myself in strips, in bits, with long strokes. The physical pain will shock me out of this maddening numbness. I bleed, therefore I am human. Am I crying for help? I don't know what that means; no one can hear me when I lock myself in here. No one can help. I hide my marks. I don't want the world to see how painful it is to be alive. Inside the glass, I process life, I plot my escape. If there is a way forward I will find it. Just not today. Today I am weak and bleeding and lost. But tomorrow... There is always tomorrow.