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crimesididntcommit · 15 days

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pushing silk.

by veronica emilyn.

more and more every day, ramona had lost another part of her.

nights had given way to endless thoughts, looping and coiling around in her head, and lenore could hear them, too, so deeply were they linked. …nothing’s ever enough, and everything is too much. i am never enough, and i am always too much…

they’d lived in that house together for what felt like always, but if it was, then always meant two years. ramona said as much when they first moved in, on that first night, as branches scraped the windows and wind blew outside.

“i already can’t remember that other place” she’d said, eyes shining into lenore’s, her arm under her head in their brand new bed.

“why would we want to?” lenore shrugged, then rolled on top of her to move inside of what was beneath.

they’d tried to get away from where they used to be, and with it, who they were. ramona had needs, lenore knew, and nothing seemed to satisfy them in time, alien even to her, unaware of what she wanted or what she had to have, only knowing the sense of loss or absence in its disappearance or nonexistence. but lenore was trying to fill that hole for her, with whatever might fit down inside.

in every corner of every room, they’d hidden letters to each other, some just scraps, small notes, soft reminders of who they were, of who they wanted to be in their own eyes. in those early days, they’d left no place deprived of small secrets, soft confessions of all that mouths would get so flustered from spitting out.

“sometimes i wish i could swallow your letters right down,” ramona told lenore, and lenore wrapped her in a hug.

lenore had chose not to hear the tired tone in ramona’s voice.

II.

bathroom doors couldn’t lock tightly enough to keep the paramedics from finding her, wrists run red over porcelain sink, eyes empty, her hair so perfectly out of place, lips parted, and then everything about her went blank. not blank like canvas, full of possibility, but blank like nothing, so much empty space that no big bang, no great display could ever hope to fill.

when they got to the facility, ramona said nothing, just as she hadn’t on the way there, lenore’s soft hands stroking her matted hair. “i’m right here, shhhhh, i’m right here,” and if ramona understood her shooshing, she certainly seemed to obey, not a single sound coming out. “we’ve got to get you someplace safe.”

the someplace safe they put her in after her wounds had healed enough was a place where the lost could never sleep, and in the evenings standing in the trees that circled all around, lenore could hear so many screams, so many voices bellowing, guttural sobs and lovesick laments, the cries of mothers whose children had ran into traffic, and children who, though their bodies had grown, never knew what it meant to feel safe, for security to be a state found at rest and not achieved through perpetual anxiety and vigilance and dread. but for all of those voices, carrying, carrying, ramona’s never reached.

that first morning there, lenore had waited all night to see her again, and when she walked into the room she thought that ramona was waiting there for her. in the center of an invisible circle, ramona sat, legs crossed, head down, hair hiding her painted porcelain eyes; her makeup hadn’t been removed, and she’d not done much of anything to wear it off.

“i’m right here,” lenore said, “i’m right here. can you speak to me?”

ramona didn’t move, didn’t flinch, didn’t anything. lenore, with soft fingertips, pressed them to the underside of ramona’s chin and tilted her face up, and the orderly who watched thought it looked like someone leaning in for their first kiss, but nothing moved on ramona’s lips.

“they said they’ll get you better here, i swear. you’ll be better soon. and then — and then you can come back, you can come back home. and it’ll be just like you left it — better than, even. i promise.”

but ramona showed no signs of listening, and when lenore went to leave she told herself so many things to explain why, that she must have been so tired, that there was no rush to say anything at all after all that she had bled, that once the doctors had stabilized her with the right kinds of medications and enough time had gone by it would all be like before, or, she told herself as much as she told ramona, “better than.”

lenore painted all the walls of their house that easter egg blue ramona had always longed for, and she hid new letters in all their private spots, slips and pages, stacks and tatters, all of them variations on the same theme — “i’m sorry and i love you so much.”

she found a note she’d never read before, written in ramona’s familiar hand:

we’re not the kind they cry about, darling; we’re not the kind they cry about. it’s not “getting better”, it only gets worse, and deep down you know they’ll put us in a hearse and nothing will matter, they’ll put our dead names on our graves and nothing will matter at all, and then there will be you, blind forevermore, seeing just as much as you did when you were alive, you and your goddamned eyes. you will be complicit. you will have let it all come to this. i wish i had it in me to set fire to these fucking walls, to set fire to it all. can’t you feel it already? it’s already there, lenore. the fire is already there, you just can’t see it yet, and when the wallpaper coils like ash and debris falls from the roof in flames you’ll still be there, telling me it’s all going to be okay as we smile and burn away.

lenore didn’t know when this was from, but she knew not to take it to heart — when ramona got into her moods, after all, she was the first to admit she could get carried away, and soon it would all be better again. and when those moods lifted, ramona was a lightning bug, dancing in the night, lighting up the world’s eyes.

the country was starting to hate girls like them — well, not “starting,” because it always had — but what was once something they had been able to ignore had begun to take new shapes, bigger ones, ones with teeth and words and pens and chants and marches, headlines and statistics, so-called “experts” and “activists” and people who said they’d been like them but had changed their minds, all that could take their being away.

but lenore had no place for dwelling on such terrible things, unlike ramona.

ramona only focused on the darkness that had existed before and had stayed awake and waited, loomed, dripped down through the cracks in the ceiling and punctures in the veins and spread, and she’d insisted it was rising up again. lenore had no time for such catastrophizing — things had a way of working themselves out, didn’t she know? could ramona really say things were worse than they used to be? would wallowing change anything at all? lenore knew which direction the arc of history bent toward, whether ramona believed it or not.

when they stopped being able to get their hormones from the doctors they’d been seeing, ardent on doing it “right,” ramona had broken down, though not quite like now, and lenore had assured her what she always did: you can’t give up. everything is going to be alright. everything is going to be fine.

at times lenore had given in to a bitterness she shuddered to admit. did ramona ever stop to consider the way that her tantrums affected her? when she drank too much and lost her mind did she ever think that her pity parties were excuses for it all? why wouldn’t she go to the hospital, if it was really all so bad? why did it take someone else being in control to make her go?

but now lenore had left those grievances behind: she only cared to have her baby back again, to tell her how sorry she was, to tell her how much she really meant all those lovely words on all those lovely notes and how all of those fights and all of those moments of petty indulgence had meant nothing at all.

when days went on too long and nights seemed to never end, when all the weight of everything got to be too much inside and neither could speak what needed to bubble out from inside of them, it was through their little letters that they could speak, always.

III.

the next day, ramona seemed unchanged.

the day after that, lenore realized something — she couldn’t hear her ramona’s thoughts anymore.

that was the night she’d stopped sleeping, and started staying outside in the woods, listening for that voice that filled her up so much.

“she’s not catatonic” the nurses explained to her.

“then what the fuck is she?” lenore spat, and though she’d lost a lady’s tone, that masculine edge she’d worked so hard to lose returning, the nurse remained unchanged.

“…ma’am, we don’t know.”

that wasn’t good enough.

nothing was good enough.

maybe ramona had a point sometimes.

when ramona’s wrists healed and still she stayed unchanged, no words escaping, lenore parted the hair from ramona’s eyes and lifted the lids with her fingers. ramona looked right into her, then beyond her, as if lenore was never there at all.

what could it be like in there for her? how lonely must she feel? whatever meds they had her on didn’t seem to be helping, and lenore knew that by now. ramona’s hormones hadn’t been injected in weeks, but lenore felt with certainty that this was for the better, that it would all be better soon.

lenore went home and wrote new letters, stacking them on top of the old, certain that once ramona came home, all this sea of unspoken affinity would wash her emptiness away.

she’d still found herself unable to sleep, and those stranger voices filled her ears, even once she’d started staying home instead of standing, swaying with those trees. they were whispering, scratching, a soft scraping that only increased once lenore invited it in, so desperate to hear anything, anything at all.

so many things only enter us once we answer their call.

finally, lenore slept, and in her sleep she was filled up with words, and when she woke she said aloud:

“it has to be this way.”

she wrote pages upon pages, knowing ramona would understand once she read them, would hear her loss and her love and her needs and her wants and all the private spots lenore worked so very hard to hide from everyone else alive, that all she had to do was take these pages in.

she had to take these pages in.

a doctor had explained to her that ramona seemed able to recognize things, she “just [didn’t] respond to them,” and lenore knew that once ramona got her wish, she’d understand it all.

IV.

sometimes, ramona would complain of paper cuts, little slits on her fingers from pulling notes out of drawers and cracks in the walls. if lenore wanted her to be able to speak again, she knew the last thing she needed was to cut poor ramona’s lovely throat. physical sensations have emotional implications, even lenore understood that. for all the times ramona had shouted at her that she didn’t really ever understand anything anyone was feeling, for all that everyone had left lenore before, friends and lovers alike, she understood this one crucial thing.

she wanted ramona to feel her softness, to sense the sweetness inside of her, and so she wrapped these letters in beautiful squares of silk, a button down cut up to make these new shapes.

by this point, the nurses had started to leave lenore alone when she would visit ramona, always so many more to tend to, always more hopeful patients to see, and what could lenore really do? upset ramona, “the unchanging girl”, as they had started to call her?

lenore basked in their solitude.

“i have something to give to you,” she said, her voice like gentle rain. “and i know — i know you can understand. i know that you’ll understand, i know.”

ramona’s lips parted as gently as ever, and then lenore had to get past her teeth. gritted, but barely clenched, she worked them apart and felt them scrape at her skin, red rivulets brushed against the roof of ramona’s mouth, and lenore felt something swell inside her — it was something close to wonderful, to know ramona had her in her now.

“i’m sorry for this,” she cried, tears coming out. “darling, i know that this must hurt. i know how much you hurt. but it’s gonna comfort you. it’s the only way that you can understand.”

pushing silk deeper into her mouth, lenore waited for ramona’s shouts, but as her throat started to move, nothing came out.

something was still so wrong — why did something have to still be so wrong? — lenore knew that ramona could read all those words, and knew that she would understand them, that she’d know this gift from her as what it was: her love, all the way down.

and then it hit her, that for all this intimacy, of course it had to hurt, and, her poor angel, she just couldn’t scream anymore.

so she started screaming for her, both of their throats changing, all their shouts pouring out, the way an expecting parent eats for two, lost in mutual ache.

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