I am not allowed to be angry. I don’t mean I’m not allowed to yell or break things or act out, though that is strictly forbidden as well. I mean I am not allowed to feel the emotion itself. It has no place in my being, no space it can comfortably take up. Instead, it squeezes into other homes, transforms into anxiety or rejection or, a personal favorite, self-loathing.

Rage enveloped me in my mother’s womb. It bathed me in amniotic fluid that permeated my cells, and developed who I was about to become. The origin of this rage could have evolved from my mother’s life events. My mother from Japan, who immigrated to America a decade after WWII ended. Whose legs carried her as she and her family ran from their house after it was bombed and burned to the ground, barely making it out alive.

It all comes down to an email.
You're not welcome back without a letter,
explaining your illness.

It was a Sunday in September and I was nursing one of the worst hangovers I’d had since college. Hours of restless sleep, lying completely still on my back in the dark, choking down stale crackers only to lose them again a few moments later; this became the day’s very unwelcome routine.

It all started last March. I was looking out the window while driving to a regular doctor appointment. It was a gloomy morning. I looked at the road and saw all the cows and farms on the country road that led me to the doctor’s office.

Leaving cardiac rehab, I don’t know yet that I will binge today. It’s after the binge that I realize it was a shadow clinging to my heel since I opened my eyes and stumbled to the bathroom to pee and brush my teeth.

I remember the day I started taking antidepressants. I waited a couple days after picking up the prescription, partially in denial and partially terrified. I was a teacher at the time and had arrived at school early, scrambling to get some-sort-of-ready for the day.

My firstborn was a seven pound preemie. He was born at thirty-five and a half weeks, barely qualifying for the moniker. I only use it in air quotes, out of respect for the mothers of what I call real preemies.

When I was little I would lean out the window of our second floor Mexico City home and sing to the stars.  I would make up my little melodies as the evening lingered on with my little brother joining me in my serenade to the “little lights up in the sky.”  

I was always working hard to keep up appearances with family, friends and anyone who I thought I needed to impress. In high school, I experienced fear. It was a fear of being caught-out for not understanding what was being taught in the classroom. In no time at all, I became good at acting. I possessed all the skills necessary to give a convincing performance and I was very believable.

Standing in front of the woman who ran the camp, I was ashamed. “Sorry,” I said, weeping too hard to stop.

“You caved,” one of my eleven-year old bunkmates hissed as we left her office.

“Jellyfish spine,” another said. 

It never happened at Isaly’s ice cream joint, the first place I waitressed.  

Well, waitressing is probably not the right word for what I did. It was more like order-taking, burger-flipping, shake-making, and plopping-on-the-counter-for-the-customer work. That demanding all-in-one food industry post that so many have as their first or second or forever job. 

It was almost three years ago when I went over to his house. He was a sophomore in college that already lived off campus and that was kind of cool. He was into anime and when I had been the desk manager at the dorm he had lived in the year before that was how we became friends. Kind of. 

Childhood games, such as “boys catch the girls,” taught us how to behave and what to feel about ourselves. It taught us that we are not important unless we are pursued.

It trembles in my diaphragm.
The stretch and turn of muscle
guiding sound,

It was over a year later that I realized what had happened. It may sound strange to you that I didn’t know it had. Wouldn’t you know if that kind of thing had happened to you? I wasn’t unconscious or inebriated. I remembered that evening, those moments in that room, but I didn’t realize it had happened. Because it wasn’t the kind of thing I was taught about in health class. Instead, I was taught about herpes and genital warts and obesity.

Train station toilets and hospital rooms, especially bed seven, smell the same. Like chlorine and baking soda and coercion and cold. I’m seventeen and I wear my school uniform. No - she wears her school uniform, three layers of khaki and stockings. He wears a suit and carries an umbrella. 

Over a decade ago, I had a best guy friend with whom I shared a great deal of my life. He was the picture perfect, textbook “nice guy.” Unfortunately, as is common, when someone seems nearly too good to be true, they often are. This guy was my best friend. And I his. I had always suspected that he wanted more than my friendship, but I wasn’t interested in taking our relationship to that place. I thought this was something that he would respect. I was wrong.

A body barely breathed
Inhale
A lizard lands
Exhale
His eyes give fire

On an August day in 1988 I walked home from my summer job at the Farish Street YMCA. I was fifteen and a freshman in the Lanier High School band. Dressed in shorts and a t-shirt I moved along the sidewalk of Monument Street quick and unresponsive to the honking horns and catcalls from the fluid noon traffic. A man in torn blue jeans walked towards me with a brown bag in hand.  He brought the bag to his lips then howled when he returned it to his side. He looked at me then said,” GOOD STUFF!”