Routine Healing

Putting myself back together was a boring, organized process. A one-thousand-piece puzzle left on the coffee table for months, or in this case, years. Finally sitting down to frame myself in sky and earth. Painstakingly searching the jumble for all those matching hooks and crevices. After the chaos of him, simply paying the bills on time was a cathartic experience. Routine was my remedy. Work away the day Monday through Friday. Come home when it’s dark. Stop at Walgreens to purchase a bottle of wine and pizza rolls. Cigarettes if needed. Home to one-and-a-half glasses of wine and the allowance of one orgasmic cigarette. The order was important. Wine on an empty stomach, cigarette immediately after, then food. Increase the effect with minimal poisoning of the body.

Every Friday night I scrubbed my tiny apartment, as if bleach could erase memories as well. Not stopping until the Formica surfaces were gleaming and I could eat off the floor. Rubbing raw that same place I had once lay, exhausted, bruised, and humiliated; begging for it to end. All this routine followed in silence. God, silence was bliss. It turns out that being knocked around a few times necessitates an equivalent measure of quiet to tidily place the pieces of brain back together. A bruised body needs only time to heal, but a bruised mind is a different thing. Was I healing or burying? I didn’t want to think about it one bit. I only wanted to exist, and was that too much to ask?

After an acceptable amount of solitude, I was given a dog. One who was equally roughed up. An ugly, scared little thing with the faintest flicker of fight in her eyes. Bone thin with wisps of wiry fur. Molted like some parrot dog. Perennially coiled to spring at the slightest provocation. A dog to whom survival is the only instinct. “I thought of you,” my coworker said gently, bringing this rat-dog into my office. Knowing, somehow. Perhaps the mask was slipping. It turns out abused dogs also need routine, and soon she and I begrudgingly ceded the ends of the couch to one another.

On Saturday mornings, we would get up at 8:00 a.m. in that cursed king size bed. Always on the left side. Slowly blinking awake to glaring light through the dirty, chipped blinds. Still, always the left side. “We’ll get curtains today,” I’d mutter, for the hundredth time. The dog wore a dubious expression. But, that was how she always looked. We both knew I would not cover up the window. At that time I had this recurring dream of bursting through the window of a skyscraper. I was alone in the building, drawn magnetically to its glass portals. Turning in slow motion to face my doom. Sound and place fading away as I gathered speed in a heart-pumping run. A delirious laugh ripping through me in that knock-out smash. Limbs flailing like a puppet with cut strings. No bones, all deflated muscles and useless flesh. Floating weightless with glass and blood for one glorious moment. Then the nauseating fall to blackness. Something about floating before falling felt like an untasted drug. The control over my own demise, intoxicating.

Those mornings I’d dress slowly, trying to walk the line between indistinct and presentable for our trip to the dog park. On the way, I stopped for one small, black coffee. The drive over was tuned to Car Talk, and on the way back, to Wait Wait… Don’t Tell Me! Peter Sagal was the only man I could trust at the time. Windows cracked in that old gold Civic. Both of us were full of anticipation and dread. We hated the dog park. It was loud and full of other humans and dogs. Annoying happy things who wanted to sniff and chat and say, “Hello, how are you? Want to play? What is she? Where’d you get her? Are you sure she’s ok?” We rebuffed every approach in turn. Side by side, backed up against the chain link fence. Observing; as an outsider might, or one who has been abroad for a very long time and forgotten the little customs of polite society. The look of one unsure how to act and using silence as a rather effective shield. Neither of us belonged there. But it was routine. When we got back, it was the weekend’s allotment of a mid-morning cigarette off a caffeine buzz, and then Nora Ephron, Wes Anderson, or the Coen brothers. Tipping into worlds where my mind melded with dreams and reality seemed far away. Slowly killing daylight. If I was feeling adventurous, I’d walk around Home Goods or Target, imagining a life with shared space to fill. Domestic dreams I’d probably fall short of again.

Sundays held lunch with my parents and grandparents. Dad frowned at the obvious whiff of cigarettes, but I pretended they never noticed. Listening to their easy conversation reminded me that sometimes church gossip could be the only bad thing in a person’s life. If that was the case, I hoped someone was gossiping about me.

The snowstorm in February was a whitewashed wonder of stillness. I chain smoked that night. Snuggled between the warmth of my apartment and the chill of the cracked patio sliding door, I cried watching Fried Green Tomatoes.

-Kelsey Johnson

Kelsey Johnson is a previously unpublished author, unless you count fanfiction.net circa 2002. Her writing focuses on essays and poetry that draw from personal experiences with domestic violence and growing up in evangelical Christianity. She started writing as a teenager and has continued through adulthood while working professionally in advertising. She resides in Richmond, Virginia, with her partner and their three dogs.