Replace

I’m walking down the street toward the library, the familiar urban street where the bus used to take us before we had a car, and the woman in front of me flicks a cigarette ash which sparks down on the sidewalk, like the opposite of a firecracker. She turns and looks at me because I’m walking too close, and I pass around her, again too close, and go up into the library. For some reason, they’re closing at five today.

I hear my mom, sometimes, saying “you can’t manipulate me into saying that” when Tyler asked if she loved us. I remember Mike, my only enemy in youth group, declaring that a horrible thing to say.

“Don’t manipulate, don’t manipulate” might as well have been my mantra for years after that. I was like a Buddhist monk; there was no difference between this and “don’t desire, don’t want.”

“Don’t manipulate,” my bones tell me.

(I am at the core a manipulator. We all are. Everything we do affects something else. I am trying to be nonexistent.)

I can sense the ghost of the new job coach pressing on me from behind, pressuring me to leave and let her materialize, whoever she is, and take over where I’ve left off with my girl.

I feel the presence of my girl’s old job coaches, probably kind, probably delighted by her, as I sometimes am.

Maybe she’s made stronger by all this change, by the memories of all of us blending together, into an Ur-job-coach, or a super-friend or a platonic ideal.

Grandma wanted to grow some special kind of tree once, and I told her about a show I’d seen on PBS about grafting two trees together. She tried it. She cut down two of her trees, ones she’d wanted to cut down anyway, sawed one to a wedge-point, and the other to a V that would take the wedge. She bound them together tightly. I can’t remember the result.

My grandparents were replaced with other ones, better ones. These grandparents that are mine are grafted in – or rather, I am grafted into them. These grandparents are compensation for my own horrible, abusive and complicated biological grandparents.

Grandpa’s graft didn’t take, but Grandma’s did. I was bound to her tightly. Grandpa has grown into me with time, like a wisteria vine.

I am in this place again, and again it is inescapable. What is it about this town, the geography of my heart, that lulls me into the comfort of anxiety and neurosis? I love it, I think, but it’s bad for me. And I can’t leave it.

I asked you if you were going to kiss me good-bye, and you did. Everything that’s happened after that is an epilogue.

I have replaced all of my beliefs with nothing, with air. I have grafted a lifeless, waiting V into my soul and am waiting for a wedge to meet it and bind to me.

Or rather, I’ve rejected the original graft, the one that was working. I’ve gone back to the beginning, when I had nothing but “you can’t manipulate me.” I’ve gone back to when I had nothing.

“Don’t manipulate,” my soul tells me, “just wait.”

I am waiting, like a creature in the dark.

“You can’t manipulate me,” I didn’t think of as horrible. I thought of it as evidence – she was wrong to say it. She was wrong not to reassure. She had responsibilities. Everyone could see that she had responsibilities.

I wrote to my supervisor, telling her I was staying longer, telling her I’m not moving in January, telling her I want to keep my job for a few more months, that I’ll tell her when I’m going, that I’m not going yet.

I am always waiting, that lifeless V longing to be bound to something.

I can’t leave yet – it would be like stepping off a cliff into air.

I have anxiety attacks, which are new to me. I don’t understand where they’re coming from – it’s like they just appear, flare up, die at random. I need to surround myself with people, but there are only a few left: friends, my girl, anonymous newspaper staff. I’ve left my family with the old graft (I don’t want to meet them naked without a new one yet), with church, with Jesus, where they’ll be safe. I’ve left my brothers to their choices, incomprehensible to me. I never found a place for my mother. You kissed me good-bye already and this is an appendix.

These streets are my streets, like my own body. Very like my body: I think they’re cuter than I did before, and I still don’t always like them.

Driving away last week, I cried until my vision blurred. Back at the beginning, before this life, I’d thought what I thought then – that it might be easier, the scythe-like swipe across the left lane, into the median divider, across the highway, than this.

I thought what I’d thought two weeks before: I wonder if they know what I would want – that if I died on the highway, if I killed anyone else, I would want them to remember the guilt. This would be their remembrance, to make restitution to my victims, always, in penance. What they would remember of me would be reenacted and purged in apology.

I am a manipulator, as a Buddhist is imprisoned in flesh.

These streets are the only ones I know as I know my own body – before language, before sensation, before God.

I asked if you were going to kiss me good-bye, and the ghosts immediately began pressing on me, the future (anxiety) and the past (depression) and I welcomed them because that is what I was waiting for. I always wanted to go back to the beginning. I always wanted to be ungrafted, to be nothing, to be a V, waiting. Everything I gain is a manipulation. My mother didn’t love us. Everything that’s happened after that is a postlogue.

It’s evidence, you understand, of who I am: “you can’t manipulate me.” I can’t. I can’t; she’s immovable. You’re immovable. I chose you because you could kiss me good-bye.

You did, and now this is the introduction, for me, the beginning of the beginning. These are the streets that are like my blood vessels, and this is the anxious, sacred, waiting creature I was at first. This is the pitiful, tiny, secret self I have always been – afraid, afraid, and alone. I manipulated you to get to her, this small waiting V. (I knew it was wrong, like a Buddhist wanting, wanting, but the only selfishness I have been allowed is self-destruction.)

I am here, V. I can comfort and salve you, and your tiny fatal wounds.

I am so sorry she said that.