“In Our Blood” Prologue

The first time I cry is in front of a therapist who wears brown clogs. Her restless feet dance with minute movements. A flash of striped sock. She holds a notepad.

The scrape of the pen slices something inside of me, a grinding kind of ache that keeps the tears dripping. She told me her name when she came into the room, but now her staff tag blurs with my grief.

When she speaks again, I become a statue, one leg crossed over the other. I wear sneakers, not professional shoes. My body tries to say, I can’t believe this is happening, but then she asks if there are other cuts. I shake my head no, and my husband pulls up my shirt-sleeve. Shallow, tentative wounds from my shaving razor, all over my left arm. Those cuts sting more than the straight razor strokes to my wrist.

My breath shakes in my diaphragm, and I move my husband’s hand. I press my face into my palms, glasses and all, and sob. Perspiration tickles my back.

“Allen,” I say.

His hand grazes my shoulder, and I don’t brush him off. “I’m here.” When I move my hand to blot my eyes, brown clogs and striped, socked feet stand, pause, and then lumber away.

“It’s going to be okay,” Allen whispers after a moment. He lifts my head, and I hand him my glasses. He places them like a tiny, vulnerable eggshell on the seat next to us.

Outside the open door, a man in a dark uniform with SECURITY printed across his back and a walkie-talkie at his hip sits in a chair.

The windows have turned from bright to soft black. “Where are the kids?” My hand cups the cuts as if to shield my children from the sight

This is grief, I think to myself. Because grief comes like the ocean rushes and sprays and tugs. My familiar self, sculpted out of thirty-three years of life, taken away by a moment of insanity.

Tears fill my eyes and sting like shards of glass.

“I don’t want to go,” I whisper.

The security guard pokes his head around the doorframe.

I try to appear sane.

This wave, it’s massive. I’m sucked under, deep into the dark murk where shadow creatures live, where the blind and translucent dwell, so far down I’ll never come up.

Another uniform. A gurney.

I feel small and see myself in their eyes: tousled bun, swollen face. Allen’s sweatshirt. Dirty sneakers.

I hand the sweatshirt to my husband. In a simultaneous choreography, the medic wraps a warm blanket around my shoulders.

They lift me into the vehicle with a weightless swing, as if sway- backed elephants are carrying me.

“You ever been in an ambulance before?” asks one of my escorts.

The wave crashes and yanks me down until I black out the moment. No, I’ve never been in an ambulance.

I’ve never been admitted to a psychiatric hospital before either.

IN OUR BLOOD - Coming July 12, 2022