Work Text:
She is full of knives.
Everyone on this godforsaken rock is full of deadly cutlery. Of course. It’s amusing, watching them jab at each other, even if their intrigues and hurts are so transparent. Her job is watching. It’s also boring, and what kind of a word is “godforsaken,” anyway? Too casual, too sharp, cacophonous. She doubts her diction, even when it’s her own internal monologue, the patter of rain on a tin roof that only she lives under.
What kind of a word is “god”? Now there’s a question. She’s picked at the yellow sun at her chest over and over and has yet to come up with a satisfactory answer, even though she is supposed to be smart, she is supposed to be insightful. Maybe the notion of the big man upstairs died with the Earth and everyone on it. She’s the one sentenced to three years in this damn cultish outfit and slippers; she’s the one who has to drink warmth out of glass bottles to feel human again; she’s the one given to lexical pedantry....
Her thoughts circle each other like this, repetitive like a knitting pattern but far less productive. She misses that, having the time to do something relaxing and lighthearted, bordering on whimsicality. She regrets not having spent more time making things with her needles, not killing with them, before the world turned to world turned to fire and asteroid brimstone. There was a time when she would wander the Internet in search of the perfect shawl pattern, one to save for the day when she felt brave enough to plunge into advanced lace.
[p1, k2tog, yo, p1], ssk-L-pnso-R, k5, yo, k1, yo, k3, yo, k1, yo, k2, sl 1-k2tog-psso.
But lace itself proved an enigma, light and full of holes, yet warm, supposedly beautiful despite its deformed, lumpy appearance fresh from the needles--it was only supposed to need a good blocking--
[p1, yo, ssk, p1], ssk-L-pnso-R, k4, yo, k1, yo, k5, [yo, k1] twice, sl 1-k2tog-psso.
She never quite figured it out.
[p1, k2tog, yo, p1], ssk-L-pnso-R, k3, yo, k1, yo, k7, yo, k1, yo, sl 1-k2tog-psso.
She wonders if she’s gone about this all wrong, wonders if she should have chosen a craft that emerges more orderly, more complete, more like Athena springing from Zeus’s forehead, instead of the looping, curly fabric that takes hours to produce. She’s watched Kanaya sew again and again, and she’s always amazed at how orderly and effortless the process seems, the way the pattern pieces ache to be joined and then fit each other perfectly, the gentle hum of the sewing machine, the precise curves and angles. A clumsy seam can be picked out and redone with ease--a single misstep in a lace panel means marring the entire design and ripping out rows and hours of work to correct it.
[p1, yo, ssk, p1], ssk-L-pnso-R, k2, yo, k1, yo, k3, yo, k1, yo, k5, sl 1-k2tog-psso.
And she’s made so many missteps, she’s not tall or stately or put together like Kanaya is, she’s unfocused and flat and anxious or drunk and falsely bubbly, or hungover, but always unravelling, another row gone each day.
She wishes she could stitch herself back together, here, now, maybe in the blank space between her thoughts--maybe she could see yarnovers and slipped stitches in her sleep, not all the things she’s killed and watched die. It would be a nice distraction for the empty halo of her chemically imbalanced brain, the great zero in her head. She might not think about dying so much, that way.
Each time she died, she was a child. She was a child, playing a game with other children, but something has changed. (Maybe it was all the dying and waking up. She is a teenage girl, no Lady Lazarus.) For all her words and analysis she can’t pinpoint it, but her head is so full of white noise that it’s hard to focus, yet alone examine past trauma.
She’d started the book for reasons like that, to better navigate the baffling currents of this reality. When it started getting bad, once she realized it wasn’t some errant, unpleasant mood, she’d made notes in her book, mostly small, shy ones in the margins, a tentative case study:
Patient presented with flat affect, depressed mood, difficulty sleeping (onset and terminal insomnia), difficulty concentrating
Recommended course of treatment: reduced stress, quiet time, amusing diversion(s)
Patient reports no improvement in mood or behavior; increasing episodes of emotional distress
Recommended course of treatment: psychoactive medication
Pate
Patt
Pati
i give uP
treatment: ?????????????????
Around that time she abandoned the book altogether.
It’s not like she has many other courses of treatment available, anyway. The mother she knew is gone, along with any associated Freudian conflict; dream analysis and “chimney sweeping” of the classic psychoanalytic variety don’t sound promising. She’s embraced her Shadow like Jung said to do, and it almost ate her alive. Almost made her a carcass, vomiting black over some surreal landscape. That outcome sounds increasingly preferable to her current state.
Perhaps Skinner is right, maybe she is not too removed from the rats and pigeons in those elaborate boxes, her behavior dictated by the pain and fear of her personal narrative, the hazy highs she can scrape together. Then again, not too long ago she woke up on a purple moon to embark on a suicide mission. A pigeon in a box doesn’t have that option.
Maybe all she needs is some nice, Rogerian unconditional positive regard to address her incongruence, but she can’t give that to herself, and after appearing falling down drunk in front of every living being in astronomical units, she doubts they can either.
The pharmacological route is fraught with difficulty--making coffee was difficult enough, but an effective antidepressant or benzodiazepine? She’s a psychologist, not a pharmacist. They wouldn’t play nicely with the alcohol, anyway, and the alcohol is there, and she can feel warm inside her skin again, and she couldn’t drink herself do death even if she wanted to (and how she wants to, sometimes).
Really, that would be nice, to sleep without dreaming, to rest again, to slip out from the noose of consciousness to go somewhere soft and dark, to make her heart stop thumping so aggressively, to force the pounding in her head to subside, to find indefinite release--
Perhaps the next time she dies, she will wake up as a child again. Perhaps she can forget everything. Perhaps her emotions and composure will return to her again, some divine visitation. Perhaps this time when she sleeps she will find only gentle blackness and wake refreshed. Perhaps she will feel productive for the first time in a long while. Perhaps she will write a story, and it will begin this way:
She is full of knives.
