This isn't my normal post, but I made this the other day and since it uses words from a little journal-y entry of mine about a time when Adam called to check in on me between sessions… I figured it would fit in with this story.
These are the writings I used words and phrases from in my drawing:
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"Stay Safe"
Somehow, even typed by a man I knew only through a pen-name and 100x100 icon, they are WARM words. They are… fuzzy, giddy feeling words. Words that defy physics as their weight is so, so, so much more than their mass. Words that mean infinitely more than they say and trail behind them like kites on a long string feelings that don't make sense. When he wrote that… it felt like he SAID it.
It was like he'd looked me in the eyes and reached for my hands and said, my hand held gentle in both of his, "Rynn, stay safe." Like he said, "Rynn, I care about you."
"Rynn, I worry about you."
"Rynn, I am not going to tell you not to cut, because I understand how horribly HARD this is, but please… what ever you do, be safe. Be careful. Because I care about you and I would miss you if you were gone. Because I like you and you are someone to me and you are important to me and you MATTER."
Like he said, "Rynn, I care."
Adam said it to me once, in more words, and not so exact. And it was… just like when he - my faceless, unknown internet 'friend' - wrote it, and yet it was SO MUCH MORE. Because I know Adam. I know his face and his voice and I have told him. Told him things I had only ever written of before. Little things too - details of nothings as well as big things of All. And sitting there in the storage room in the dark, holding the phone and rubbing fuzz of the rug, his words stilled me and hit me and filled me.
"Are you keeping safe?" he asks. And I pause. I double check. "Yes" I tell him. And he says: "You'd tell me if you weren't safe, right?" and I say: "Yeah." And long after the phone has been hung up and I have unlocked the door and snuck the phone back to it's place and done my homework and gotten ready for bed, it echoes in my head. You keeping safe? You safe? Safe? Safe? Safe? You'd tell me? Right? You'd tell me? And somehow, it feels very, very Good. I hug the words close and write them down to Keep and go to bed with them feeling big and fire-like in my chest. Fire-like in the way that the wood stove was last year when the power went out for three days and we all slept in the living room. Orange, and yellow, and warm. Smiling.
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The floor is cracked cement. It's cold on my bare feet. I huddle in the dark amongst the boxes of christmas ornaments in the little storage room we have instead of an attic. A welcome mat with dog hair on it is beside me. I pull at the hair slowly. The phone is with me. It is dark in the room. I locked the door, pulling the door in tight until the bar fell softly into place. The window is blue with the transition of day to night. I am silent. Waiting.
It seems to take forever. The minutes on the phone's screen inch from 6:20 to 25, 27… Then I am checking three times a minute as it hits the assigned 6:30… and creeps by. It hits 6:40. I am fidgeting. I feel cold. My fingers shiver. He…
Maybe he's running late. Maybe I was too annoying. Maybe he forgot about me. Maybe he's not in the mood to hear my complaints. Maybe he's not calling. Maybe -
But I stay, just in case. Because if he calls and Mom picks up, that is worse than waiting here alone in the dark, worrying for another ten, twenty minutes. 6:45 comes to pass. I pick up the phone, set it down, pick it up, hold it… set it on the rug. Move it to the lid of a box. Set it on the ground. Touching it over and over and over. Waiting.
I don't want to think about it. I don't want to think about it. I wont think about it. Nothing Nothing Nothing. I am shaking. He isn't calling. I am such a looser! I am so… pathetic bugging him all the time as if I even DESERVE him. I don't. There's nothing wrong. It must be such a disappointment to him - getting handed me. I bet he thought I was actually a SI-er. Like, actually had issues that were Real. Real things. Not stupid, babyish, comp -
RING!
I snatch the phone. There on the screen flashed the clinic's name. My finger pressed on talk slowly, hesitatingly, but before it could ring again. "Hello?"
"This is Adam, is Rynn there?" he asks. I am half sitting, half kneeling, still in the position I jumped to when reaching for the phone which was, by that point, on the top of a second shelf.
"It's me," I say, quietly. I hold the phone with two hands as if it might fall. I am small. I sink back slowly until my back is against the wall and my knees are at my chin and I am listening to him.
"How are you?" he asks. I am loosing my voice. It is slipping away with my breaths like cold-day breaths of white clouds. It is twisting up and around and reaching dizzying heights across the ceiling before tiptoeing out of the cracks around the window. But there aren't any cracks in the window.
"Okay," I tell him, my eyes fixated on the edges of the window frame.
"What's been going on?" he prompts me. I am biting my lip, wide eyed and fidgeting. I move to sit cross leggedly and release the phone into one hand so my right can trace the crack in the cement floor.
"Uh…" I am trying to think up something to say. I picture many things, but nothing that makes a good answer. I think of wet brown leaves in the back of a white pickup truck. I think of a water-heavy tarp roof over the chicken coop. I think of a beautiful-feeling, red-inked comment on an English paper. Of a cold draft slipping in with the speed of Hermes' through the open window in French class. Of eating warm oatmeal breakfasts alone on the Kitchen floor from a dark green bowl. A pink-tiled bathroom stall pure-silent an hour before school starts and the sound of pencil on paper as I write. None of those are good answers of what I've been up to in the last week.
"I…" Why is my mind blank? The angry, annoyed thought pushes out the details, but replaces them with nothing more useful. Instead words that are angry at me fill the space in my skull and I am waiting. Waiting for it to calm down so I can pull up something - anything - that works.
"Uh, nothing much."
By the way, the symbols that aren't words by her hands in the picture - those are nordic runes. The first and third ones are Odin's Rune. It's Ansuz. Together they spell Adam. I've been meaning to explain the title in one of my writings, but it hasn't bothered to slip in any where yet …