This Time, Unravel Me Quickly
There weren’t any easy answers. A Memoir by Sam Moe
1.
Meanwhile, I fall out of love with you. The river tells a story because it is a story. We trudge through in our amber boots and I wonder about inheritance. What happens after we decide to bury our hearts. Would you want to melt your ring into a coin, presumably a dollar, will you ever admit you were wrong, meanwhile you pick up different stones and lick them, always with the salt obsession, stories like ours have a beginning and a middle, and thousands of endings. If I’m being honest, I could have stayed the same. I shouldn’t have engaged in emotional unraveling. Yesterday, my lung capacity was vast. Today, my hands are numb and shaking. I talk about my mental illness so many times you can’t look me in the eye any longer. How many hours do we have left. Near my feet are small, shimmering fish. I am soft and my skin feels like a moss patch beneath rain. I fell into the fear earlier and thought about relapsing the size and width of a small bandage. I thought about owls and evenings and who would miss me if I were gone.
2.
You decided to go to the forest for your birthday. I couldn’t remember how old you were turning, too afraid to ask. Those days, I was more fawn than person. I answered each time you called, even if my body was exhausted or I had a migraine. I deleted and retyped each text to you, careful about verb choice and adjective placement, obsessing over what would inevitably be a one-sentence text you would ignore for weeks. This was after quarantine lifted, and you wanted to be near nature. Please understand me when I say, this trip combined all my fears. A river wide and deep enough to drown in; a cabin on a winding hill; one-way streets for two-way traffic, no cell service, and a supermarket trip we took in a group. I hadn’t yet been diagnosed with an eating disorder, I only knew I didn’t want to partake in dinner in front of other people. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves. Let’s go back, to the first night in your new house, the tree full of cardinals, my relapse, and the dog.
3.
I had relapsed only days before. In some ways, I like to think I warned my therapist. When I told her I had been making a makeshift blacklight with postal tape and permanent markers, she asked why.
— I need to see my old scars, I explained.
— Hmm.
She adjusts a mug in front of her, filled with what I can only assume is coffee but might be whiskey or wine. We were on a telehealth call, not yet returning to in-person meetings after the quarantine was lifted in Bloomington, Illinois.
— The women I used to work with scars and bruises wouldn’t want to see those again, she says.
I ghost her as soon as we hang up.
The problem is I had been working towards and away from the relapse. I’d stopped shaving my legs, and thrown away most of my razors, but I still needed my kitchen knives. My nails were trimmed as short as possible, but it didn’t matter. I took the tool from the tub and locked the bathroom door.
4.
The second relapse, only a few days apart from the first, was in my friend’s house.
Outside, Kentucky and the hills were green as jewels. She had a single oak tree in her backyard where two cardinals flitted back and forth, reminding me of my grandparents. I thought about texting him but thought better of it. Each time I tried to talk to him—about cardinals, my day, my pain issues—he would turn the conversation into a joke about sex. To begin writing an essay about my time in the restaurant industry would be futile. It would take me books and then some to explain what happened, the years that followed, and the boundaries pushed.
We sat on her back porch, everyone moving and alive while I wrapped my sweater tightly around my body and pretended to be a statue. One of our mutual friends had brought his dog, a gorgeous puppy with as much fear in her heart as I had in my mind, probably more. Each time any of us moved she would start barking, loudly, only calming down when we fed her wedges of cheese.
I felt terrible for being triggered by the dog. The problem wasn’t the animal, but the noise. I had grown up in an abusive house where everyone used their tone and the loudness of their voices to punish. I had partners whose screams could have shattered the windows, one who hit me in the face, previous managers at the restaurants who yelled at me at the table where my guests sat, then in the kitchen, and yes in the back room where we ate. I was uncomfortable with food and noise, finding it impossible to navigate being a person. There weren’t any easy answers and each time I went into the bathroom to calm myself down, explaining it was just nerves, my logic and reason were immediately dissipated by the sound of someone’s too-loud laugh, the slamming of a cabinet, or the barking of the dog.
Later that night, I lay on the floor and wondered what I was doing in her house. Friendship had always been complicated for me, and I found I still didn’t understand it, though I thought, at least she loves me, or so she says, as I stared at the ceiling fan.
5.
The next day, the six of us—you and your soon-to-be husband, another couple, and our mutual friend—drove towards the Red River Gorge.
The friend sat in the front seat of my car and we shared a bag of chips and a bar of chocolate. I found I didn’t mind eating while I drove, wanting anything to distract me from how winding and desolate the road was. We weren’t alone for long, and soon my car was faced with a one-way tunnel made of grey stone. I remember you telling me you could hear me screaming and laughing hysterically, commenting about how much fun you thought we must be having. The road continued to twist like a centipede, frilled on the side with unnamable plants and trees I’d never seen before. Below snuck a copper-red river, beautiful and shallow. I thought about parking the car and entering the stream, laying with my face to the sun, give up on me, I imagined saying. Leave me be.
A gravel driveway buttressed by trees spread out behind the house. The house existed on a cliff, the hot tub elevated on pillars of wood. There dangled a wind chime, a long staircase curled to the ground, and below were stones, roots, and dusty leaves. Overhead, the trees laced together. I couldn’t see the sun, the stars, or the moon. The river continued to rush by below.
We went to get food first. I remember talking on the phone with my mother, the only place within driving distance of the house with a cell signal, and complaining about how this trip triggered all of my anxieties. My mother cackled loudly in my ear. She thought I’d stopped hurting myself more than a decade ago and I hadn’t brought it up to her since. I was desperate for connection so all I did was make jokes as you walked around, placing boxes of fresh spinach and chickpeas into your cart. The others bought whole wheat pasta and boxes of grape tomatoes. I didn’t know what I felt comfortable eating in front of the others so I bought a pizza and tried to feel no shame over my anxiety.
6.
Years later, after the eating disorder diagnosis, a friend would tell me I eat like a coyote. I carry dozens of snacks in my bag and eat rotisserie chicken every day at lunch, unsure what else will help me to feel full, unsure what will keep away the dizziness.
— How many whole chickens do you think you’ve eaten? he’ll ask.
— Probably hundreds, I joke. But I also eat rice every day. Would a coyote do that?
~
You’ve just read 1 / 2 installments of “This Time, Unravel Me Quickly.” The 2nd installment will be published on October 8th (10/8).
Sam Moe is the author of Cicatrizing the Daughters (FlowerSong Press, Winter 2024), Grief Birds (BS Lit, 2023), Heart Weeds (Alien Buddha Press 2022), and the chapbook, Animal Heart (Harvard Square Press 2024). Her short story collection, I Might Trust You is forthcoming from Experiments in Fiction (Winter 2024). She has been accepted to the Sewanee Writers’ Conference (2024) and received fellowships from the Longleaf Writer’s Conference, the Key West Literary Seminar, and Château d’Orquevaux.
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