fives

five years before and five years after

content warning: this post includes fairly lengthy discussion of self harm; make space and if you need to skip this one please do

I'm not sure if you're aware, but the meanest numeral is 7. 2 is basically a pushover, 3 has 7's snark but softer; not kindly, it’s just it doesn't have the necessary backbone to be upfront about its edge. Even numbers overall are nicer but I prefer the odds. 8, are you kidding me?

It's 5 that's always owned my heart, its balance of the soft and the sharp, the shape of it, the way sets of five arrange themselves so neatly, with a center and two flanks, two to each side, balanced. As a very young child I was astounded by connections between my preferences. Did I like Sailor Venus, I thought, because Venus is the morning star, and my name, it has been claimed, means the same? Do I love the number five because E, anchor of my name, is the fifth letter of the alphabet? With the same assiduousness with which I counted stairs at school and drew people with round noses, I attended to the omens scattered among my tastes.

she was fighting crime FIRST okay!?

So fives have been significant to me, always. My preferred number on a soccer jersey, my lucky number. When I used to cut, I put the xacto to my skin most often in sets of five, for five years, and it's been five now without a knife, and there is me, in memory, sitting in the middle of the fives, in the apartment on Irving, waiting for a life.

I've written elsewhere and in more detail about my hospitalization, from November 13, 2019 - March 2, 2020. I had a ticket to a Chastity Belt show that first night, and maybe if I'd known how long it would be til I went to another show maybe I could've held off one more night — ha, ha. It is worth noting that I went in without much hope or expectation, another thing that would probably not work, and I came out four months later different from before (no five this time but 111 days still auspicious or significant, surely). My thoughts about systems of power and the carceral nature of inpatient, my own mostly generative experience notwithstanding, I have written of elsewhere too, and what I’m after now anyway is before, after, not the time between.

Each year my hospitalversary arrives and I feel it in my body, I feel it coming, a discomfort that echoes. Each year, maybe, I feel it a little less. This year, my fifth, I did very little to mark the day, which is not only the mark of five years gone by since I arrived on my unit, unable to stop crying, but also the mark of five years self-harm free. Last night I dreamed I cut again; it wasn’t true. I got the xacto tattoo on my right index finger because I am afraid of a history that never happened, scars that will or won’t fade according to their own logics. I got it because of how deep in me cutting was for those five years, the ways it helped me to survive and the lasting ways it wounded me. I got it because reshaping my relationship to sharpness was essential to my art practice, because I want to be able to put my hands on sharp things and not be afraid. I got it because I am afraid of going back, and I wanted to promise to myself in skin and ink that I wouldn’t.

It wasn't until the therapy session two days before my hospitalversary that I realized the evenness of this time in and out: I have not cut for five years, and I cut for five years, too, from 2014 - 2019, slips of time I remember vividly: the stairs on my college campus where I sat to tell my parents; the folded toilet paper pressed against my thighs, my ribs, the inside of my arms; the slip of too wide a wound, too much blood. There are still things I miss, most often the sensation of the long, narrow scabs under my clothing, something grounding to me in the fabric catching against them, the skin stretch, the memory of the wound more potent than the wound itself.

And suddenly it's been five years, in the same way suddenly I was five years deep in doing it, and this a decade of my life.

Song of the day:

AQI of the day: 144-ish, edible

Coffee shop of the day: Rose Establishment

Color of the day: Silhouette (Pantone 19-4103 TCX) (sidenote they got rid of my preferred Pantone colorpicking site and I’m annoyed about it)

When I was five I looked like this:

Kindergarten, ballet, the year I started playing the violin (finally, after three years’ wait to be big enough, enough dexterity in my little hands, was it an 1/8 size, a 1/16?). Books at school, the circles I couldn’t draw with my broken right elbow. The Millennium year, which we must have welcomed with pizza and been put to bed before midnight (though I was four then, birthday still to come). The year we moved the second time, to the Woodside apartment with the 7 running past the end of the block, my favorite train, parade past the window of the my borough on the rattle to or from school each day. The store around the corner that sold Yu-Gi-Oh cards and Beanie Babies and little plastic figurines of Pokemon and Digimon and stationery from Japan. How much can happen in five years, even to someone so small?

How many weeks now since my hospitalversary (it’s three, not five, I’m sorry), and what about traditions? I didn’t go to Spiral Jetty for Thanksgiving, and instead accepted an invitation to a last-minute Friendsgiving that made me feel at home. And I didn’t, as I would have in New York, mark my hospitalversary with a trip downtown for an aura photo at Magic Jewelry, or any comparable ritual, except I did a tarot reading, long process of the Celtic Cross and all the focus I once attached to attachments, numbers, patterns, sounds.

There are always nights when the hospital feels very close, not behind me but ahead, a terrible proposition but one I face with practicality, a nothing space that might get me through the in-between. I want another five years, and another after that. Sometimes, anyway. Enough.

Today, because my building’s mailboxes don’t have locks and because the USPS will not deliver to the unlocked boxes (despite the utter lack of mailboxes in our first Rego Park apartment, the mail for all four apartments strewn on the floor, getting home from school with my brother and leaning down to get the mail and my backpack sliding up (or down?) my back to rest on my head and neck so I was stuck like a turtle; evidently a mail carrier derelict in duty) and because my building insists they are fixing this problem and because that seems to be a lie, because of all of that I drove once again to the Downtown Annex to collect my mail, junk mostly, a package from While Odin Sleeps, apparently delivered some time ago, oops, and a book sent for my belated birthday by someone who matters to me. I wasn’t going to say, but last night was one of the worst I’ve had in a long time, and the day is shaken by it, strange the sunlight in the smog, strange the crescent of the moon as it rises.

I wasn’t going to say because too bracing, the nearness of the instance, like a full swallow of cold and pine-scented air, like the ice on the wind. But I am thinking through the extended stretch of this fifth year of freedom and last night seems too deeply part of it to push through without it. Imperfect freedom, or, an honest practice, survival.

I still will swear to you that five is the best-mannered of the numbers, or at least the most compatible with my combination of softness and snark. This fifth year, it will only happen once, and then the years before will be smaller than the years after, and go on getting smaller. How terrifying, the tightrope of life on this side, how far there is to fall, and every day farther. It will always be five years that I fought for small instances of restraint, maybe months at a time. It will always be fives, for me. In the tarot, fives represent change and conflict. They are tense cards, they have fighting and sorrow in them. They have something on the other side, the success of the sixes. I am better in tarot than in the rest of life at recognizing the promise in difficulty. I guess with the cards I have a growth mindset, at last. I am okay with fighting, I always have been doing it, even if it’s only with myself. I fought my way to these five years free, I did, I do. Beneath the feet of the figures in the five of wands, the churned dirt looks like a whole landscape: mountain ranges, hills and plains, the light moving on not just handfuls of dirt but oceanfulls, crags and cliffsides. Does it matter, to believe I’m big as that, even if I’m sometimes very small?

I’ve been in a series of left-behinds lately. It’s been a season of steel. Maybe it helps to stomach the weekdays that there are five of them, I don’t know. I don’t know what this tarot time of struggle means, except that I have made it through all the seasons since inpatient. Through pandemic and relocation, graduate school, graduation, love and loss and wounding.

When I really mean it I send five heart emojis. One, two, three, four, five.

Art note: I am about to post (like…tomorrow or Friday?) planners for sale on my website. I’ve worked real hard the last couple years to figure out the best way to do this and I hope you like them <3