By Nicole Brogdon
Since Tom stopped his anti-depressant, now he chews the pleated cap of a dried mushroom each morning, micro-dosing with his mug of turmeric tea, then the fork and mustached spoon start tap-dancing across the table.
Every object has an aura, ribbons of vibrant chakras dazzling his Tuesday. Waves of green noise—wind swirls, insect chirps—pink noise and brown noise, too, pull him outside, where he is dropping his attachments like vacuum cleaner parts in the crabgrass. He strips, flexing into naked yoga, yapping with humility as he bends, ass up to the turquoise sky, into downward facing dog, then sits, wrapping both legs behind his neck, ankle bones pressing his amygdala—that dark closet where he’s tossed creeps and traumas like they’re muddy boots.
Now the clanging banging jangling of his nasty flashbacks interrupts his Omm, so he unwinds his body, he fists his own ear, hard, boom, yanking the porous mind out from its bone bucket, rolling it—brain bowling—across the back yard. His temples throb on the head in the dirt, the big eyes staring up at the rest of him, parched lips whispering, “Help me”, a line of ants trotting across the cheek.
For the past five years, he’s been trying to find himself. Ever since his Father died, and hi wife left him, screaming, “I can’t live with all your darkness!”, hurling her floral carry-on suitcase into the Uber, riding away, he has been trying to know, Who’s my Daddy? Who am I now? Trying to go inside the bone house, to get outside in the trees, to get embodied. He has been Rolfed, acupunctured, chanted over by a shaman. Soaked, frapped, group-therapy-ed. Kneaded when he didn’t feel needed, grinding his nose in grapefruit oil, grounding his feet on the therapy office carpets.
He is out here, neighbor lady watching him from her upstairs window, he’s a rat in the wooden box of his fenced yard, huffing oxygen, conscious breathing, a suburban monk without a diaper. Like a good mitochondria, he is feeling his being and nothingness. The primal yap of the collective unconscious echoes through the suburbs, disturbing his peace. Real human cries are nearly eclipsed by streaming videos of people yammering, falling, partially drowned out by roaring mowers pushed by brown men. Tuning inward, he touches again the pesky DNA strands—wrapping his nerves like kudzu—loaded with drops of inter-generational transmission of trauma. Sees faces resembling his own, beset on other continents and centuries, by soldiers, rapes, bullets, burnings.
Picking up his head, tucking that sucker under his arm like a just-picked seedless personal watermelon, he is walking away from these rough games. He is pulling himself together. He is attaching the head with a resounding pop to his neck, making left-right eye movements, tapping his itchy chest. He is walking through the weeds, inside, visualizing fluffy clouds of world peace, wrapping his body in his dead father’s brown corduroy robe, steeped in the oily smell of the old man’s Parkinson’s.
He is sitting down for his weekly Zoom session with Patty Therapist. Patty. Framed by his computer screen, she sits lotus-style before him in mismatched pink and blue scrubs, scarf draped round her shoulders, eyes like wide comets, open and relaxed, seated before the ficus plants and that big bay window in her space. Just like Patty instructs, he is visualizing a bag of air inside his belly. “There now. Fill the bag with oxygen, breathe out slowly, gently, like you’re blowing out a thousand birthday candles, and you’ve got all the time in the world. Making your own wind and yours is blue blue, all the body blue. Releasing through your mouth in a powerful sky cloud wave. Yes. Say yes, today’s your birthday, you are being born, emerging from a sack under a beautiful blank buoyant belly, blowing safe air, you are new, riding on air, here you are, emerging fluffy and fresh, floating like wishes. Welcome.”
He feels like a raw and tender blister. And Patty is with him, her eyes, sepia-tinted like his mother’s, her pointed chin held just so, the way his ex-wife angled her face during love-making. “Everything will be all right.” He is finally good enough, he can almost touch her—he can almost touch all of them—with the pads of his fingers.
Nicole Brogdon is an Austin, TX trauma therapist interested in strugglers and stories, with fiction in Vestal Review, Cleaver, Flash Frontier, Bending Genres, Bright Flash, SoFloPoJo, Cafe Irreal, 101Words, Centifictionist, etc. Best Microfiction 2024, and Smokelong Microfiction Finalist 2024.
losing our grip on purpose 