Goth Girl Rising (37 page)

i should understand
but I can't
fluvomit does not equal rosevomit

dead already, to me
dead and gone
seventeen months of slow death
of hospitals and
hospices and
doctors and
radiation and
chemotherapy (latin For "poison")

("Honey, come close and let me see you.")

smell of death above the rosevomit
twelve and i had never smelled death before—
—but i knew
(I knew)
I know

this is what death smells like

dead already
why won't this g host leave me alone?
and let me get on with my life?

she touches me

once
on the arm
before her own arm becomes
too tired
and drops to her side

("Be strong,"
She said.)

i want to run
runscreamhide
get away
from the THING
in my mother's bed
the THING
that pretends to be her

("Be strong
And don't be afraid
And be good
For your father.")

for the father who
KILLED ME
she means
Be Good because
because "Being Good"
will protect you.
right, mom?
Being Good

Will make everything OK
right, mom?
Being Good
will mop up the puke
and wipe it from your lips.
right, Mom?

(Tears in my eyes.
"Don't cry,"
She said.
I hated her
For it.
I could cry
I could cry
No one could
Stop me.
I had the
right.
)

("Honey?"
Weak and confused.
"Come closer."
I had stepped back
"Honey?"
Weak and confused.)

not my mother
my mother was not weak and confused
i will not let that be my mother
and i leave i walk away
from the rosevomit.

but i turn to her
one last time
and I say:

"Fuck off and die."

A
ND SHE DID
. T
HAT NIGHT
.

I have a secret to tell you.

I haven't sent any of these letters to you.

You don't know that because, well, I haven't sent them. So you don't know they exist, so you can't miss them.

Which is weird, because you would think that the opposite of
you
not knowing I didn't send them would be you
knowing
I didn't send them. But it isn't in this case. And that's strange.

So why did I write these letters if I never sent any of them? Wow. That's a long story, but I'll tell it anyway.

It all started in the hospital, when I was DCHH. In my first session with Dr. Kennedy. It was a long session.

Time is a funny thing in the hospital. In the mental ward. You lose track of it easily. I mean, they keep things pretty regimented, but you still lose track of time. Because every day is the same, pretty much. And between the drugs and the sameness, it's easy to forget the hour, the day, the month.

That first session was a couple of hours. Dr. Kennedy had talked to Ms. Webber, who was my usual, court-appointed therapist, the woman I'd been seeing for years, ever since I tried to kill myself by slitting my wrists the wrong way. I didn't like Webber. She was too cheery. She was too upbeat.

Kennedy, though ... Right from the moment I met him, I could tell he was different. He was no-nonsense. He wasn't upbeat. He wasn't downbeat, either. I wish there was a word for what he was. I guess the word
should
be
beat
(ha, ha), but that's not it.

He was a realist, I guess, even though that doesn't say it all.

So partway through that first session, Kennedy suddenly says, "You hate your mother."

And I was like, "Shut the eff up. I don't hate my mother. I hate my
father.
And she's dead anyway."

And he dropped it, but he kept coming back to it, circling it like ... Like ... You know how you can have something in, say, the bathtub? Like a sponge? And you pull the plug and the water starts to drain out and you figure the sponge would head straight for the drain, but instead it takes its time getting there and when it
does
get there, it circles for a while before finally hitting the drain? You know what I mean?

That's how Kennedy was. He took his time. And eventually he got there.

"I don't hate my mom," I told him again.

"I think you do. That's what I'm hearing. A lot of anger. And that's perfectly fine. It's OK to be angry. It's OK to hate."

He was the first adult—hell, the first
person
—in my life who told me that it was OK to feel those emotions. The first person who didn't try to get me to swallow them or purge them. That was when I knew—that was
how
I knew—that I'd been right, that Kennedy really was different.

"So you hate her," he went on.

And I had to admit it. "Yeah. I guess." It felt bad and good at the same time to say it. I wasn't sure if God existed or not (still not sure, if you want to know the truth), but I figured that there was a pretty good chance he'd strike me dead right there for saying that.

"Why do you have trouble saying it?" he asked me.

And, like, duh! "Because it's bad. It's wrong."

"Because she left you," he said. "I'm not saying you
always
hated her. Just when she got sick. Right when you needed her the most."

"It's not like she had a choice," I told him. And I felt like complete shit, because he was right. He was right, it was true, and the truth made me look like such a weak, pathetic, self-absorbed, selfish bitch.

"She didn't have a choice," I said again. "Roger's the one who smoked. She just got cancer."

"But you blame her for it."

"No."

"Then why do you hate her? Why are you so angry?"

"I don't know. I don't want to talk about this." I still had the Bangs of Doom at that point, so I sort of flipped them over my eyes and sank down into my chair, and I figured that was that.

But he just leaned back in his chair and said, "I have an idea, Kyra. It's going to sound a little bit strange, but I'd like you to play along, OK?"

So, here's
another
secret. I'm just full of secrets today, huh?

The other secret is what Dr. Kennedy said next. His big idea.

See, I wasn't supposed to be writing letters to you in the first place anyway.

Kennedy wanted me to write letters to my
mom.
He's a pretty smart guy, but you know what? I thought that was a pretty stupid idea. Especially for such a smart guy. Because my mom is dead.

"The letters aren't for her, Kyra. They're for you."

Well, that's fine and all, but it's still stupid. What's the point of writing a letter to someone who will never, ever get to read it?

So I thought about it. Because he asked nicely. When we finished up that session, I went back to my room and blocked out the psycho-bitch roommate and thought about it. I'm not dumb, you know. I know that I'm not the smartest person in the world, but I'm not an idiot either. I just don't like school. I don't like sitting there all day while people who think they're smarter than me blather on and on and on. It's not that my teachers are smarter than me. They've just memorized more. Which is no big deal, especially because they're older and they've been to college and stuff, and you have to memorize all kinds of shit in college.

So I thought about it. (Huh. I started two paragraphs the same way.) And I got the point of the letters—it's supposed to help me work shit out, sort of like therapy, only with just me talking.

I was OK with the idea of writing letters. I don't mind writing. I used to write really bad, really shitty poetry, right around when Mom died. So writing is fine.

But I decided that I couldn't write to Mom. And I sure as hell wouldn't write to my dad, because he's alive and if I wanted to say something to him, I would just go say it, you know?

And I thought about you, Neil. About your work. About how much I love it. Because it's like you only have your own life, you know, but it's like you understand other people's lives. That's just amazing.

So I thought and I thought, and I thought, I'll write to Neil Gaiman. That's what I'll do. Because if anyone in the world could understand what I'm thinking and feeling, I bet it would be him.

Originally, I was going to write e-mails even though Dr. Kennedy said I should write actual letters. He's old school, I guess. I wasn't going to do that, though. E-mail is fine. But they only let us use the computer for, like, an hour a day in the hospital and there's always someone looking over your shoulder and there's no e-mail anyway, so I decided I would have to do actual letters. And since I was going to do that, I figured I might as well go all the way and actually write them by hand, with pen and paper, like in the old days.

Whew. Now that I'm home, I write these on my computer, but it's still tiring. Especially this one, which is really, really long.

I didn't believe in this letter-writing idea at first, but I have to admit—it's helped me think about things. It's helped me organize my thoughts.

When I first read
Sandman
and I first saw the whole goth thing, something about it
spoke
to me and I couldn't help it. I thought that if I did it and did it
my
way, then it would mean something different from what it does for the rest of the world. But it didn't matter. Everyone just saw the black and they thought goth and they didn't get it. So now I've done something more extreme. Something my
own.

And then, of course, other people copy me.

But, you know what? That's OK. Because I've realized that maybe I don't care about that. And that they can't copy me if they don't know what to expect.

It's weird, Neil. Because your work has meant so much to me ever since I discovered it. It was like a special herb or bandage I found right when I was hurt and sick and needing it the most. And I loved it. It helped me. And now I wonder if I ever really understood it. Part of it is Fanboy and Cal talking about it, I guess. Like, did you really mean to end
Sandman
sooner than you did? What stories would we not have gotten if you'd stuck to your original plan?
Dream Country
?
A Game of You
? What would have gone away and never been told?