Your Head Is Not a Pot Roast
Your head is not a pot roast, just like my wrists are not cucumbers or strawberries or onions. I wish I could give you my spare bottle of Lexapro. Don’t worry, I can travel to you. I could sit on your cream-tiled bathroom floor and hold your hand while you swallowed the pills that look like candy. Babies make me nervous, but I would watch your kids while you slept off the side effects, or play Scrabble with you all night until dreams finally found you.
Deep into the night, I’d tell you to ditch your husband—yes, the one who’s cheek you bit and the one who bit into your words like a moth with a killer instinct. I’d tell you that when I first realized I wanted to die, I was thirteen, knees knocking together on my pediatrician's brown leather examination table on the border of Boston. I wasn’t shocked with a million pins between my temples, and I didn’t see vivid shades of blue behind my eyes, but I had a lot of blood work and shitty veins. This all feels so stupid now. I talked and talked a lot then and still talk a lot now. I was good at hiding my sorrows, my body a well where truth and pain laid deep inside of me. I know what it’s like to have a fire and to be vicious and to so desperately want love. To succeed in every aspect of my life—after all, I, too, am a Bostonian brutalized by cold winters and competitive report cards.
I would tell you about the summer I lived at home on the brink of thirty, and I think you’d understand how I unfurled and lost and ultimately won. I could not write about it, still can’t; I’ve tried, and I’m still trying. How I could barely drive three miles away from home without losing my breath, feeling trapped in my mother’s Honda, and I’d cry because I thought, this is the end of my life. How my mind wouldn’t stop racing and I’d press my body against our worn wool living room rug, sobbing to my father over the phone that I thought I was dying. When I thought for sure my genius had decayed because of all the cocktails of weed and alcohol and mushrooms still lingering in my system.
I would tell you about the planes that flew overhead that summer, how every time I heard their rumble I thought for sure they were flying too low and I would remember the day in third grade my mom pulled me out of Catholic school and we weren’t allowed to watch the news. How impossible survival felt. The way the heat encased my skin like an enamel and my mind went black. How I got sick on my family vacation and tipped a bartender twenty dollars for letting me sit outside their bathroom, bile and shit pouring out of my system while drunk vacationers hooked arms and danced down the sand encrusted streets. How when I drove back to my aunt’s beach house, I could see nothing across the water no matter how hard I tried, it was like I was inside of a black jug.
I would tell you how every night at 11:30, I could feel my own hands wrap around my throat, demanding death as if long ago I had made a pact that if we made it this far, this is how it would all end. How I still woke up in the morning, red and puffy and gasping for air like a newborn calf. The act of constantly dying and being reborn, like yellow leaves falling from a plant so all that's left is this terrific stem, bare and fruitless. Like how starfishes can grow back limbs after one is cut off in battle. Have you seen this regrowth happen? I have not but that is what it felt like. I could feel the impossible death surround me like a maroon sea and smother the parts of me that must leave, must go, and this always happened at night when no one could see me. I’d wake up feeling changed yet utterly the same. Like a pimple gaining momentum under the skin until it finally makes its grotesque need for detox known, red and full of egg-white pus. Impossible to ignore.
I would tell you how I considered my aging body on the brink of my third decade—my tits tattooed with silky stretch marks, the little red crosshatch patterns on my thighs, the waves of cellulite on my ass. The one time I found a white pubic hair, I thought, well this is the end of my good looks. I pulled it out with my mother’s tweezers and it never returned again. How I felt I wasted my beauty, looking at older photos of myself when I thought I was fat but really I was just a normal, rather pretty girl, it was my vacant eyes frozen in a flash that told a different story.
I would tell you about how I went to an office in Braintree every week, holding both my breath and my dad’s black leather steering wheel as I drove there to deal with the pain between my legs. How I was reminded of my failures, of how I laid like a deer carcass, eyes shiny when men would touch me for years after that night I was trapped between a frat bro and a sagging dorm mattress. How I never had memories but my body did, how in some way, I knew my body was fighting against my need for validation, my need to feel normal and fuck just because I could, even when I felt rotten and empty inside. How the only real experience with intimacy I ever had was with the pelvic floor PT who loved Taylor Swift, who pressed her fingers inside of me, felt my muscles release, asked me to breathe, and made sure I was OK. How the glazed donut I got at the Dunkin’ Donuts across from a seedy motel on Route 3 on the way home always tasted like a French gourmet pastry.
I would tell you how every time I held my mother’s blue kitchen knife, I’d feel a loss of control. I’d see the tunnel narrowing and watch myself claw my way out. How I wondered if I just pressed the tip hard enough into my wrist, the same wrist where I wrote “Keep Calm and Carry On” with a worn blue Bic ballpoint pen in high school, my skin would peel open like an ancient Holy Book and give me every answer on why I was the way I was. I would see the three fates holding my red string, sheers poised, and I would meet their eyes. I want to know where they’d cut my woven fibers; I want to know when I should hold my breath.
I would tell you how I saw so many brilliant things that year, things that felt like greeting cards from the void. The large snapping turtle in the neighbor's yard, how time stopped and the kids stood straddling their bicycles, watching it eat grass. The woman at the airport with her white silky hair tied like a croissant, holding hands with her husband, some aging cowboy, a smile painted on his leatherized face. The way the crows flew in a V, like synchronized swimmers in the sky. The way a seashell fits just so in the palm of your sun-soaked hand. The way the ocean held me as I rested on it, surrendering my body to the sun. How can all of this and all of the ugliness exist simultaneously? How can I want to live and die at the same time?
You should have died in a hospital bed adorned in every prize for your words, white sheets nestled up to your neck, Mylar balloons dancing like fluorescent clouds above your face, not on your cold linoleum floor. When I see you, I will tell you about my rebirth, about how this pain can end, the cold isn’t forever, the babies eventually stop crying, and the knives, over time, become dull.
Catherine Spino is a writer and performer from the East Coast. She has appeared and is forthcoming in Rose Books, Sarka, House of Vlad, Test Pie Press and more. Her work focuses on the primal, the domesticated, the anatomical, and the ethereal experience of being alive. She records her dreams daily and, most recently, wants to shoot a gun.
You can read more of her work at vividbluestain.com and find her on Instagram at @spaghetti____western (that's four underscores) or X/Bluesky at @1virginmartini.