Black collars and red doors.

You admit yourself into the psych ward two days before Thanksgiving. Your mother drives you, after an argument-turned-tearful-moment at one in the morning and seven hours of fitful sleep. They take your blood pressure no less than three times, ask questions you mostly don't know the answer to, and then there's lots of waiting between this nurse, that consultant, and the other doctor.

You fall asleep on the emergency room bed, fully dressed with your boots on. When they come in to take your blood pressure again, you have a fast moment of vertigo.

For a second, just a second, you thought you were asleep on the Ramapo Health Center floor, the Ramaplague 2.0 kicking your sorry, sleepless ass, your favorite camper whining your name in your ear. Stomach flu or no stomach flu, in that moment, you were happy. You knew who you needed, and who needed you.

- - -

One of the people you talk to that morning asks you what your stressors are. You stare at her blankly for a second. My whole if is a stressor, you think.

“She dropped out of college,” your mother replies helpfully after a few seconds of silence.

“So you're feeling... abandoned?” the woman asks. You must have mentioned your long-distance boyfriend, the camp friends no closer than 300 miles away, the friends in Chicago who graduated. The idea that everyone is gone, gone, gone, gone.

The quizzical look you give her is real. “Why would I feel abandoned?” you ask. “I'm the one who left.”

- - -

When you go up to Station 20, which is where you will spend the next 24 hours, they make you change into burnt orange scrubs that are the same color as your ex-boyfriend's old car. Most of the things you brought with you, you cannot keep. Your journal has a spiral wire binding. Your Fair to Midland sweatshirt has a drawstring. Your belt is a potential weapon. They don't make you take your rings off, which is nice, especially since you don't think you could take out all of the ones in your hair.

You're almost ready to leave, brushing a stray dreadlock or two back with your left hand, when the nurse notices the black double band around your left wrist.

“Is that a belt?” she asks you.

You unbuckle it and hold it out to her. “It's a—” You choke on the word collar, as if mentioning your sex life—your kinky, happy, comfortable and currently-on-hold sex life—in this place is somehow unholy. Or maybe you're just not ready to try and explain a black nylon dog collar to this nurse. You're hoping that holding it out to her, unbuckled, will let her see that it's already cinched as tightly as you can get it, and it can't be a danger to anyone—especially since you've worn it exactly like this on your left wrist for the better parts of the past year and a half. Wearing it around your neck without Lynx around would be uncomfortable, unnatural.

But you don't say any of that, and she takes it from your hand cool as you please. Well, you think with a slow and sinking sense of inevitability. I suppose it's better to take it off now. He'll be gone when I get back, anyway. I had a meltdown on him and his girlfriend, it's only a matter of time. You take your now-harmless clothes back and step out into the unit wearing your scrubs and the feeling that something crucial to you has sloughed away like dried glue from a five-year-old's fingers.

You couldn't have felt more naked if you stripped all over again.

- - -

You play too many games of chess with a boy with the same name as someone who once treated you like a commodity he'd earned. There are not enough black pieces. You play with some that are a gray a shade darker than his white pieces. This leads to confusion and makes your forehead furrow, but you still manage to stalemate him at least twice.

The games keep being interrupted by doctors, nurses, and consultants. They ask you the same things. The conversations gain a rhythm.

Why are you here?

I don't really know.

Do you feel like hurting yourself?

Not right now.

Do you feel like killing yourself?

Not anymore.

How can we help you?

I don't know.

Your father even comes to visit that evening. He asks you the same things. You give him the same answers. You try not to be angry when he hints that you haven't been looking hard enough for solutions, and he tries not to let you see him tearing up.

After he leaves, you sleep like the dead, waking up once during breakfast to shouts and yells that make you think, I do not have to take care of this. My job is not to control this behavior. Today, I am a camper.

The thought gives you comfort you haven't been able to find in months. There's nothing quite like understanding your role in a crisis, even if it's completely opposite than usual.

- - -

Your mother picks you up at noon. You turn your phone on when you walk in your front door, braced for the texts from your two best friends inquiring after your well-being. What you don't expect is the text from Lynx, from 6:17 pm, right around the time your father started playing with mismatched plastic chess pieces instead of looking you in the eye.

I miss you and I hope you're doing okay. ♥

You stare at it for a good ten minutes before you can even think about answering. You feel like you are an axis and your world just rotated around you like a secret door.

He did not leave you. Between the time you hung up on him in a hiccuping, hyperventilating panic, and the time he got on a plane that would take him away from the other woman he loves, he was thinking about you.

When you get up to your room, you buckle the collar back around your left wrist. The snap of its clasp feels like the click of machinery in fine working order. When you go out into the kitchen, you play Scrabble with your brother. A couple hours later, your best friend in the world comes over. You finish Lynx's Christmas present and she paints a red door in the fog.

“It's a sad picture,” she says by way of explanation. “But it can have a happy layer.”

“Do you like it?” you ask her.

“Yes.”

When she leaves, you sit for a while, thinking. You think perhaps you're the Short-Haired Tornado's red door. You think that all the things you've spent so long believing about why people stay with you might be wrong. For the first time since you found yourself in a hammock in the woods in upstate New York in the middle of July, you think you know something.

You think you know who you need, and who needs you.

And for the first time in a long time, you feel those things balance, like your weight in a hammock between two oak trees, or the pressure that pulls on the ring of your collar when it's clasped around your neck. Yes, it's nice to know your role, even when it's completely opposite than usual.

Sometimes you take care of others. Sometimes people take care of you.

The balance there is the part where you take care of yourself.

Of monsters and men.

TRIGGER WARNING: horror, gore, anxiety & anxiety attacks

You never get used to looking monsters in the eye.

You've been dodging them right, left, and center since you were twelve and you know how to do everything else--how to avoid the claws that change length and strike when your guard's down. How to go-go-go-go for hours with their rancid breath stinking like wet coffee grounds and mold on the back of your neck. You've memorized the escape routes, mapped refuges in your head like the way you spell a lover's name. This book, that movie, the album you know all the nuances to. You can hide in the patterns and basslines for a while.

You learned how to take the hit with someone else, minimize their pain, share it like the more you bleed, the less they do. Sometimes it even works. Emergency emotional sutures are your specialty, followed closely behind by the Magic Words to Talk Someone Off an Emotional Ledge. Both work best on no sleep, 4 AM crisis calls, Diet Coke and Excedrin to keep your mind sprinting away from the demons faster than they can catch you, or anyone else. And then the danger has passed, somewhere between the desperate, panicked sobbing that took root in your chest and your partner's words shifting from desolate to somewhat acceptable in the real world. They cut you loose and slip into sleep or their own Anti-Monster Routine, full of chemicals and secrets they won't share, not even with you. You let them go--wasn't that the idea this whole time, digging your bitten-off nails into the rotting flesh of someone else's insecurities?--and the stares of the creatures from the insides of both your heads come back to haunt you.


Your hands shake too hard. Your chest is too small, heart too big, lungs suddenly incapable of normal functions. Gasp. Try and focus your eyes. Fail twice before you find enough presence of mind to realize your glasses are off and discarded on your floor somewhere because they were in the way of your tears. How long has it been since you breathed? Twenty-five seconds? Forty? Your chest is frozen shut. You tell yourself to gasp, inhale, god dammit breathe or you won't get the chance again, breathe already, BREATHE you mother FUCKER.

And you do, eventually, just in time to notice the way your head is spinning and everything is either too dark or too bright, nothing in between. You taste your last cigarette on the backs of your teeth and bite half-moons into your palms instead of standing out in the cold and repeating it won't work, it won't work, it won't work into the puffs of smoke rising from your cracked and bleeding lips. You close your eyes and try not to spin too much, but that only makes it worse. Imprints of danger on your closed eyelids. Panic hanging in imperceptible droplets from your lashes.

You don't have your own Anti-Monster Routine. You've spent too long patching up the holes in everyone else's. Your adrenaline leaves you in a rush as you remember that you never found a replacement for that kind of fuel. The collapse to your bed is too long for dead weight falling three feet. The press of your body, slowly betraying you into trembling that is bone-deep below zero, is too much to pull to the right place on the bed. Find a corner of a blanket and try to pull it over your like a shield. Try not to think about how much safer a pair of arms would be. Gasp--when is the last time you breathed, again?

Keep on the artificial lights like witches' lanterns. Pretend you did something to make them powerful. Pretend someone else found your Magic Words, the ones that etched themselves in wrist-bones and ankles to keep you safe. Pretend the war you just waged was for you, that the demon-spawn won't be back the day you think to yourself, Maybe we've both recovered from the last round.

Most of all, pretend you know how to forget. How to let all of this fade into fairy-tale and once-upon-a. Pretend you never looked a monster in the eye, that the eye never grew to twice its size and reflected your face and your fear and your life and made it look more terrifying than any set of crooked teeth and armored, swinging tails. Pretend you don't dream of that reflection swallowing you in the middle of the night, opening up like a sinkhole and eating you alive, that you are safe and sound in your bed and you don't have to fight this battle again next week, next month, next time you haven't slept and have spent eight hours listening to your little brother trip on acid. Pretend that it's over. Pretend it's all okay, now and forever, world without end, Amen.

Remind me--when is the last time you remembered to breathe?

When you draw your gun, think first. Shoot anyway.

When you become the people you hurt to keep from hurting anyone else, you've failed.
But that's not new to you, is it, sweetheart?
You're sitting alone and you're hungry, and you listen to the way your stomach clenches around itself
like it's trying to salvage something that isn't there.
          It isn't there. The things in your life that you love
are few and far between and while you're in the land of much
    and close together,
nothing matters anymore.

Let your head hurt. Let your stomach growl.
Once upon a time you were going to be something.
You ran away to the woods and thought, This 
is a good place to become. You unraveled instead.
They'll find you in the scum under the bridge. You freeze in the winter.
When their feet slip over you,
don't pretend you're holding back your laughter.

Crack under pressure.
When your stomach growls,
     pretend it's a roar.
Pretend it's a battle cry. Pretend
you have something worth fighting for
and something inside you left to fight.

When your enemy kills you, laugh
to the beat of the pulse in your temples.
Look into your own eyes like a lover's,
like they belong to the people who ripped you apart.
And they do, honey. They do.
You are your own worst enemy.

Surrender without fuss.
When your own back is turned,
take the poison.

The only honor you've got
is in the way you're giving
up.

Heartline Cartography

For four days and three nights, I found you in the pockets of the real world, and we stole hours that burn brighter than any days outside of the ones we found in a forest in upstate New York, naked and laughing on a wooden floor because we couldn't quite do it any other way. The map etched into my collarbone says home, and it occured to me over and over again while you smiled at me that you are the only person in my life who has a grasp on what that means. You stood in the tiny, black ink star with me and we lived, together, through stories no one else quite believes.

You are my battlefield lover, and somehow that has always made your kisses taste sweeter. I curled up against your chest while I spun on wine and tiredness and you let me sleep with a smile on my face. The bed was too small, but it was yours, and in the morning I thought to myself that there was none more comfortable in that moment. When I met your other girlfriend, a student of the sword with eyes the size of the moon, the way you lit up made me want to cry. It wasn't until later that I realized you look at me exactly that way, as if I hold something bright and alive, as precious as sunlight or late August nights. It wasn't until now that I realized maybe I do.

You tied me up and set me free the night before I left. We slow-danced naked to songs that make me cry. When I bit the back of m hand to keep from shouting for you, I wondered if my skin could absorb your name like sunlight on oak leaves, to help me grow. I wonder if it already has.

When I told you there was a utopia inside my head, you asked me to share it. When I said it was you and me and lovers neither of us had met yet in a cheap apartment, its barely-not-empty walls echoing with laughter, you didn't ask me to stop. You told me you smiled, and asked me, "In this picture, are you wearing your old collar, or a new one?" and the tears I'd been holding since the back of a Greyhound leaving Milwaukee spilled onto my face like too much rain in a crystal glass.

I've tried to catch the light in you so many times. I've tried to keep it on the backs of my eyelids so it burns up the long nights when I'm not sure why I am. I've pointed my camera at your smile and click-click-clicked until I gave up with a frown and the thought that whatever you have in your heart is too big for a glass lens. I put pencil to paper and tried to draw the sun in your eyes and the lunar shine of the student of the sword, and all I got was graphite on my cheekbones. You glisten outside my lines, refusing to be tied down by anything quite as simple as art pouring from my shaking hands.

Listen--you are the fable in the back of my head, intricate and steadfast, reminding me of all the reasons I am. You catch my stutter in your lips and when you smile, it flees, like mist at dawn. My imperfections look like freckles that turn to constellations you are teaching me to read. When I see you looking at me, I wonder if perhaps I am the lines of a book and no one else bothered to read me long enough to say if the story is good.

This story is good. It's slow and it's strange, and sometimes I wonder if we're in the middle of a chapter or the end of one. But here it is, spinning out on pages made of question marks and maps no one has labeled yet. There are oceans we want to swim in and turns we want to take, only to double back and go the other way. What else is there to do? There are uncharted territories to draw lines in and sights we don't even know we wanted to see. Here we are, sometimes together, sometimes alone, making a map to answer all the questions no one ever wants to ask. When we see go no further, here be dragons, we look at each other and laugh.

After all, who doesn't want to see a dragon?