This Recording

Tell Me About Yourself

by TERESA FINNEY

As I am standing on the Manhattan-bound above ground platform on 61st St in Queens waiting for the 7 train, the poem “Frida Kahlo to Marty McConnell” by Marty McConnell pops into my head. It begins, Leaving is not enough; you must stay gone. Train your heart like a dog. Change the locks even on the house he’s never visited…

I am unsure why this poem comes to mind, but I had just dropped a man whom I was certain I would never see again off at the airport, so it felt notable. I take out my phone to snap a picture of the skyline, the Empire State and the Chrysler Building all tower in the distance and I start to cry. I do this discreetly, subtly burying my face into my scarf, but even if I had had no shame in my public display of devastation, no one would have bothered me. New Yorkers are busy and preoccupied, they leave sad girls on the street alone in their sad.

Instead of writing about the loss of him, I read poetry. For weeks I am unable to document properly the magnitude of what his sudden and severe loss of interest in me feels like. I will feel silly for even letting it cut so deep. He is just a man. There are bigger, more important things happening in the world, I scold myself. This is such a boring, commonplace thing to lose sleep over, I tell friends while chugging wine or listening to the same dreadfully sad song over and over. Sometimes while doing both.

One night, out of a fit of rage for being unable to write anything for a full week, I will hurl my journal (the one he bought me) across my bedroom causing a glass of water I had on my desk to topple over onto my laptop. I am still paying for that tantrum.

Instead of blaming his departure from me on just an unfortunate incident, I will blame my ass. My thighs. I will wonder if maybe I was too quiet, too dull at breakfast on our last morning together at that diner in Queens. There was something about the way he described our time together as “brief” that made it seem like what he really meant to say was “insignificant”. I will feel all too foolish for believing it meant anything at all. Despite that, the last several months I spent knowing him felt like an axe to the frozen lake within me. I was glad for it still.

When it is all over I will blame myself. I will engage in the dangerous indulgence of comparing my body to other women I see on the street or in packed subway cars. Their waists are smaller than mine; their legs, leaner and the image of these women will leave an indentation on my mind. Would he have wanted me if I looked this way or that? What about if I was someone else entirely? Even though I know logically that it is absurd, I will take on the full brunt force of his absence. It will hit me like a speeding car. Any hope I had for us had been broken into tiny pieces like shards of glass. It cut just the same.

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So, I read poetry. The aforementioned poem is a favorite, as is anything from “The Gift” by Hafiz (don’t surrender your loneliness so quick/let it cut deeper). There is “Letters from Saint Francis” by Joshua Heineman: In love like long rambling walks with no destination – Teach me that language. Run out my weakness on the roads of history stretched out to infinity & still arriving… I will devour anything that says what I seemingly cannot, at least not yet.

This is how it goes. For weeks I will try to make sense of what makes no sense. Why, at the age of 29, this particular loss feels so far-reaching when I have been through this exact thing over and over. Perhaps that is why it felt so unbearable. I was certain this time things would be different. I didn't understand then what it was about this one that held me by the neck and refused to let go.

Making the obvious parallels, I think about the time when I was maybe six years old and I realized my father would never be coming home again. He was the first man to leave, and the ripples of his abandonment will go on into my life as far as the eye can see. I think about how it was from him that I first learned I was "fundamentally flawed."

On a Thursday night, when even poetry and sad songs are not enough to hold me, it will all come to a head. This is the oldest ache of all time.

The bottles upon bottles of brown liquor are all sitting on my nightstand burning a hole into my mind, as are the pills. What I feel like I should do, and what I know I absolutely should not do are the same thing, and somewhere between that spectrum is where I find myself.

Soon it will be too late. I will have consumed more alcohol than I ever have before. The wound that he left was too much and I just wanted to go to sleep until it was all over, until the mere thought of him didn't feel like being doused in flames. As I am laying in the fetal position in my bathroom in upper Manhattan, there on the cold tile, I drift in and out of consciousness until paramedics arrive, my breath rising and falling like calm waves out at sea.

Twenty-four hours later I am sitting in an office on 168th St. There is a plant on a desk that looks like it needs to be watered. An ominous sign, I note. Shelves of books and framed accomplishments line one wall, a large window looking directly on to the George Washington Bridge lines the other. The sunlight shimmers across the Hudson and is so pretty, for a moment I forget where I am and what I have done.

My doctor is taking notes on a notepad that has the words "New York Presbyterian Hospital Psychiatric Center" on the cover in gold typeface. Jotting down anything he deems notable about me, undoubtedly.

He looks up from the notepad. "Teresa. Tell me about yourself."

I consider for a moment how far back into my history I should get into. It seems appropriate to bring up my father even though he is the last topic I want to discuss. "Tell me more about your dad; your relationship with him." I stop myself from rolling my eyes.

I had spent the vast majority of my 20s "working on myself", which meant reading a lot of books about abandonment. Journaling everything. Consuming myself with esoteric works on spirituality and personal development. I had come to know why I do the things I do. I can trace my behavior to some memory from my childhood or adolescence. I know exactly why the sting of rejection lingers far longer than it should.

He asks about the previous men and I realize I am discussing my love life with a psychiatrist. I always suspected I would one day be here. ("This is New York, everyone has a shrink", a friend will say a few days later.)

I explain to him that what happened that night was not the result of the dissolution of a pseudo-relationship, but rather because when I most needed to be strong, I chose instead to abandon myself. "Just like your father abandoned you."

I can only nod. His eyebrows burrow as he writes in the notebook quickly now. I look out the window across the river into New Jersey, realizing I feel so tired I am struggling to keep my eyes open.

Once I wrote that I was done writing about my father. It is laughable to me now but at the time I felt convinced. How can one mere person committing one singular act leave an impact that is so vast? It is akin to a meteor crashing into earth; I am forever altered. I can see the correlation between my father's absence and each new rejection, except it is not the same.

Each rejection felt like absolute solid proof that all the terrible things my father believes about me were true. All those things that I had adopted only because no one ever told me differently. Cerebrally I understand why when a man leaves, it feels like my father leaving all over again. What an injustice it would be for me to hate myself the way my father hates himself. What an error to forget, even momentarily, that even when life is painful, there is still value in it.

He does not love me, but I am not done writing about my father. It seems there is no greater inspiration for me than in the things I have lost. Whenever any of these men left, all that remained was me and for so long I couldn't stomach it. My only mistake though was in repeating the same self-contempt my father had. In letting it grow in me. It is all too deep and familiar, the ways in which we have both treated ourselves. I had become his mirror image and perhaps that is why he has never accepted me. Whatever he has, it is also living in me.

The writing came back, as is evident. I kept reading poetry, then writing some (Now every light in the apartment on 7th Ave is off. November, I am sober and aching/Sometimes I fall in love too recklessly/Then wonder why the edge of the world is hurled at my feet). I felt grateful that I could access this part of myself again. I hoped for reconciliation with my father, it will never happen. I hoped for this last relationship to work out, it will never happen. It was through writing that I came to understand myself. I came to understand that there is a certain freedom that comes when things do not go the way I hoped.

I had been looking for my father all my life. In places he should have been and in places I knew better than to believe he would ever be. But there in his absence is where I would find what I most needed. There is nothing left for me to give myself grief over.

Teresa Finney is the senior contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in Harlem. You can find her twitter here. She last wrote in these pages about Thanksgiving morning.

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