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I am obsessed with you. The second-person pronoun you. For ten years, all the poems I wrote were about you.
I have obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). I can say that now. But for a long time, I kept it secret. And when I finally started talking, I told everyone you were the one with OCD. Not me.
It wasn’t exactly a lie. I’d been trying to deal with the obsessions and compulsions on my own, reading self-help books smuggled home from solo trips to the bookstore as soon as I was old enough to drive. Of course, you drove with me. There was a book called Brain Lock that taught me the sing-song mantra, “It’s not me—it’s my OCD.” That’s what got me started thinking you and I are actually separate people.
If you’ve ever heard someone shift from the first-person pronoun I to the second-person pronoun you when talking about a traumatic experience, that’s me with OCD. I mean, that’s you.
You’ve been through a lot. It’s natural to want to create distance between yourself and the violent visions OCD has forced you to see. You were just a child when your OCD set up a high-definition projection screen in your mind and played the bloodiest, scariest movies on repeat. You saw car accidents, bodies sliced into bits and flung across the road. You saw brains blown apart by bullets. You didn’t even know what OCD was back then. You thought those visions were yours—your doing, your fault, your violence.
Your childhood bedroom was pink. You had an elegant doll who slept in a four-poster bed. Of course, you know these facts because you’re me. It’s a mistake to tell the person of direct address things she already knows. For example, you know an angel appeared in your room to tower over you at night. You listened to an Anne Murray record until you fell asleep. “Stars are the windows of heaven,” she sang, “where angels peep through.” You know the scary movies played on, even in your dreams.
But now I’ll tell you a secret. There’s someone else here besides you and me. Someone is pressing an ear to the door, listening. Someone, right now, is reading these words. You think I wrote this just for you, but I’m speaking loudly on purpose so the eavesdroppers can hear.
We were in our late thirties when I wrote my first poem about OCD. After decades of keeping you locked in my brain, I worked up the nerve to unlatch the gate. Talking about you felt safer than talking about me.
Once you were out, I realized I wasn’t fooling anyone with my dissociative lies. But my poet friends walked through it with me. They pointed to “the speaker” who wasn’t me but the voice in the poems who was talking to you. The language of poetry and its criticism provided multiple buffers between me and my OCD. I could be both present and invisible on the page, hidden in plain sight.
I said things to you in my poems that the OCD has said. “Bite your cheek,” I told you, even though I knew it was hurting us. I knew we bit our cheek obsessively for so many years we needed a surgeon to remove the ball of scar tissue that had hardened inside our mouth. Still, I told you to do it again. I wanted them to hear it.
I said “the face has seven holes” and taught you how to draw a star in your mind while blinking seven times even though people were trying to talk to us, and I knew we couldn’t think clearly if we were busy counting and blinking and drawing stars. “You look like an idiot,” I said. I admonished you as a parent would a child (“what have you done?”) though neither of us ever had an answer for why we felt so guilty.
Whether you were ready or not, I told your secrets. The worst of the violence I withheld, but I revealed a lot. I told them how you drowned in the lake, how you soaked so long the skin slipped off your hands and floated to the surface like starfish. The trash bags heavy with babies. All the ways you imagined your child hit by a car. I wanted them to witness what we’ve been through.
And for this, you’ve had to relive your trauma.
But I also tried to find meaning in what we went through. I tried to make art. And I was able to say some things in poems that I’ve never said to you. Things you deserve to hear.
After meeting you dozens of times on the page, I started to recognize a change. You were showing up calmer, more at peace. I realized “it’s okay if you’re starting happiness from scratch.” Together, we sought help, sitting on therapists’ couches with too many pillows. Eventually, I learned to comfort you as a parent would a child: “Don’t be upset,” I said. “It’s okay.” And as an angel absolving a sin: “You are innocent of all the violent things your thoughts imagine doing.”
“No one knows how dark the darkness is,” one poem says. I don’t know if it’s me saying that or you. But we both know it’s not true. Someone else knows. Someone, perhaps, reading these words right now.
POETRY
Exploding Head
By Cynthia Marie Hoffman
Persea Books
February 6, 2024
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