Renée LoBue

Clock Strikes 3

The pit of stomach downwardness was a daily ritual. Sense and sense alone were all, spare the few grilled chicken wraps and smoothies.
 
It was the one-month anniversary of silence—my doing. Not cast aside, but a noiseless retreat, staring down a threshold of pain that could no longer be smiled through, shopped through, hungover through. Deleting. Blocking. No hatred, just a mental construction site of pink-padded walls. For me. For me. For me.
 
Week one was liberating: No more churning, wondering, hoping. But by week three, down came a woozy Secret Santa bearing a gift box full of grief with a stocking stuffer of occasional diarrhea. Trudging through each day in invisible cement shoes was not the plan. By now I was supposed to be on the Healing Highway. Further down the road. Arms open, golden light on my face ready to receive Selfdom.

What the hell happened? Were the lies so good, wrapped in presents of Forgetfulness (or, what I sometimes wondered was very early-stage dementia) that I believed? No. I believed. To reach was the prize. To run to them as if in an open field, even when being picked up in their minivan to roll down the road and talk about nothing over shitty tacos.
 
Over 18 months, my physical activity of choice was legs pumping forward bounding along grass perpetually en route to bliss. At the time, I didn’t note disintegration. I was absorbed in forward motion. The flower beds under my feet became void of color, but I was above them, oblivious in sweaty movement. Erosion.
 
A cardboard box now sealed shut. Badass Bitchery, or so said someone with a Love Coach certificate. No sound is the new sound. It was me who ordered the iron gate prohibiting access to the field, yet my feet still wanted to run. Some nights as I slept, my pump-to-nowhere legs could feel the cool air of wind-cresting movement.
 
I wanted to feel beautiful again, so I researched the best undereye concealer for dark circles. My new look: Sunken with a hint of hollow. Gone, the self-help books. Gone, the YouTube and TikTok advice videos from strong women. The me that me used to be became livelier at week four: Laughing, conversing, flirting.
 
I mentally chanted my self-created mantra, Oneness is for One, while faking interest in a conversation about the importance of gutter cleaning on a power walk with my neighbor. Later that evening, I ate a full plate of food, a hug for my body and mind.
 
At a holiday party during week six I ravaged the hors d’oeuvres buffet. A nameless accountant’s eyes were glued to mine as I talked about the Creativity and You lecture I was leading at a local University. He didn’t seem to mind the large piece of ham lodged in my front tooth. I was the window. Magnetic and endless. The seal on the cardboard box didn’t matter now because it was in the recycling bin of my mind.
 
I didn’t realize how much I loved my black velvet pantsuit until after I got home, gazing into the bathroom mirror flossing at 1 a.m. The eyes of me were inside of me. In this moment, I could be anyone. I could rehash, be brash, perfectly forget, and reimagine my soul because my soul was mine to recreate. A blink and the eyes of my eyes were startled by a text from an unknown number.
 
“Can we please talk sometime?”
 
I stripped my pantsuit into a pile on the bathroom floor and jumped into bed with a full face of makeup. A sleep of twirling, circling, half-off-bed-hanging found me at the kitchen table at 5 a.m., staring at their text. Void of them I had nowhere to run. Like an overly confident realtor harshly pulling down on a cheap window blind only to have it shoot upward snapping the pane, the field was long rolled up. It’s Over! Remember?!
 
Later that night, seated back at the table, I replied:
“Yes.”
 
I tried squeezing into my denim jumpsuit, then the red one, but both refused to cooperate—my hips and stomach won the filling battle. A full plate of food wasn’t a negotiable object, but a recognition I lovingly bestowed upon a pod, always seated at the same chair at the table, often salting her meals with water from her eyes.
 
Wearing my white cotton sundress, I walked out of the sunny afternoon into a dimly lit coffee shop. I immediately spotted their baseball cap at the back of the room. Not a blade of grass under my feet as they churned, one in front of the other. I arrived at them, seated on a vintage orange sofa. They looked awful; overweight yet drawn. I sat on a wooden chair facing them.
“Hello.”
“Hello.”