The Story of The End / A 12-Year-Late Goodbye

It was not a fair ending. What’s more, it wasn’t really an ending at all. After his father died, I was hospitalized. Within three weeks, he lost me, we lost each other, and I fully lost my mind. How can I grieve a breakup that never happened?

When I entered the psych ward, I swore I saw him everywhere. I knew he was watching; I now know that he was not. How can I let go of this tragedy when I was placed into a chamber of torture upon its arrival?

He moved back to Israel and I moved back home to be close to family in California. He was studying abroad when we met. For ten months, we slept in the same bed, shared gossip, and orgasmed in unison.

I have not loved romantically since the end of it all. Apparently, neither has he. Every few months, our video calls remind us both of this grim fact. The wound is as deep as the thin blankets of the plastic beds in Langley Porter psychiatric hospital. The video discussions are as full of static as the few forlorn moments with his long-missing father over the phone.

I am as wounded as a dying bee in a pool, gasping and writhing, until the chlorine detaches its abdomen from its brain, as it loses its capacity to fly. This is not a love story, because our time was cut short. This is merely a story of a perpetual lack of love; unremied by distant calls from countries apart. Ten years, and nothing has changed. Ten years, and my brain has finally healed, but my heart has not mended at all.

Excerpt From MFA Statement of Intent / Follow Up, Post MFA

I am entirely fascinated and enamored with the world of poetry. I must dive deeper. My teeth and tongue have just begun to taste the surface, but I must crunch bone. Many poets may say they love to write, but are afraid to address the true question: must I write until the day I die? My answer is yes. I would love the honor of consideration  for your low-residency, long-distance mentorship Master of Fine Arts in Poetry with a Narrative Medicine track. I hope you enjoy the poetry that I am submitting.

Thank you so very much for your time and consideration and all the best,

Abby Peyton Laporte (APL)

FOLLOW UP STATEMENT:

Fuck poetry. I've learned to write with clarity and rigor; I prioritize being honest about exact who I am, or the precise narrative of a fiction prose piece that I need to write. I don't care much about poetry anymore. Over the course of my graduate education in creative writing, specifically of Narrative Medicine (so yes, I got in,) I realized that I could write with greater coherence in increasingly difficult genres as my brain healed from my hospitalizations. I incurred brain damage when I was 19 years old, by way of an extreme and unpredicted psychiatric crisis (more so medical crisis). I wrote beautiful prose before this neurological event, but then as I recovered, I could only write poetry. In the year or two after the catatonia, which caused the majority of the brain injury, specifically through brain swelling from psychosis, I couldn't even read at all.

I think that when I initially applied to my MFA program, I was so haunted by this injury and incapacitation, or really the sense of accompanying grief, that I couldn't admit my interest in any other genres. I felt that prose, weather memoir or fiction, was simply too difficult, or inaccessible in some way. I now understand that I am lucky enough, in many various ways, to have a brain that has healed sufficiently to write in whatever genre calls to me. Free verse poetry is exceptionally powerful and stunning, artful and important, but also not my only seed of interest. Many writers may be grateful, excited, and happy to write brilliant poetry. First of all, my poetry wasn't quite brilliant. Secondly, each poem I wrote seemed to have an echo of my incapacitation. Finding a program with a narrative medicine emphasis, however, was a soothing and ultimately crucial choice.

Throughout the course of my MFA, I grieved and processed the lost of my mental capacities, specifically around lucid writing. My two and a half years of raw writing, crying, screaming, reading, and listening were a full catharsis (a highly privileged yet also highly perseverant gift to get). I entered into a state of transformation, a state of elevated bliss of anguish, which sounds about as douchey as the French Philosophy aesthetics that I so willing borrow to describe a strange state of affairs. I ended up reconnecting with my affinity for the easy demise and genius of Virginia Woolf, a woman with money and whiteness who still died by her own hand from what was then called manic-depressive. Yes, even Woolf didn't have the level of damage, quite literally and neurologically, that I had nearly endured.

I wrote through poetry in my first semester or two during a pandemic and a full time grocery store job that I eventually failed (again, neurological deficiencies, this time in the form of passing out from the overhead lights). After a year of that work, I found standup comedy. By the time I found standup, I had already re-engaged with the world of prose. When I was young, from about age 7 up until 18 years old and before the psychosis, I wrote quite beautifully, with a normal writerly learning trajectory. In my final graduate thesis, I include one vignette that I wrote the beginning of that ill fated freshman year at Bard College, in upstate New York. It is ingenious, and significantly better quality writer, with a stronger voice than I have well into current day. When you have survived significant brain damage and also recovered, slowly but surely, capacities that you thought were probably gone forever (in my case, sanity, lucidity, and then even reading and writing,) you don't really care about the quality of the qualities regained. Even as a lifelong writer, more or less, I'm just still really fucking excited to still be alive. At 31 years old, the benefit and thrilling surprised of finding anew my capacity to be understood is totally mind blowing. Mind un-blowing? Un-explosive -- but a massive, happy, and totally unexpected relief.

Fiction is my newest medicine. Comedy is my newest love. I don't want to or have time to write the rest of this update because I love myself now to trust myself now to understand that I know my capacity for contribution as a human being, as a writer, and as a survivor of SMI (a small subcategorization of mostly disorders with lifelong bouts of psychosis from the DSM).

I love you!

Abby

"dancing down" --> a freeverse poem, by APL

 a typo makes red spread like dye in water

across the water in my body

vermillion

to be soothed with carnelian rituals

agate is a word with thud

it hurls itself with matter-of-fact

impact

across the mouth, throat, tongue.

I am afraid of everything

I never feel unconstrained

constraint is the strain of

a heavy backpack

constantly making my chest hurt

throat close, if only partially

stuck again. shoved into a hole

dug by the shovel of shame

plunging into my deficits

knowing I’ve lost my abilities

weeks of my brain being 

slow and lagging

my ego strikes these words down

with flourish

a twist of the paintbrush

and a twirl of the body of my ego

a realm of performance

a performative woman am I

after all

made for the stage

shimmer and glitz

old words and new hats

dreams of nonsense

is the only way out

of my flawed embarrassment

the embracing of

non-sequitor?

of confusion?

is my ego so fragile

that when she is asked

what makes her happy

she apparently

just 

screams.

I want to scream until my throat hurts

make me raspy with rage

I want to tear out my hair

and slam my fists onto the small table

and grind my feet into the carpet

just to hurt my neighbors ears

oh that ugly rage of loss

grief over all

that I might have been.

quantity? so what.

I write a lot.

meaningless.

I am human.

meaningless

I am a starseed.

closer.

I hate each word

I seeth like I’m made of silly putty

and that wasn’t supposed to be funny.

I’m so mad it makes me sound funny

and that is not

the point at all.

I want to squeeze my pain onto the earth like rain

let my pain fall from me like tears

like water to earth from sky, from clouds

I am a broken little doe in the headlights

I pity myself, oh how I pity myself

waiting every moment

for a new interruption

something unexpected to once again

break my precious, sweet, curious brain

tiny soul, so small

she fits into my mind

she is from Enceladus

which is the sixth biggest moon of Saturn

and a place where nothing is physical

all of the beings on Enceladus

are made of orbs of energy

and nothing more

they can fall in love

but there is no three dimension plane

within which to experience it

I use fantasy to dissociate

because

I simply need to rest.

Flash Fiction, "Middle Window"

 

“Middle Window”

313 Apt. 7

I am a lucky person. My life is ascetic. Minimalism drives me (toward nothingness). 

I am alone in a studio. I have a balcony. I do not have a cat. 

I choose to leave my home each morning, because no possessions are there to call my name. 

I feel like a lonely house cat. 

They say when artificial intelligence takes over we will all be like their house cats. 

A billionaire said that. He probably has too much stuff. 

I will be safe and without extra belongings. 

I will roam feral of our AI overlords; no stuff to keep me from running away. 

I sit in the dim light of my home, alone, expecting that my strange aversions will save me one day. Neither cats nor robots seem to care about stuff. 

Materialism will become obsolete, with me, here, already ahead of the future.