Displacement

Displaced, your shrink says. Distanced. Disaffected. Ineffective, anxious-ambivalent, obsessive and/or compulsive. Abandonment issues. Transference. Depression. Anxiety, social and otherwise. Transgression. Aggression. Delusional.

Impacted molar, you think.

To you, the labels are empty. Your existence can’t be represented in language.

Have you thought about taking a vacation, your shrink asks.

In your kitchen: in the past, forgetting, you have mistaken hunger for your weeping ulcer. You sit amidst deli slices of ham, pastrami, and roast beef and a loaf of white bread.

You smell her before she enters the room and you pause. She doesn’t speak, but reaches around you, taking a slice of bread from the loaf. Her hand is bright reflective tape against the crimson nails. It’s not her color. She is winter.

She leaves. You exhale suddenly, noticing that you were holding your breath.

No one says anything, not at first. When you stopped wearing makeup after college, your mother might have told you that she always thought you looked better without all that shit on your face. When you finally stopped by the house with Erica in tow, you are told, as the good coffee cups are passed into your hands from the dusty hutch, how glad everyone is that you finally have a female friend. Women do not like other women who do not have female friends.   

Erica is the bright center of your mother’s living room. She comments on the photos that pulse with the faces of impossibly happy children, your sister’s. She doesn’t notice the dust on the piano, or the water stains on the northern corner of the ceiling. Instead, she notices the large portrait of your dead father hanging in the center of the room, and she fawns over the pictures of a younger you, her nails clicking on the glass. She doesn’t comment on the way your eyes look.

But still no one says anything, even after they noticed the glue that had kept you together was losing its tack. They might ask about Will, make veiled references to him over pot roast or spaghetti or coffee, but they could never meet him. There is little left concrete. You say that you haven’t been seeing much of him, and they ask why. You shrug, but they are too nice to comment on the encroaching daylight they can from see behind you. 

Will was your secret. You kept him in a tight wooden box with brass hinges, away from the rooting of your family and friends. If they were to find out about him, you think, they might destroy him. You met him at a bar, of all places, and he tried compact pick-up lines from the first half of the twentieth century. 1940’s fluff. You have a nice face, he said. You didn’t want him to know that you were that easy, played it off, but you went home with him anyway. Will was a polite guy, a careful fit. He was exactly your height, and he kept a photograph of his mother on his bedside table. Always find out how a man treats his mother, those women’s magazines say.

That was when you were normal and indistinct. But now you’re a rip in the crowd. You are a black hole. Energy is sucked into you, and it drains out in concise streams of chaos. Feelings are only brought on when she is near you, and when you experience her, a rush of air, then silence, and you feel at peace. 

Will’s mother was beautiful and expansive. She breathed, and the house tensed. Light brown hair, smooth. Will waited on her, and she eyed you, your thinness. How faded you seemed. She used politeness, but thought you were insignificant. She barked at Will, and he smiled, touched her a lot. You liked her. Erica was in her profile.

I swear, you kill one, and three come back to take its place, she says. You are in the bathroom, sitting against the lavatory. Erica is before you, standing with one leg in the bathtub, one out. She is in her underwear, killing gnats. Stupid insects that don’t fight against death, not like mosquitoes.

Your eyes focus on her porous and downy skin. You try not to look at her breasts, the startling lump in her panties. Focus instead on her skin, her face, angular and exotic, her frosted honey brown hair. The amethyst studs in her earlobe. Her smile, toothy and perfect. Relax, and let go.

There is only Erica, your shrink says, not looking at you. There is nothing else.

But there was Will.

Was Will. Projection, your shrink says. Displacement. The meeting of his teeth at the end of that word unnerves you. You shudder.

If you have trouble understanding what you are, what she is, how do you expect others to react?

And stop speaking to yourself in second person, he says.

Jo Lynn Pack is a graduate assistant at The University of Louisiana at Lafayette. She is entering her second year as a Master's student, and is pursuing her degree in the English department, with a concentration in Creative Writing. Her poetry has been published in The Southwestern Review, Bloody Swamp Poets, and Temenos (forthcoming), and her first chapbook, Leaving Anhedonia, was published in 2004 by Sunday Evening Press. Her favorite color is purple, and she is a huge fan of Japanese shock cinema.