Missing People

I am a missing person. If the injunction is to come home to oneself, at the end of the day, to reclaim sanity and ground and place, then I am missing: I went past (or had not passed, yet) the mark of where I start. I missed me.

I am a missing person. I woke up today wanting to disappear, and found a conundrum: who is this self that I want to disappear? What is it? I am missing: wholly absent from even my own thought and self. I missed me.

I am missing person. I yearn for a sense of self, to be able to live in this world, to be a part of things, to not just be a spectator of existence. I miss me. 

I used to have me. Well, of course. That is the only reason why I am a missing person.

In the desperation of wanting to disappear, and as a cry for help, the people I texted speak to levels of existence that I know I have taken for granted and taken for non-understanding: I spoke to my ex (asking for existential crises services - he holds one), my pyschiatrist (asking if she has free time today - she doesn't), my best friend (to whom I simplified matters - she will understand), and my dentist (for a coffee - after three meetings for a root canal).

All those are aspects of myself that I have ignored so fundamentally that I am goddamned crippled in life right now, at 41 years old: my mental health, my past, my friendships, and the respect for time. I feel like since I took one whole mat of nalidixic acid and the resultant rush to the psychiatric ward, my life has been out of my hands, as if I'm just buffetting myself along. 

As will always inevitably evolve out of pieces about the self and missed persons, I turn to my parents.

My mother was a monolith - strong, cold, regal. She, who would tell me to get up when I fell down as a child and to stop bawling, taught me to fix things rather than complain about them. She, who would tell me that I killed a plant by plucking its blossom and giving it to her, taught me to be in love with things that stand alone, unappreciated and unsullied by human eyes, much like the most beautiful shade of red existing in the ocean depths where no one can go. She taught me to be to be a rock, losing sense of object permanence the whole time.

My father was a soldier - fertile across the country, disciplinarian, absent. He, who has survived through a war in the southern part of the country, taught me to survive in snow, desert, ocean, forest. He, who has three firearms at home he would fire at the ceiling when drunk, taught me to shoot a rifle and a handgun. He taught me to drive, while shouting at my ear the whole time. 

"Why are you so angry, Tano?", my psychiatrist asked me. It was a rhetorical question, and like a pronouncement from Athena with bullets for teeth, she continued, "Because your father left you and your mother never defended you."

I was taken aback, that session. Man, psychiatrists can be bastards. I was uncharacteristcally silent for two minutes. She handed me my prescription for an antidepressant and a mood stabilizer without a further word.

"Your mother is dead, Chris. No validation from there," my second psychiatrist said. "There is no one to forgive for your issues; they are all missing. You are, uncharacteristically, missing the point." 

I am missing: all is there is a host of daddy issues that come from a soldier father and a monolithic mother. For he was really only good at leaving; and she, until she died, at staying.