The Day I Lost My Voice
I’m sitting straight up in a chair that’s been pulled into a circle with ten others, so straight it’s as if I don’t want my body to touch the vinyl. So straight that maybe if I control my leg muscles, I can levitate above it. The therapist, Bob or John, I can’t remember, and I’ve called him by the wrong name all week anyway, is chastising me for my tone. I sound “maternal,” he says, then adds, “You’re not wrong, your words I’m mean. But your tone isn’t helpful.” I don’t look at him. My eyes are locked on my husband who sits across the circle, elbows on his knees, staring at a stain on the carpet. He’s been staring at that spot, avoiding my eyes, for the fifteen minutes that I’ve been speaking as if he’s trying to disappear into it. And I want to scream back at the therapist, “Then he should stop acting like a fucking child!” I want to scream about the latest ugly behavior, the new horrible discovery that I can’t yet face. Pain boils inside me.
But I don’t say it. Instead, I clench my hands tighter into balls and feel my nails mark my flesh waiting for the next step in this torturous form of therapy, the next question, the next, “How did it make you feel?” But my feelings are not really the issue.
I’m the prop.
Bob/John turns to the men in the group, the addicts, and asks them how they felt about the words I’d been able to release. The old stuff. The old pain. He wasn’t asking my husband, he was asking the other guys. I don’t see them. My eyes won’t let go of the gray curls at the top of my husband’s head. I don’t see the other loved ones either. I’m too angry. It’s as if by controlling my gaze, I’ll be able to contain my rage. But their energy swirls around me--stifling, percolating, threatening to boil over. Or threatening to extinguish them, like it has extinguished me. They too sit quietly awaiting their turn to publicly download their agony for scrutiny, for a teaching moment. Each of us is locked in our personal hell of watching someone we love slowly killing themselves, and us, with substance.
One man pipe’s up, “I felt like you were talking to me.” I can’t remember his name either. He’s the one who resorted to drinking lighter fluid to get his fix after his wife managed to eliminate all other sources of booze.
As he shares his new awakening, he sounds sincere, but I’m certain his wife has delivered the same agonizing words at some point in their past, just as I have, repeatedly. Did he hear her then? I doubt it. Did he hear any of this the last time he went to rehab? And what is she thinking now? Maybe that’s the point. Our addicts can’t hear us when our love speaks to them. They can’t hear our fears or our hurt or understand the damage drink has caused. Their brains are too pickled or working too hard to deny their disease.
They’re working too hard at lying to themselves.
The addicts cautiously add their tepid, forced responses while I dig my nails into my palms even deeper and stare at my husband’s bowed head. Eventually, the therapist jumps in, saying he thinks, “We’re going to make it.” Our marriage he means.
And again, I want to scream, “NO! You don’t know what he’s done!” I want to rant about his new lies. I want to rant about this new trauma. I want to run out of the room, fly back to Chicago, and toss every physical element of our life together into a bonfire. The words explode in my head, but I can’t say them. My body trembles with anger. But I can’t release it. I’m frozen.
Why?