Thoughts While You Attend the Third International Conference
on Multiple Personality and Dissociative States in Chicago
Darkness covers our house like a blanket.
It warms us until your return.
At the same time, it hides countless fears of harm
that could befall us and you.
So, we lay in hope that nameless dangers pass us by.
We watch September pack her bag (like you)
and fly day by day toward October.
It feels uneasy to watch the flowers dry, stiffen.
To smell your aftershave fade, vanish in the bathroom.
To put your toiletries in drawers.
To fold wash without your shirts.
To wonder where you are right now.
To imagine a scenario, and not really know,
if you are in it.
Or, if it is only in my mind.
To pick up the phone.
Hear a distant voice that sounds like yours
reeling off events foreign to those at home.
Not the usual schedules, routines.
I feel so much at once.
I overwhelm myself with the endless well within.
The rage, pain, loss, grief.
The wishing I were with you or you with me.
The tiredness born of double duty.
Of being ever vigilant with eyes for two.
So, I say nothing more than enjoy the day
lest I betray myself to you.
For, while you’re away, I’m a stranger on the line.
My thoughts have other boundaries.
I want Time to fly after promising to enjoy
the minutes of each day.
I feel angry that I would shortchange Time for missing you.
Only a few days ago, she was a friend.
I wanted to see more of her.
Today she stands between us with a parade of minutes
to be accounted for, planned.
This September marks a new beginning and an end.
You learn to stretch your wings, grow your mind.
While I am here to keep the pieces ordered.
But I am learning, too.
My learning is not as measured.
I do not get it in a lecture hall.
Rather, it’s a home-based experiential workshop.
I can let my feelings be there when you are not.
I understand the rage, pain, loss, grief,
of the woman who has a family without a man.
I can see how much my love for you has grown.
How complicated it is and how very female I feel to have you.
While one part of me copes, learns, grows,
another part invites my existential Worry in for tea.
While you are gone, I sit face to face with Fear.
A lovely lady who looks like me, takes no pity on my thoughts,
promises no happy endings, but who listens while I think:
In this topsy turvy world of ours,
I see death sentences dealt like Old Maids
in a children’s game.
The horror, brief, falls like the edge of a guillotine.
The hand is lost, the sorrow, quick.
A new hand counted out.
Fear, can you tell me what magic spell will keep
Old Maids away from us when they rear their ugly heads
unexpectedly in airplanes, cars, the streets?
My question is not rhetorical.
I need an answer but Fear is silent.
The only sounds, the pounding of my heart,
the ticking of the clock that mark seconds
until you return.
Darkness outside is the thin coverlet
of season’s change.
It neither shields nor protects babes asleep,
me or you.
But Fear has always had a place beside me,
even before the time of you and me.
As she and I age, we mellow, make our peace.
She listens now more patiently until I exhaust myself.
I think the unthinkable.
Finally, succumb to sleep.
S.T.T.K.T. 1986
Lynn Benjamin
