What is frosted over is not forgotten

It's not even about the Xanax anymore.

When I think of the long plane right home to the east coast, I think of snow. The flakes descending down in silent tufts of love. The airplane flight is important: I see from my window as the scenery changes from green to brown to white. I lug around my giant suitcase and don't cry because I'm not leaving, this time.

Sometimes on Prose I'll write something fantastic and my computer will delete it, each word quickly deleted backwards until nothing is left. I watch in horror as the screen reverses everything I've written. I have nightmares that this is symbolic, that I am running towards a void I have no business jumping into so readily, so greedily.

Perhaps I will never go home again during these times, at least for a while. The void is opening and I am being devoured by my poetic injustice to landing in a sacred space.

Xanax reminds me of home, of the long night in the ER. Did you know they refuse to pump stomachs anymore? They simply wait for you to experience hell. I couldn't remember how many I'd swallowed, but I did remember every text he sent about my failings as a girlfriend. I waited and felt nothing. Hosptials have always felt like a second home to me, and this is a very dangerous place to be.

Before I started writing, I loved too hard. I scared men away with my intensity, my clinginess. I heard once, don't let a man reject you twice. I learned this with tears streaked down my cheeks, a work day cut short, sobbing on the train ride home and feeling like I would never be loved. I watched my little sister, so happy on the west coast, get engaged and then married. I felt so disgusted with myself that the psychiatric hospitalization revolving door opened for me once again.

I struggle to write about home. I write poems reflecting my homesickness. I see posts on social media from the east coast, the snow flaking down like ripe cherries to be savored. There is no way to capture this magnifience in writing, and it kills me.

I also heard once, we kill ourselves to live. I might have taken a boatload of Xanax, but home is the snowfall, the mightiness I can't feel on the west coast. I moved here to be in the same time zone as my ex-boyfriend. I stay here to experience something new, but home is where I am flying, where I will land, and where I will settle into a winter that is, now, something I can dream of.