From the Wild Collective Heart series: Part 3

Content Warning: Candid reflections on trauma processing, internal fragmentation, and mature themes.

I’ve probably owned a dozen vibrators at this point. I keep throwing them out and she keeps buying more. Once I can get at them, I do. I clean them, wrap them up, place them in plastic, and throw them in the dumpster. Then I sterilize the house.

I really can’t understand why this keeps happening. Neither her reaction nor mine. I feel sorry for the poor thing. She’s not meaning to go off on a tangent and neither am I. It’s just what we do. A strange balance at play. She lets the badness leak out a few days and then I clean it up.

Unfortunately, I joined her in smoking. It turns out I also needed a little break from the monotony of behaving like a saint always. I do care about getting into heaven, to which she points out we’re already in hell. What heaven? We clearly landed in the flames.

I keep her from embarrassing us and hold her when she’s crying.

It’d be years before I understood it was a trigger and an impulse to reenact her understandings of sex, her experiences. Demons demon and angels angel.

I was named for the robin’s egg found, sky blue, cracked open.

I can appreciate the symmetry to that now.

-Robin