Scattered Recollections of Exile, Alyssa Bunce [excerpts]

My brain had become unbearably heavy, like carrying a boulder atop my fragile anatomy. Memories spiralled and proliferated becoming sneering conspiracies. My thoughts were so overgrown they blocked out the sun, and always seemed to lead me to the foot of a treacherous mountain, and never to a meadow or a field. Never to a resting place, always to an insurmountable issue. My own mind circled me into these traps. My own mind expected what it could not provide. Even within myself, my earnest labours were insufficient. How does one escape this dread, which chokes from all directions?

♢

Now our kitchen is filled with people trying to solve something, and apparently it is Me; the thing which needs to be solved. Our kitchen, in which I’ve had a few scattered memories of warmth and unity, has become so bleak and flawed all of the sudden, even the light is slimy and repulsive. It is about three in the afternoon and I have never seen the kitchen so revolting. I can’t bear to see it, so I fixate on a piece of lace that has frayed from the hem of my sleeve, and I twist it madly with my nails. My isolation feels like food poisoning, something rancid I let into my body which refuses to exit. 

♢

When I walked with the doctors to their car it was spring, there were hills of brown snow chewing at yellow sod. There were layers of tulle pulled in front of the cold sun. I smelled life dormant in the earth, a smell of potential and promise, which jabbed me with envy and grief. My thoughts from then on were abstract and illogical: I thought about a song I learned in choir when I was a girl, I thought of Paris France, which I had only seen in pictures and hadn’t thought much about before that strange moment, and I noticed, with a peculiar distance and indifference, that crocuses were blooming.

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