Victoria Sees It by Carrie Jenkins (love letters to the dead TXT) 📕

kills us. We are like those dogs who were trained to think they couldn’t escape from electric shocks, so they just stayed there getting hurt even when they could leave. Who ever did that to a dog? Jesus Christ.

The surfaces of things: I have an excellent job. I am a success. A good dog. And don’t I love my work? A “rising star”—that’s what everyone wants to be, isn’t it? Isn’t that supposed to be why the trolls hate me? Why don’t I just get a different job if I don’t like this one? I cannot live without brainwork. What else is there to live for? Anyway, what I despise isn’t the work so much as the thing that does it. It’s hard to love that. That said, truth is, the two have not really been separate for a long time. Perhaps not truly separate since I lost Deb.

Or maybe it’s that the fog makes them hard to distinguish. Philosopher, philosophy. What is there of one without the other? I’ve always been materially rewarded for putting my professional status first among my identities. The lady vanishes.

But something around here stinks. Maybe it’s me.

Everything in here smells the same. Shit, and stale cigarettes, and shit.

Thing is, though, once everything smells of shit, nothing does. So it’s a good thing really. Everything depends on how you look at it.

Jesus, I’m kidding. I just told you that everything in here literally smells of shit. I’m not going to make that be okay, not for your benefit, not for my own, and not for the little shit’s either. Relativism. It’s an old joke. Very old. Haven’t you heard it before?

And don’t you remember the punchline? I could be bound up like a nutcase and count myself a king of infinite space, were it not that I have bad FUCKING dreams.

Chapter Fifteen

Time passed faster the longer I stayed in Seattle, like how it did in Cambridge. It became predictable. Being a woman in the Academy means you are constantly put on committees, and every year or two, asked to serve in some sort of bullshit administrative role.

I always agree. Why? I hate this kind of work. It is not an honour to be asked, it’s grim. You see the worst of everybody, you must absorb it full in the face and you cannot let anyone else know what is happening to you because it is confidential. All the things you’re told to recognize as the warning signs of an abusive relationship, it’s basically like that. I have no training in the skills required and absolutely no aptitude for any of it. But I am always told we need someone to serve, and that everyone else is unavailable or incompetent. I am made to feel responsible.

One semester, though, a request came in that felt different. Slightly off. Slightly darker, more intense. I was asked to serve as chair of my department, and I was told that in order to accept the role I must make a presentation in a large room full of faculty, staff, and students. This whole process was to be recorded and the video posted online.

It was strange theatre. Performing drains all my energy, so I walked in with a cold face, but I tried to make it look warm. Women are supposed to be warm. This is especially important in connection with management roles, because a woman in charge is generally perceived as mean and bossy. I was immediately called upon to defend my decision to stand, to persuade the room to elect me. I hadn’t prepared for this because it made no sense. This was not a prize. I had nothing to say except that I had been asked to stand, and I was willing to serve, but this seemed to make matters worse, and the pressure intensified to defend myself. Why would I put myself forward for an honour like this? At last, a colleague asked whether I wouldn’t be liable to disintegrate if I were chosen. She was one of the ones I quite liked.

Chosen. I paused for a moment. Yes, perhaps, as the most beautiful maiden is chosen to be burned to death in a bed of flowers and white cotton—we need a good budgetary harvest this year from the Dean’s Office, these last winters have been so spartan, we are down three tenure-track lines, hemorrhaging funding for our grad students. I might be liable to go up in flames, but wasn’t that the entire point? That couldn’t be what she meant.

Sometimes my mind flickers in and out of time. This moment, another moment. Do you get this, too? Like two movies are playing at once, each one’s frames interspersed between those of the other?

Here in this room, two years earlier in a doctor’s office. The day after I nearly drowned on the bus.

“Now, then,” the doctor explained, “I don’t know exactly what’s prompted it, but you do seem to be experiencing an especially bad anxiety reaction and I want you to take it seriously.”

He said I needed to take an SSRI. I wasn’t sure he was right about that. Generally, I want to feel the things that should be felt. But I took the pills. I am a very compliant patient. I’m also scared of doctors.

Then he told me I ought to take some time off work. My aunt used to say this little rhyme to me, when she was giving up on something:

For he who fights and runs away

may live to fight another day;

But he who is in battle slain

can never rise and fight again.

I thought of it often during those weeks, as I sat around the shadows of my home. I hadn’t spoken to my aunt in years. It did occur to me to wonder if she’d ever given up on my uncle.

So, then, I might be liable to disintegrate again in this sense. Another colleague was talking now, a younger man who’d sent me some undesired