Horizon Line
by Roe McDermott
Christina McPhee, Archaeology of Trauma, oil, ink, dye, and collage on canvas, 84 x 52 inches, 2021. Courtesy of the artist.
HORIZON LINE
ROE MCDERMOTT / MARCH 2021 / ISSUE 6
LEAVING
I can’t see the sea from where I live. But it’s there. I remember.
I read once that people who grow up on islands often experience a very specific form of anxiety when they move to landlocked places. There is no word for this specific fear. The closest is cleithrophobia, the fear of being trapped. This makes sense; the sea is the ultimate physical manifestation of a boundary, a threshold, something to contain or be crossed. I was supposed to cross it so many times this year.
Travel has become a defining feature of my life; I’m always leaving and coming back. Disappearing into different cities, I get to try on a new existence, even if just for a weekend. But I’m aware that running away means I’m always looking back over my shoulder, ironically keeping me tethered to what I’m trying to leave.
Now, though, I have to stay in place.
Event boundaries are a psychological concept that affects memory; information learned or sensations felt in one environment are retrieved more easily in the same context. Walking through doors can simulate the effect; you leave a room, you forget what you were looking for, as the act of leaving a physical space resets the memory to make room for new experiences. You re-enter the room, you remember. We associate feelings, memories, emotions with physical spaces; crossing boundaries can, even involuntarily, prompt us to move into an altered mental and emotional state.
Event boundaries are defined by three acts: leaving, returning, associating.
I have now been on my island for a year.
Seven years ago, I dislocated my ankle; tripped walking down the sweeping staircase of a Dublin hotel, my cheap, five inch stiletto pulling my foot towards a right angle. I wasn’t staying in the hotel; I was interviewing a beautiful actor who could actually afford to sleep in one of the high-ceilinged rooms. I knew something was wrong with my foot but I had another interview later that afternoon; which meant another paycheque. I drove home slowly, using one foot to work all the pedals, the gears of my car groaning in protest, or sympathy. Crawling on my knees up the stairs, I rooted around at the back of a wardrobe for the crutches leftover from someone’s teenage accident. Another excruciating drive and I arrived back at the hotel, hopping, with one shoe and a sweaty face. The doorman who had subtly eyed me up and down that morning was still working. He looked at me, confusion turning to cringe as he got a flash of purple swelling between my ankle sock and jeans. Only later, after an Xray and an examination, did my body get its diagnosis.
Dislocation: a sudden separation from your body due to a trauma. A thing out of place, a broken embodiment. Everything is still attached to your body, but it is not as it should be.
RETURNING
In March 2020, I return from a trip to Berlin to a Dublin that is markedly changed. I watch the news, pay attention to travel guidelines, begrudgingly cancel plane tickets.
In my bedroom, I start moving in place; lifting weights, jumping, squatting, committing to intensity. One morning I wake up and I cannot stand; my previously dislocated ankle cannot hold my weight. My foot hurts, but the pain is blunt and constant, making it easier to incorporate into daily existence. I shift my weight onto my other foot and limp around my house. But after three weeks, the pain becomes sharper and intermittent. Now punctuated by stabs of heat, even the dull throb is harder to ignore. I go to the hospital.
“There is ligament damage, but there’s also a chronic instability here,” says the doctor. “You didn’t heal properly last time. If you rush this again, you’ll permanently damage it. You don’t want to be back here in ten years with arthritis, right?”
Ireland is still in lockdown, so I haven’t been able to hop a plane in months. I don’t want to be back here ever.
The doctor gives me new crutches and straps my foot into a large boot. He tells me I need to keep off my foot completely for a month, then I can start slowly walking for a few minutes a day. He estimates it will take me three months to be able to walk normally, five months before I will be able to run.
“That’s what happens with these types of injuries,” he remarks. “If it had just been a clean break, it would have been easier to heal.”
ASSOCIATING
“You pile up associations the way you pile up bricks. Memory itself is a form of architecture.”
—Louise Bourgeois
With him, I became a master of navigating emotional thresholds. Out of necessity, out of secrecy. When we were alone, I was all fear and need and want and ache. When I went out with others, I acted normal, though over time, I began to forget the script. I stopped going out, reduced the thresholds to be navigated down to one.
I became unable to sleep beside him. He slept, I cried. He slept, I crumbled. He slept, and I became acutely aware of what was happening to me.
When he woke, I forgot. I forgot, I hoped, I tried, so hard, all day. The night came. I stopped performing and cried.
He was my only event.
While travelling with him in Colorado, I found myself suddenly overwhelmed by the vastness of the landscape. I had been on the back of his motorbike for nearly two weeks, staring off to the side as the landscape changed. But when we heard a storm warning, we rented a van and cabled the bike in the back. Sitting higher off the ground, staring directly out the windscreen onto the endless road in front of us, his silence heavy in the huge, tiny vehicle, I could see more clearly. And I started to panic. My heart pounded and cold sweat slicked my skin as I kept asking how far we were from the next border, the end of the country, the ocean. We had been driving for more hours than it would take to drive the length of my entire country, and were apparently still in Colorado. I could not comprehend the distance; I needed to know that we would get out of this state. We drove and drove and drove. I remembered that the horizon is an imaginary line that recedes as you approach it; I could walk and drive and try forever, and the horizon would keep moving.
I was terrified of being left out in the emptiness where there were no markers to follow, no boundary to walk along or over. I knew that without boundaries I would remain lost forever.
Thresholds are where you get found.
LEAVING
In March in the before, he had a work trip to New York, and invited me to come. When I met him in San Francisco airport, he didn’t speak to me, just stared at his phone until we boarded the plane. Unsure if I had done something wrong again and too afraid to ask, I tried to make him smile by acting excited about being in First Class. I swung my legs and cooed over the menu. I asked if any of his colleagues were on the flight.
“No,” he stated calmly. “I changed our flight, in case you’d act like this.”
I stopped swinging my legs. I sat as still as I could for the whole flight. I don’t remember breathing.
When we entered our sleek New York hotel room, he was enamoured with the view, the modern fittings, the minibar. But I was horrified. The bathroom and bedroom were separated not by a wall but by a huge sheet of coloured glass; you could see into the shower from the bed. I desperately wanted to ask for another room, but felt like I’d be ruining everything if I complained. This is what happy people want, I told myself. Trips to New York, fancy hotel rooms, watching each other shower. I should be grateful.
I suggested we go out for a drink. I put on a short tuxedo dress and new skinny high heels that wrapped pearls up my calf. I double-checked myself in the mirror before turning towards him, waiting, breath held. He looked at me and his eyes lingered on my shoes, but he didn’t say anything. I exhaled. I had passed.
“I want to show you my favourite bar in the city, down where I used to live,” he said warmly, as he pulled on his sneakers and coat. My body flooded with relief. “I’ll call an Uber?” I asked. “No,” he responded. “We can walk. I want you to see the neighbourhood.”
Outside, it was freezing. I instinctively curled my toes as the air hit them, and fruitlessly tried to pull my dress down five inches towards my knees.
“Is it far?” I asked.
“You’ll be fine.”
We started walking, and immediately my nose started to run in the cold. I had to take fast, quick steps to keep up with his long, booted strides, and still he was always ahead of me. After ten minutes of walking, my legs freezing and the straps of my shoes rubbing painfully against my toes, I asked again “Is it much further, or…?”
He spun around so quickly his scarf whipped around him. “I knew you wouldn’t care about where I come from,” he said, staring coldly at me. “Let’s just get an Uber then. So you don’t have to care.”
“Of course I care,” I stammered. “I just didn’t know, I thought we were just getting a quick drink so I’m just not really dressed for it…” I trailed off as he continued to stare at me. “Sorry,” I whispered. “I’m fine. Let’s keep walking.”
We walked. And walked. And walked. I kept my tongue between my teeth to stop them from chattering.
We arrived at a bar and I followed him inside, my glasses fogging up at the sudden warmth. He chatted with the bartender and downed several glasses of whiskey. Under the bar, I unzipped my shoe. As I moved the straps off my foot, I felt strips of skin peeling away. I knew not to let him see me wince, and so I pretended to look around the bar so I could hide my face. The bar was Irish themed; there were maps of my country all over the walls; boundaries marked, pathways highlighted, coastlines clear. An unnerving façade of home. But home was unfathomably far away.
RETURNING
When he was done drinking, I ordered us an Uber back to the hotel. The drive back took twenty minutes.
ASSOCIATING
“When essential structures are subjected to inescapable shock, the result may be confusion and agitation, or it may be emotional detachment, often accompanied by an out of body experience – the feeling you’re watching yourself from far away. In other words, trauma makes people feel like either some body else, or like no body.”
—Bessel van der Kolk, The Body Keeps The Score.
In the hotel room, I took off my shoes and tried to clean the inch-long open sores on my heels and my bloody and blackened toes, but he came into the bathroom with the glass wall and started pulling my dress off from behind. I let him lead me to bed, and stared at the ceiling as he fucked me. I let him push my legs open wide, I moaned when it seemed like I should, I kissed his shoulder when he finished because that felt like what you do after your boyfriend fucks you in an expensive hotel room. He fell asleep beside me.
Tomorrow will be better, I told myself. We’ll go wherever he wants. I won’t complain about my feet. I won’t embarrass him.
He slept, and I sat in the dark, gazing at his body in the bed. He looked the same as he always had, and I wished he didn’t; wished there was a change I could track, could show in a Before and After, could show to someone and say, ‘See, it’s different, right?’ I turned away from him and stared into the empty shower. I thought about the person who designed this room; the people who enjoy it. How secure they must be in their bodies, their intimacy. How safe you must feel to not need walls.
I tried to sleep, but the sheets rubbed against my bloody feet all night, like an alarm, like a reminder: There is a wound here. There is a body. There is a person. Don’t forget when you wake up.
LEAVING
Dissociation involves an act of leaving. Consciousness, body, memory, sensation, time, sight, emotion. Dissociating can involve leaving your body now so you can keep your mind later. Dissociating can involve leaving your body to someone else so your mind remains yours.
Historically, dissociation has been viewed as a weakness or a defense mechanism.
Being good at leaving implies a tendency to quit, a fear, a lack of commitment, an avoidance, an instability. But leaving can also imply strength; hope, desire, appetite, freedom, independence, healthy boundaries.
The difference between a weakness, a strength and a defense mechanism depends on the surrounding events, and your perception of them. The distinctions between them aren’t always clear.
RETURNING
Six months stuck in Dublin, I buy a yoga mat, and start stretching. I exercise my foot, putting my weight on it, pushing and pulling against resistance bands. I find the monotony almost excruciatingly dull. I want to be running through an airport as a final boarding announcement repeats my name. But I can’t, so I sit on my yoga mat and I stretch.
Seven months in Dublin, and I start building a routine to prevent me from losing my mind. I give myself a bedtime, like a child. For the first time in years, I start falling asleep at night, and getting up in the mornings.
Eight months in Dublin, and I slowly accumulate things I’ve never owned before. Plants for the windowsills, art for the walls, a laptop stand so that I can write for hours.
Nine months in Dublin, and I keep sitting on my yoga mat. My foot feels more stable, but I keep exercising it, to ensure it will keep holding my weight. I practice staying with my body, my breath.
Every morning for a year, I wake up in Dublin. I close my eyes. I listen to my breath. I move my body. I get tired at night, and I fall asleep.
My foot feels more stable. I move my body everyday. I stay in place. I stay with myself.
ASSOCIATING
“The challenge of recovery is to re-establish ownership of your body and your mind — of your self. This means feeling free to know what you know and to feel what you feel without becoming overwhelmed, enraged, ashamed, or collapsed. For most people this involves (1) finding a way to become calm and focused, (2) learning to maintain that calm in response to images, thoughts, sounds, or physical sensations that remind you of the past, (3) finding a way to be fully alive in the present and engaged with the people around you, (4) not having to keep secrets from yourself, including secrets about the ways that you have managed to survive.”
—Bessel van der Kolk, The Body Keeps The Score.
Return, re-turn.
React, re-act.
Resolve, re-solve.
Recover, re-cover.
Represent, re-present.
Remember, re-member.
I can't see the future from where I live. But it’s there. I’m starting to remember.
Roe McDermott is a writer, journalist, and Fulbright scholar with an MA in Journalism and an MA in Sexuality Studies from San Francisco State University, where she studied Irish women’s experiences of abortion. Roe is a columnist for The Irish Times, the film editor for Hot Press magazine and has had essays published in The Rumpus and The Coven. In 2020, Roe was awarded the Irish Arts Council’s Next Generation Artist Award for Literature. She is currently completing an MFA in University College Dublin and is working on her first essay collection which will explore PTSD, trauma, and patriarchal constructions of knowledge and credibility.
Christina McPhee’s images move from within a matrix of abstraction, shadowing figures and contingent effects. Across drawing, painting, video, networked and photo-based processes, she engages potential forms of life, in various systems and territories, and in real and imagined ecologies. Her new paintings in the series Trickster Utopia (2020-2021) entangle sensations of human, plant and animal spirits in a mashup of landscape, anime, and collage, together with traces of text and performance. Born in Los Angeles, McPhee grew up on the Great Plains in Nebraska. Museum collections of her work across media are with the Whitney Museum of American Art, International Center for Photography, Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Sheldon Art Museum, Great Plains Art Museum, Colorado Springs Art Museum at Colorado College; and internationally, with Thresholds New Media Collection in Scotland. Solo exhibitions include the American University Museum, Washington, D.C. and Bildmuseet, Umeå, Sweden, for her project Carrizo-Parkfield Diaries. She has participated in many international group exhibitions, notably with documenta 12. Drawings based on the poetry of Sor Juana de la Cruz, plus a new video/audio collaboration with Ashon Crawley, will be in the group exhibition Otherwise/Revival, at Bridge Projects, Los Angeles (April-July 2021). Her drawings have most recently appeared in print with Radical Philosophy (fall 2019) alongside an essay by philosopher Rei Terada. McPhee lives and works in central coast California.