Crack the Spine - Issue 80

*** My sister hypocritically pokes fun at her family members’ lists. “Everything’s gotta be on your list or you won’t do it,” she teases us. Though I find nothing wrong with this. And I do not know what my sister’s goals are, but I do know I have never seen her push around a shopping cart without a list in one hand.

Her partner is the opposite. Her partner is my best friend of fourteen years and I have never seen her make a list. Recently I have wondered that if my sister's partner/my best friend were to create a list then would she write down on it “no drinking.” Due to the fact that my sister's partner and I are besties, I actually know that “no drinking” would be that one task she would never check off. It’s the task that would always carry over to tomorrow’s list. It's the task she would forever declare I’ll tackle that one tomorrow.

It's the task that took me a decade and then some to check off my own list. *** Three years ago “No BP” was one of the necessities, the baseline, the bare minimum of what I must accomplish that day. “No BP” was not for no bipolar disorder-induced actions that day, though it could have been, but no, it was for no binging and purging. I abbreviated this goal on my list, worried that if someone were to find my list, get a glance at my list, they would say “What the fuck?” for two reasons.

1) You’re still bulimic? 2) You really need to put that on a list so you’ll remember to not throw up? And they might have asked how often this goal appeared on my list. And they would have more than perhaps thought of me as crazy when I answered them with “every day.” They would have then known it, would have then been able to identify the crazy in me. Proof on the page. I wouldn't have been able to handle that. Thus, the abbreviation. “No BP.” *** The word “goals” reminds me of the old school word for jail: gaols. Substituting this word for the word that describes what it is I want to do in that day, I begrudgingly have to admit sometimes that the goals do feel as if they are my gaols. Confined. Trapped by the tasks, unable to wander off from them. There will always be more annoying and yeah right tasks that will forever roll over to the next day. And I will never escape them because I can never seem to force myself to do them, even though they are on my list. Fail. *** I had the idea a few months ago of making a list into an essay. It was going to be funny and ironic due to what I put on that list. Though now I can’t remember what all I was going to write down to compose that list/essay. Perhaps a list about making a list.