How arsenic poisoning made me a better listener

It was a nine-month love affair, and it ended badly. You know the sensation. Suddenly the plug is pulled on something vibrant, electrical, and oh so deeply flawed, and your heart breaks into so many pieces that you don’t know where to step.

Maybe that’s what drew the arsenic up from my cells when I stopped eating. There are less than a handful of ways to get unintentional arsenic poisoning: in utero, asbestos, inhalation, well water, and fish. Since the start of the relationship, because we cooked for each other every weekend, my intake of fish had tripled.

But deep grief also drew it up. It turned my mind into a foreign landscape when I had the sensation of stepping over the edge of a cliff. As I was falling, something challenged me to write, and to limit myself to one page. If I couldn’t do that, then I wasn’t worth my salt as a writer.

In the end, there were 27 one-pagers with names like: The Nature of Desire. Winter. Shedding Skin. Fangs. Coiled Hearts. Being Ten. Arranged Marriages. Ghosts. Spells.

This intense focus harvested something more. When you limit yourself to one page, it places in your hand a culling knife that butchers the non-essential.

It introduced me to what I would later call my “wider wisdom” – the intelligence that gave me wings when I lost my footing. What was with me when I wrote at four in the morning with arsenic the alchemical lab in which I learned how to wrestle with and hone language. How to listen for clarity, and the “no fat on the bone” sound of the pain of not being heard as a child. How it forced me to repeat myself, until I thought I was heard. How to say it another way.

In my time of arsenic, I came to understand that in my young despair, I was already practicing how to craft sounds that would give voice to what I could not bring myself to say.