When people have called me strong for my early life and the things that I grew up with and having grown up to twenty eight and three quarter years old in spite of them, I snort.
I say, “the worst thing that’s ever happened to someone is still the worst thing. It’s all a matter of perspective.”
I believe this, I’ve made it my mantra in fact, because I have to believe it and repeat it to myself. Some people chant serenity now, some engage in cognitive therapy. I simply tell myself that because I’m merely a character in an Alice Sebold novel, and still kind of far from Irvine Welsh, I’ll be just fine.
And then I move on, continuing to shove down the things that make my liver want to come up through my throat. The memories that would choke me with their very thought.
It’s my band-aid solution.
I haven’t dealt with or overcome any adversity; I haven’t learned and moved on. I’ve simply become a little deader inside, deep where the five-year old me lives – the kid who just wanted people to love her.
Because she was beaten down and up, forced to watch herself scrubbed and bleached, starved the soul right out of herself, she’s never aged or accepted or forgiven.
She’s the angry monster that lives within, ready at any moment to tantrum her way to the surface. Prepared to accept any one’s offering, regardless of whether it’s a hug or a punch. She doesn’t know the difference between love and hate, hurt and affection, because they’ve always been symbiotic.
When some one’s nice, she looks for the agenda. When she wonders why someone would love her, she sees herself only as a commodity – a naked body, a source for someone else’s power to be exercised. She’s a victim, through and through, but a stubborn kindergartner that at her very roots refuses to accept abuses that she hasn’t called for. She didn’t steal, so her hands don’t deserve cutting off, but if you’re not willing to try, you don’t really mean to care about her.
“He hit me // And it felt like a kiss. // He hit me // And I knew he loved me. If he didn’t care for me // I could have never made him mad // But he hit me, // And I was glad.” ~ Carole King
There’s no running total for the amount of times I stood there, blocking a door, telling a him that he wasn’t leaving, poking and prodding, finding his soft, tender parts until I saw rage flash vermilion. I’d say, “Just hit me. You know you want to. Just get it over with and then we can move on.” They never did. I never believed they cared.
As much as I hate the phrase, it fits: It is what it is.
This temporary solution, the flattening of everything bad until it starts to climb into the real world and beg for nourishment, it just keeps getting bigger and thinner. Its surface area is stretching beyond collapse and I fear that I am, too. So much has come into my scope, things I didn’t remember, visions I’d repressed, that I feel like some antagonistic character in a dramatic scene who has discovered she was abducted by a cult, but the statute of limitations has run out for criminal charges.
I was never allowed to clean, growing up. Don’t get me wrong, making a mess wasn’t allowed, either, but if I should move something, or attempt to do dishes, I was told that I was a fuck up. I might have moved something out of one of the five million piles of things my father was always going to get to later – it would be lost forever, a date would go unnoticed and it would be my fault that a bill went unpaid and we were without heat.
I could never do a good enough job. I was never enough, even at six, washing dishes; at twenty, scraping the residue of poverty’s lunch from a butter knife.
Two months before he died, when his two bedroom, two-floored house was stacked to the ceiling with the detritus of might-one-days, I wasn’t allowed to move anything. When he was finally dead, the thought of trashing the place, of seeing everything gutted and removed was the most vindicating oasis I could have had.
I left the house for his landlord to deal with. It took two dumpsters to cart everything away. I thought, maybe having some stranger toss all of his maybe-one-days would feel cleansing, but it wasn’t. It was all just junk, just like I was.
The need for me to be owned, struck, have words screamed into my face, to have my blood boil with I don’t deserve this at the same time as my heart is saying Yes. More. Again. Please. is chaotic. There’s no right, there’s only an absence.
A nice boy won’t do that, and because of that, I know I’ll never be satisfied with one.
As memory and track record proves, I change them. Men, boys, girls, toys. Every boyfriend, every girlfriend, each one a mellow, devil-may-care, became obsessive, trapped and seething because it seems something that lay dormant in their DNA was revived.
My father, the late-hour basement scientist, made me the catalyst.
“Don’t call me daughter, not fit to // The picture kept will remind me // Don’t call me…” ~ Pearl Jam
How do you move on from that, when the very essence of over half of your life was a thinly-shrouded message of self-worthlessness?
I can’t not clean, now. Always looking for the dirt, the thing that will right the disorder that lives within. I forget to remember to eat, or eat too much, because to simply live healthfully is more than I’m deserved of. Good mother, yeah right; good writer, as if; good person, you believe my act? I’m my own marionette, constantly tangling my own strings, forcing the awkwardness to the surface without any reprieve.
Only mild relief can come about, when a face that hates me gets closer to mine. When I can see what I feel about me, reflected back from the person who claimed love. When he lashes out and I think, I deserved that for all that I’m failing. When the one who came to me already broken, gets a little more so, when I’m not here to repair him.
When does the ride stop, how do I quell the nausea, is there a bag I can hold, just in case I can’t keep my guts inside of me?
I know logically, I see it clear as day, that I choose to put myself in abuse’s way now. It’s so much more comforting to know that things never change, you see. Because of this, the quest to find the person who will obsess over their misfortune of being with me, who will wonder at whether I am in love or merely looking for a comfortable place to rest for a while, I’ve never loved anyone who could make me feel whole.
And why would I, when it means that everything I know to be true would come crumbling around me? I wouldn’t choose death of my illusions, when I can be comfortably numb – it’s too much work and scar tissue to slice through. What am I supposed to do, open myself wide and wet, raw and red, and wait for someone to find a new way to stab me?
I just can’t.
