brain vomit
Ladies and gentlemen of the jury,
My mind is wrapped around lines. I think and dream of them, fractals that shift to make three dimensional shapes that change the way you feel about yourself for the rest of your life.
I was never a pretty child but I can see how the Lolita that hides in every girl came out.
I would love to think I am innocent, but innocence is simply ignorance, you can still seduce and not realize it.
I think of the beach, the swimming pools, thin arms and legs and a streak of red and sun burned freckles over the bridges of noses. Sun warmed shoulder blades and scraped knees. Your backyard, me leaning on the trellis, bottom teeth breaking through the waxy skin of a purple bruise of a plum, your hands reaching under my shirt to tickle me as I squeal and twist away. Or in the back of the car at a rest stop, my legs over yours, parents in the parking lot, you saying let’s play a game. Your thumb on my chin twists my eyes to match yours, and you say, you have pretty eyes. Thumb grazes my cheekbone and I scrunch my nose. Now tell me something you like about me, you say. You have pretty eyes, I say, flat, the blood rushing to my cheeks, embarrassed to say such a grown up and mushy thing. No, pick something else, you say. I turn my head and blow onto the window, creating a frosty patch. I don’t remember what I wrote but my mother and father returned to the car and the game ended.
At the pool, you would take me to the deep end, hands under my armpits, me kicking and wailing that you were going to kill me, I would drown for sure. Away from everyone else, hands on my hip bones, chorine-kissed eyes, forcing me to swim in waters well over my head. I clung to the grimy cement curb of the pool wall, small feet digging into the slimy tile. I knew how to swim, but something about the overwhelming depths of the pool sucked the faith from me, instilling the irrational fear that I would somehow be vacuumed into the vast aqua fog and never return to the surface.
Every greeting was met with a kiss, the forced hug, I complied politely every time. Kiss me, you would demand, if I did not remember this vital step. Soon it was kisses whenever you demanded, pinned to the floor, against the couch, your tongue on my throat, face, bottom lip. Blowing rasberries on my stomach, tongue on my stomach, hands on my hips.
At the country fair, I was a pretzel around your neck, you would insist on carrying me every step of the way. So my legs dangling over your shoulders, hands, carpals, tarsals, metatarsals, encasing the patella, fingers sliding down the femur and tibia, sweaty handprints on the arches of my feet. I would sometimes arch my back and twist over backwards, whine for you to drop me, and you would do so reluctantly, only for me to be scooped up again ten minutes later. I was a leaf, a petal, so easily placed where you wanted, a feather or eyelash. You could lift my entire body with one arm. Was that desirable? This fragile, breakable girl, lively and clumsy, hair uncombed, swathed in baggy clothing? What part of this made your heart beat faster, made you think of me as more than a child, a lover, someone you wanted to be intimate with? When did this line cross, or break, or simply bend to such an extreme? These lines, I wish they were glowing, I wish in my mind they reverberated or buzzed and crackled like an electric fence every time you crossed through one. But they are threads, silent, weak, flexible.
I recall particular times, most all blurred in my memory. But as I approached the age of 12, going on 13, the clothing became less baggy, the hair became combed, unnatural colors began to smear across my eyelids and onto my cheekbones. I began wearing brand name clothing and trying to be someone that I didn’t really know.
You discouraged this; maybe you were trying to protect me from my future. You told me not to shave my legs and to stop wearing makeup. My girlfriend doesn’t shave her legs, you said, referring to the awkward girl who had been hanging around you that night, someone I had never seen before. That’s right, your girlfriend. I’m not your girlfriend, I screamed in my head. Don’t try to change me. Maybe you missed the little feisty sand-covered child with the awkward teeth and sunburn, this fruit-scented, gum-snapping, glitter-smeared girlthing was changing too rapidly for your taste.
Maybe I am blind to the poetics of it all. Maybe it was merely the same chemistry that spurts a torrent of emotion for a cousin or school teacher. All wrong, but nothing more than a glitch in the electrical wires reserved for pretty girls, the ones your age, maybe even older. Maybe I simply, through society’s paranoia and laws and history repeating itself for every little girl left alone with the wrong person, am judging one person’s confusion for something so much worse. Maybe it was as innocent, or ignorant, as it seemed so many years ago.
Either way, I will never forget the amount of blood that rushed to my head, to my cheeks, my entire brain, the way my stomach clenched, the way my palms sweated, the way I wanted to crawl out of my own skin the day you sat me on the couch and confessed everything. You made sure nobody was around, and when shadows peeked through the door, you stopped the conversation, waiting until they passed. I had a ball filled with beads in my hand, I held it so hard, the only thing I could grasp as the situation spiraled beyond every level of comfort I possessed. I am your guardian angel, Thea, you said. I am attracted to you, Thea. I want to be with you. But I know I am too old. Someday, when you are older…you drift off. I clench my eyes, there are tears welling up, please get me away from here. I know you feel the same way, you say.
The lines form into sharp daggers and I stab you in my mind.
I tell the truth and, for once in my life, I defend myself.
"I always thought of you as a brother."
I am your guardian angel, Thea. You are beautiful. I want to protect you.
I want you to die, I wanted to say.
Don’t tell anyone I told you this. They wouldn’t understand.
There may have been more words, but these are the ones that stand out in my mind.
Someone eventually came into the room. I broke free, ran outside, and hid in the grass until the sun sank and mosquitoes threatened to suck every ounce of blood from my arms.
At home, the conversation looped in my head over and over again. My jaw clenched, tears rolling down my face, I cursed you as horribly as I could in my head, sometimes out loud when nobody was around. I would have imaginary conversations with you. I would scream and punch you and make you feel as horribly uncomfortable as you made me feel. I started taking hour and a half long showers, scrubbing, scrubbing, trying to make the disgusting feeling inside of me go away. You had betrayed me.
It wasn’t until years later of hiding from boys and getting the same feeling of putrid repulsion every time someone I wasn’t interested in approached me. The boy who’s locker was next to mine told me I was pretty the first day of school, then told a friend he was going to ask me out. I ate lunch in the bathroom for three weeks and didn’t use my locker for half the year. He got the point, but I still walked down the halls with my eyes down, fearing any sort of contact.
I don’t understand how this affected me so badly. I was fortunate, I wasn’t raped, molested, anything.
But part of me thinks that’s what makes it worse. He touched a part of my brain that nobody could see, that no jury would ever prosecute. There is no law against molesting someone’s brain. This is the truth.
I carry this around, thinking, what did I miss? Was I secretly abused in my innocence/ignorance? Was it everything I remember, harmless, just the words that jumbled up the wires in my brain, that set me off on a fear parade?
I wish I knew. I wish I knew. I wish I could remember. I wish I could remember. I wish I could remember.
Or forget.
I don’t know what you saw in me.