(no subject)
writer's craft '07
memoir.
I remember the days you were a hero in my eyes, / but those are just a long lost memory of mine. / I've spent so many years learning how to survive, / now I'm writing just to let you know I'm still alive.
I look at myself through a fun house mirror tonight while I’m heading off to bed; distorted and grotesque, stretched and bloated like a water logged corpse. Eleven, maybe twelve years old, and already I’m twisted, veined through with contempt, distaste and hate. For you, and for me. To you, this is just a night that you put band practice ahead of picking me up on time, a night when you chose yourself over me yet again. For me, this is just another piece of the puzzle that says that I’m unimportant, worthless. Another piece of the puzzle that stabs needles in my back, leaves me scratching and crawling for your attention, for a wave of your hand.
The mirror doesn’t show me, it shows you. It doesn’t show my pale expanse of skin, my freckles, my body that’s too big here, too small here, mouse brown hair that curls in all the wrong ways. It shows me something else, something far worse, something black with soot and gangrene.
No matter how many times I tell myself it isn’t true, a part of you lives in me, even if it’s only chromosomes and DNA. I let it grow. This will be the final time you put me in last place, but it won’t be the last time I feel like a loser. This will be the last time I even run, the last time I even start, and last night was the last time that I will ever look in the mirror and smile.
I sleep, and I don’t dream, there’s just the inside of my eyelids turned black from pulsating red by the lack of light. I get up in the morning a little less of myself, and you’re blaming my mother just like you always do, screaming through telephone wires like that could save your dirty soul.
This is the beginning of the end, the first day of the apocalypse, father and daughter divided for the last time. A thick black line, drawn across my life in permanent ink, a gory slash; twelve years old: a new chapter, and another chamber in the fun house, with shifting floors and spinning walls, things that morph and twist into things they aren’t. Illusions on a grand scale, mirages and vanity that change with the wind and a lift of a finger, something you never gave me.
It’s sick, how you’re atrophied and dead, and yet you spent fourteen, fifteen, sixteen years destroying me, piece by piece; tearing me down without so much as uttering a word in my direction. You became the sun in my universe, or maybe the black hole, holding everything together with your gravity, pulling all my energy into one place. I became the distant planet, cold and isolated, black and blue.
I could count the days that I’ve wasted on you, but that would just take more time, time that I am not willing to waste. When I look into the mirror tonight, I want clear vision. I want the mirror to stop bending and the floor to stop titling. I want gravity and stability.
You are not big enough to take that away from me.
Tonight I will be my own sun, and pick myself up off the tilt-spin-shifting floor and clear my head, shake the demons and steady myself.
Tonight, you’re as good as dead.
&&&
When we were children, we used to think that when we were grown-up we would no longer be vulnerable. But to grow up is to accept vulnerability...to be alive is to be vulnerable.
We are most alive when we're in love.
She bought me a dress, steel blue velvet that shimmers crimson-violet-pewter in the light, twenty dollars on sale from the mall.
My fourteen year old body isn’t feminine enough or thin enough as I stare in the mirror, and there’s always you behind me with an unreadable face, in your canary yellow sweatshirt and trademark half-assed smirk. You tell me in your guarded way that I am beautiful, nice, from a guy’s perspective, and I roll my eyes in mock teenage indifference.
I never believe anything you say about me, not because I don’t trust you, but because I have no reason to believe you. You always skip around the truth, play hopscotch with it, jumping expertly over the squares and never missing a beat. You don’t lie, but you stick to the safe, healed edges of the wound that is truth. You’re obviously blind or stupid, as much as I love you. Yeah, you’re obviously blind, when you smile at me like that and try not to stare at the ghosts of what I will be.
It’s sick, diseased, the way I am, and you are salve on burning skin. It’s too bad we don’t speak up at times like these, it’s too bad, really, that our words haven’t caught up to our feelings. It’s unfortunate that our fourteen year old vocabularies don’t yet contain the lexicon of words to express the feelings that we don’t yet begin to fathom.
You could have stitched the wound shut with your smile; you could have disinfected me with something less tangible than peroxide, but something just as potent. Something that stings less and burns more, something that hurts even as the anesthetic flows from our lips, something that cleanses the tissues that bandages and platonic kisses on the cheek in the kitchen can’t reach.
So I wear this dress in the living room, sock feet sliding on the hardwood floor, regarding myself in the gilt-framed mirror with critical hazel eyes, and you sit on the dining room chair in your black jeans and that damned canary sweater, black hair standing up like porcupine quills, brown eyes half staring, half ashamed.
We were never the thing we were supposed to be, not then or now, in the blue dress and the yellow sweater with our festering wounds and cherry blossom scars. You look at me like there’s something you can see that I can’t, some mirage that follows me around, a one way mirror of façade that I wish I could see. I want to see out of your eyes for one day, to see what you see when you look at me.
I change out of the silver-blue-bloody sunset of a dress, back into whatever dark and dirty jeans I wore today, whatever thrift store t-shirt and whatever hard metallic jewelry. And then we’re back to us, sitting on the couch or my best friends’ bed, two kids with no idea that what has just happened to them will change them forever. Two kids who don’t understand the way they’ll hurt when their vocabulary catches up to their brains, two kids who haven’t quite grasped the way they’ve been molding and twisting each other, dressed in liquid mercury and sunshine.
At least, this is how I see it from where I stand, with that dress in a ball of molten metal on my bedroom floor and a thousand words scribbled in notebooks. I don’t know the mystery of what flowed between us on nights like this, because I was, I am, too young to know the difference. I don’t know if you remember the way the velvet shimmered in the light or the way I tried to hide my eyes when you smiled at me. I don’t know if you remember a word we spoke.
But I will never forget, every time I slip into that dress, the way it felt to be alive.
&&&
Oh, come on. If you can't laugh at the walking dead, who can you laugh at?
March 2005. East London, England. 10 PM.
We walk along the cobblestone-paved paths, in dark, narrow alleys between taverns, hands in our pockets. The buildings are so close together that looking up affords you only a sliver-sized glimpse of the stars. We come to our first destination, a square surrounded by flower boxes and tall buildings. It doesn’t seem too foreboding, maybe just dark and damp and a bit chilly. But right here, right where I’m standing, someone was murdered. Right on the very stones under my feet, in a matter of seconds her life was snuffed out by an enigma, a mystery.
The tour guide speaks up, tells us that this is where Jack the Ripper’s first victim was found, by a police officer making his rounds. She was killed silently in a matter of minutes. Someone to our right laughs as they watch us, tourists!, they’re probably thinking. We stand fascinated, staring at the space on the ground he points to. Someone’s blood once covered those stones! A corpse of someone’s daughter, sister, or mother was laid there with her guts ripped out!
Humans are morbid creatures, indeed.
Our tour continues through a stone tunnel, orange-lit with lamps, to the next location. It goes this way and that, winding through streets that none of us had ever seen or were likely to ever see again, passing by tiny pubs spilling over with people. The people in their apartments look down at us curiously, a noisy group of tourist kids walking in the dark.
When we get to the last location, an alley between two Victorian apartment buildings, everyone gets deathly quiet while the tour guide starts explaining the manner of the last girls’ death. We stand so still we almost blend into the rust coloured stones, stock still and attentive while he tells us the gory details. Her intestines ripped out, strung along the walls, hanging from the ceiling. Blood covering her apartment, her body torn open, several organs missing. Everything is silent while we stare up at the four-paned window encased in dark red brick, while we form the grisly picture in our minds, considering the gravity of what happened to this girl, and how gross and totally awesome it is.
And to my right, my best friend bursts into peals of raucous laughter.
&&&
Music is the effort we make to explain to ourselves how our brains work.
We listen to Bach transfixed because this is listening to a human mind.
We stand restless, grouped together like a pack of hungry wolves. We wait. The room is already hot, humid, and the show hasn’t even started. Electricity crackles and flares down my spine, pooling in my lower back as a chill - goose bumps, even in the tight press of bodies. Anticipation is palpable, tension thick enough to taste.
When the lights dim, we roar, a sound loud enough to wake the dead. Everything starts with the sudden emergence of bodies from the shadows. We rush towards the stage, a tidal wave, shuffling and shoving. Everything disappears, and all we are is energy, bouncing and rippling over the concrete floor. There’s just heat and sound and light.
See all these people on the ground, wasting time. Try to hold it all inside, just for tonight.
And then there’s a moment where I stop being me. There’s a moment where I become a part of something bigger. There’s that split second when his voice stops floating over the ocean of people, a moment where we aren’t just kids anymore, where we’re part of something bigger.
On top of the world, sitting here wishing.
There’s a moment when the heat of a thousand bodies evaporates on the breeze of voices. There’s a moment when it doesn’t matter that I can’t see the band, that I’m caught behind a gaggle of six-foot giants. There’s a moment where it doesn’t matter that I’m stepping in spilled Coke and that my feet are throbbing, that my hair is plastered to my forehead, that I can barely breathe, that my clothes are soaked with sweat that probably isn’t mine. There’s a moment where it all disappears.
The things I’ve become, but something is missing. Maybe I...what do I know?
There’s a moment where all that matters is the chorus of voices, high above the concrete echo of the building, over the static of the speakers, filling every square inch with something tangible, something more than just words. There’s the blue-white glow of cell phones, a thousand little squares that must look like stars from where they stand. There’s a moment where every kid in that room, every freak, geek and jock, is family. Fucking family.
And now it seems that I have found nothing at all, wanna hear your voice out loud.
And for three and a half minutes, no one in that cavernous, concrete building is alone. There’s not a single soul who doesn’t leave with a piece of that moment lodged in their soul. I hope there isn’t a kid in the place who doesn’t leave feeling like they were a part of something massive and magical.
Slow it down, slow it down. Without it all, I’m choking on nothing.
For three and a half minutes, everyone belongs. No matter where you’re from, what you’d been through, or where you’d go at the end of the night, you were home. You and every other kid in that room were brothers, sisters, and friends.
It’s clear in my head, I’m screaming for something. Knowing nothing is better than knowing it all.
For three and a half minutes, everything was blindingly clear. Everything was laid out, love and friendship and belonging and music and hope.
On my own.
For three and a half minutes, no one was alone. And this is the church of sound, where you are the least and most important person in the room, and we bow to the beat of the drum. When your voice rises up with everyone else, screaming the words you know like the back of your hand, there is nothing else. A community of love, even as a kid stumbles between the barrier and the stage with a broken nose. We are the choir.
&&&
Jesus Christ, I’m not scared to die, / but I’m a little bit scared of what comes after. Do I get the gold chariot, / do I float through the ceiling? Or do I divide and pull apart? / ‘Cause my bright is too slight to hold back all my dark.
I sit here, still and silent, staring at the statue of Jesus hanging from the cross, blank-eyed and bloody, shiny with glaze; staring, eyes roaming, at the paintings of people, naked and dying. At the bloody red heart wrapped in golden thorns. I should be paying attention to the priest at the front, standing behind the pulpit and speaking so highly of my Meme. Focus, focus, please.
But I can’t, I’m here, I’m lost. I am absorbed by the artificial shine coming off the Christ, and the patterned light coming in through the leaded stained glass windows, bejeweling the floor. I feel pinned to the hard, dark, polished wood of the pew, pinned by the downward gaze of the statue. The smell of incense and prayers swirls around, dust particles through the coloured beams of light, and the air presses close.
Flash, and I’m five years old, lying in bed. The air is thick and dusty, and there are people, thousands, pressed close in the dusty streets. The sun is scorching. There’s a man, strung up, blood dripping into his downcast eyes. He’s hanging on a cross by his wrists and his ankles, cut and punctured like a pincushion. I’m not a Christian girl, I don’t go to Catholic school, and I’ve never read the Bible. I don’t know about the crucifixion, about Jesus and his Apostles or God his father. But I know that this, this dream I am having, should frighten me, send me running to my mother screaming about the bloody man, oh mommy, the bloody man. Why then, am I not afraid, staring into His eyes from my five year old body? I’m just lying there, standing barefoot in the dust, three steps away from the Saviour. The air thickens.
Flash, and I’m back in the church, listening to the drone of the priest and staring blankly at the ceiling, lost. It occurs to me that maybe, remembering this, sitting under the sad eyes of Jesus, I should be having a revelation, something that leads me to God and turns me into an ecclesiast, a devotee.
No. I sit here, staring at the fiberglass Jesus, his thorn encrusted heart and the frescoes on the church walls, and I feel nothing.
I leave the same as I entered - not an atheist, and not a believer, but some agnostic in-between who hangs herself on threads of paganism - and with the same old sins tucked up into my coat sleeves.
I leave the same as I entered. I don’t feel purer, cleansed, like I want to turn to God and blindly believe. Instead, I leave with painted porcelain eyes burning into the back of my skull, and a heavy weight somewhere behind my sternum.
I feel guilty, disgusted, because it hasn’t hit me yet, the devotion that so many people carry. I’m left out here alone, looking for something tangible to take its place, something that words and music and late nights have not yet afforded me.
I leave the same as I entered, only maybe a little more lost, with the face of Jesus burned into my retinas like that optical illusion, and with a little bigger gap between me and faith.
I know you're coming in the night like a thief, / but I’ve had some time, O Lord, to hone my lying technique. / I know you think that I’m someone you can trust, / but I’m scared I’ll get scared / and I swear I’ll try to nail you back up. / So do you think that we could work out a sign / so I’ll know it's you and that it's over so I won't even try? / I know you're coming for the people like me / but we all got wood and nails / and we turn, turn out hate in factories.
&&&
“She is full of contrast, more alive and closer to death than anyone I've known,
like a Johnny Cash song or some theatre star.”
“The stars are always there but we miss them in the dirt and clouds.
We miss them in the storms. Tell them to remember hope. We have hope.”
She belongs in a twisted, static world of chemicals and slow death. She is like a television, flashing and blinking, but not listening, never listening. She hides behind the wall of substances and scars, trying to escape from the pain and the hate and the loss. Tries anything and everything to numb herself and silence her demons, to quiet the voices wailing in her head. She calls me late at night from payphones and her bedroom, broken and crying, when even the drugs can’t numb her. We don’t talk much, because after a while I run out of ways to tell her she can live, and she runs out of ways to tell me she wants to die.
If I could have, I would have erased all her memories, of the boy, the suicides, her father, the drugs and the bleeding, the things I don’t understand. If I could have I would have, but I know I would’ve lost her in the process, lost who this experience has made her, a beautiful girl with a broken spirit.
One night I walk to meet her in the snow, late, because she called from Seven Eleven and said she wanted to talk. We sit in my living room, saying nothing much at all and watching music videos on television. She’s high, coked out, fucked up, and I can’t even tell - I’ve never seen her any other way. I don’t realize until later that every day at school she’s using, she’s high on chemicals, too many lines of blow a day; heroin other days, deadly and numbing in her veins. She doesn’t believe me when I tell her that I’ve never done drugs. Months later, I tell her that she is why I never will.
In the spring, she tears her arm apart with a razorblade and wears gauze to school like an accessory, unconcealed by her sleeves. I don’t know if she even thinks to hide it, if she even cares if someone sees. She draws stars on her eyes where tears should be. She belongs to the darkness.
Fast forward. A few months ago, she wrote in her online journal that she had been clean for two weeks. She hadn’t told me she was quitting, and I never dreamed that it was any more than an idea she entertained when she didn’t think she could go on, an idle fantasy she liked to play in her head when she hit rock bottom again. I prayed, but I never dreamed. But slowly and surely and all of a sudden, she began to emerge, to unravel. A slow transformation that is still taking place, months later, a breaking down of walls and an unfurling of her insides that will take time, and love, and hope.
It has been a long time, months, since she’s gone off into her chemical reality, since she’s painted another red slash on the canvas of her skin. I think, I hope at least, that this is the truth. I like to think that maybe I helped her, on the phone and in words, with television and awkward silence. Sometimes she thanks me, for not giving up on her, for not walking out when everyone else was running away.
And for now, she falls into the arms of her girlfriend, who knows what it’s like to belong to the darkness and the pain, and talks to me when she needs to. She has finally found someone who knows where she’s been better than I ever could without walking straight down the path she has taken, dangerously close to destroying myself. Still, my door and ears are always open.
Today, she no longer belongs to the pain and the drugs. She belongs to hope and love and truth, and a better tomorrow.
Today, she belongs to herself.
&&&
So let's drink to forgiveness, / let's drink for regret, let's drink to the ones we've loved and lost, / let us never forget.
Jesse stumbles in around one AM, soaked from the rain and the tears streaming down his face. There’s mud smeared up the legs of his skin tight blue jeans, on his skeletal hands. His hair is plastered to his forehead in the vibrant shade of blue - teal, aquamarine, sky, electric - that he prefers, dripping and wet. He chokes on his words, he pleads,
“Where’s Kayla? I need...”
And I don’t even hear the rest of his sentence before I’m out of my chair, leaping across the few feet to the stairs where Kearyn meets me with wide eyes, already worried. He’s hysterical, drunk, barely able to tell me the problem through his sobs and cold, shaking hands. We head unsteadily down the wood stairs, arms on shoulders and wet feet slipping, and he falls into a blue satin upholstered dining chair, unable to make it to the couch beyond.
“I don’t need you to take care of me,” he whispers while I’m sending off armies, troops to gather dry clothes and put his wet, muddy ones in the dryer, his soaked shoes over a vent. I don’t listen to him. He may not need me, but I am here, and I am cleaning up the mess and not going anywhere. He tells me in garbled words, drunken syllables, about vomit and harsh words, crying and fear. He ran home in icy rain, slipping on the wet grass, only stopping to puke, afraid of someone. I only half understand his strings of vowels and emotion, and when he’s calm, dry, loved enough I send him to bed, Jen’s bed, telling him not to sleep on his back, just in case. He tells me he’s sure he threw it all up on the way home. Unfortunate, but reassuring.
And then just before he heads upstairs, clean and dry, he turns on his heel and tells me something else in a low voice, thick with something, maybe vodka or unshed tears. I don’t know.
“He pushed me against the wall, and said ‘We don’t need your faggot ass at this party.’”
And something snaps inside me, breaks in half and lets out a torrent of black, red and rage. He trudges off to bed while I hide shaking hands, pale and drawn, and I walk into the kitchen, trying to swallow the bitter taste in my mouth.
“What’s up?” Aaron says, always concerned, because he knows how I am, the way I take care of people and the way I kill myself when I can’t fix, heal, stitch, love. He sat and watched me, changing Jesse’s clothes, talking in soft words and melody. I’m sure him and Jeff can read the anger in my eyes, the way my fists are clenched and the way my whole body is screaming, pouring out black and red.
“They called him a fag and pushed him into the wall!” I spit, not at him, but at anyone, everyone, the walls, the floor. I am seething, boiling, almost unable to function with a head full of venom. I almost expect him and Jeff to laugh, to crack a joke, well, he is one, isn’t he?
Because, well, they’re boys, they’re straight, and I know they’re uncomfortable, sometimes, with James and Jesse, the way things are. So I wait, I pace, for some joke to slip out, some other piece of glass to lodge in my brain.
But his face just blanks, and then rearranges into a flash of anger while I pace on the ceramic tiles, doorway to sink, almost twitching with anger.
And suddenly, they’re there with me, back and forth and trying to calm me, trying to cool me down. It’s unanimous, words and actions, that if it weren’t for the rain, the three of us would walk over and teach the kid a lesson, pound his drunken face in, anything to make him listen. But really, really, we know it’s just talk, angry words without meaning. We know it’d be no use.
You can’t fight violence with violence, ignorance with ignorance.
And eventually, Jesse saunters back out of the bedroom, tired but considerably more sober and considerably more sane, considerably more steady. I’ve heard someone else’s drunken variation of the story, someone else soaked in rain and vodka, which is maybe better, maybe just drunk talk, maybe not as bad as I thought. I’m not sure who I believe, and I don’t care who’s right, I am still clenched fists and white knuckles behind a smile. I am still angry at everything, at the injustice the world possesses and the way nothing is right, everything is wrong, and there is nothing I can do about it.
And yet I’m glad, joyous, that I was there when he came home. That I was sitting on the couch with my legs crossed, wishing for sleep, watching the rain run down the window. That even though it was his own fault, drinking too much too young, I was there to clean him up and love him. Maybe, maybe that’s unhealthy, pouring so much of myself into everyone and leaving none for myself.
Nonetheless, I wouldn’t wish for anything less. I am who I am, and I do what I do, and the only thing I really understand is how to love. I am the girl held together by glue and stitches, music and friendship, and he is part of my seams, no exception. He is a piece of me, and when someone hurts him, calls him names they don’t understand, a piece of me breaks off and embeds myself in him, to heal.
He could come home drunk every night that I’m there, soaking wet and muddy, and I wouldn’t love him any less.
Maybe, maybe I’d love him more.
&&&
memoir.
I remember the days you were a hero in my eyes, / but those are just a long lost memory of mine. / I've spent so many years learning how to survive, / now I'm writing just to let you know I'm still alive.
I look at myself through a fun house mirror tonight while I’m heading off to bed; distorted and grotesque, stretched and bloated like a water logged corpse. Eleven, maybe twelve years old, and already I’m twisted, veined through with contempt, distaste and hate. For you, and for me. To you, this is just a night that you put band practice ahead of picking me up on time, a night when you chose yourself over me yet again. For me, this is just another piece of the puzzle that says that I’m unimportant, worthless. Another piece of the puzzle that stabs needles in my back, leaves me scratching and crawling for your attention, for a wave of your hand.
The mirror doesn’t show me, it shows you. It doesn’t show my pale expanse of skin, my freckles, my body that’s too big here, too small here, mouse brown hair that curls in all the wrong ways. It shows me something else, something far worse, something black with soot and gangrene.
No matter how many times I tell myself it isn’t true, a part of you lives in me, even if it’s only chromosomes and DNA. I let it grow. This will be the final time you put me in last place, but it won’t be the last time I feel like a loser. This will be the last time I even run, the last time I even start, and last night was the last time that I will ever look in the mirror and smile.
I sleep, and I don’t dream, there’s just the inside of my eyelids turned black from pulsating red by the lack of light. I get up in the morning a little less of myself, and you’re blaming my mother just like you always do, screaming through telephone wires like that could save your dirty soul.
This is the beginning of the end, the first day of the apocalypse, father and daughter divided for the last time. A thick black line, drawn across my life in permanent ink, a gory slash; twelve years old: a new chapter, and another chamber in the fun house, with shifting floors and spinning walls, things that morph and twist into things they aren’t. Illusions on a grand scale, mirages and vanity that change with the wind and a lift of a finger, something you never gave me.
It’s sick, how you’re atrophied and dead, and yet you spent fourteen, fifteen, sixteen years destroying me, piece by piece; tearing me down without so much as uttering a word in my direction. You became the sun in my universe, or maybe the black hole, holding everything together with your gravity, pulling all my energy into one place. I became the distant planet, cold and isolated, black and blue.
I could count the days that I’ve wasted on you, but that would just take more time, time that I am not willing to waste. When I look into the mirror tonight, I want clear vision. I want the mirror to stop bending and the floor to stop titling. I want gravity and stability.
You are not big enough to take that away from me.
Tonight I will be my own sun, and pick myself up off the tilt-spin-shifting floor and clear my head, shake the demons and steady myself.
Tonight, you’re as good as dead.
&&&
When we were children, we used to think that when we were grown-up we would no longer be vulnerable. But to grow up is to accept vulnerability...to be alive is to be vulnerable.
We are most alive when we're in love.
She bought me a dress, steel blue velvet that shimmers crimson-violet-pewter in the light, twenty dollars on sale from the mall.
My fourteen year old body isn’t feminine enough or thin enough as I stare in the mirror, and there’s always you behind me with an unreadable face, in your canary yellow sweatshirt and trademark half-assed smirk. You tell me in your guarded way that I am beautiful, nice, from a guy’s perspective, and I roll my eyes in mock teenage indifference.
I never believe anything you say about me, not because I don’t trust you, but because I have no reason to believe you. You always skip around the truth, play hopscotch with it, jumping expertly over the squares and never missing a beat. You don’t lie, but you stick to the safe, healed edges of the wound that is truth. You’re obviously blind or stupid, as much as I love you. Yeah, you’re obviously blind, when you smile at me like that and try not to stare at the ghosts of what I will be.
It’s sick, diseased, the way I am, and you are salve on burning skin. It’s too bad we don’t speak up at times like these, it’s too bad, really, that our words haven’t caught up to our feelings. It’s unfortunate that our fourteen year old vocabularies don’t yet contain the lexicon of words to express the feelings that we don’t yet begin to fathom.
You could have stitched the wound shut with your smile; you could have disinfected me with something less tangible than peroxide, but something just as potent. Something that stings less and burns more, something that hurts even as the anesthetic flows from our lips, something that cleanses the tissues that bandages and platonic kisses on the cheek in the kitchen can’t reach.
So I wear this dress in the living room, sock feet sliding on the hardwood floor, regarding myself in the gilt-framed mirror with critical hazel eyes, and you sit on the dining room chair in your black jeans and that damned canary sweater, black hair standing up like porcupine quills, brown eyes half staring, half ashamed.
We were never the thing we were supposed to be, not then or now, in the blue dress and the yellow sweater with our festering wounds and cherry blossom scars. You look at me like there’s something you can see that I can’t, some mirage that follows me around, a one way mirror of façade that I wish I could see. I want to see out of your eyes for one day, to see what you see when you look at me.
I change out of the silver-blue-bloody sunset of a dress, back into whatever dark and dirty jeans I wore today, whatever thrift store t-shirt and whatever hard metallic jewelry. And then we’re back to us, sitting on the couch or my best friends’ bed, two kids with no idea that what has just happened to them will change them forever. Two kids who don’t understand the way they’ll hurt when their vocabulary catches up to their brains, two kids who haven’t quite grasped the way they’ve been molding and twisting each other, dressed in liquid mercury and sunshine.
At least, this is how I see it from where I stand, with that dress in a ball of molten metal on my bedroom floor and a thousand words scribbled in notebooks. I don’t know the mystery of what flowed between us on nights like this, because I was, I am, too young to know the difference. I don’t know if you remember the way the velvet shimmered in the light or the way I tried to hide my eyes when you smiled at me. I don’t know if you remember a word we spoke.
But I will never forget, every time I slip into that dress, the way it felt to be alive.
&&&
Oh, come on. If you can't laugh at the walking dead, who can you laugh at?
March 2005. East London, England. 10 PM.
We walk along the cobblestone-paved paths, in dark, narrow alleys between taverns, hands in our pockets. The buildings are so close together that looking up affords you only a sliver-sized glimpse of the stars. We come to our first destination, a square surrounded by flower boxes and tall buildings. It doesn’t seem too foreboding, maybe just dark and damp and a bit chilly. But right here, right where I’m standing, someone was murdered. Right on the very stones under my feet, in a matter of seconds her life was snuffed out by an enigma, a mystery.
The tour guide speaks up, tells us that this is where Jack the Ripper’s first victim was found, by a police officer making his rounds. She was killed silently in a matter of minutes. Someone to our right laughs as they watch us, tourists!, they’re probably thinking. We stand fascinated, staring at the space on the ground he points to. Someone’s blood once covered those stones! A corpse of someone’s daughter, sister, or mother was laid there with her guts ripped out!
Humans are morbid creatures, indeed.
Our tour continues through a stone tunnel, orange-lit with lamps, to the next location. It goes this way and that, winding through streets that none of us had ever seen or were likely to ever see again, passing by tiny pubs spilling over with people. The people in their apartments look down at us curiously, a noisy group of tourist kids walking in the dark.
When we get to the last location, an alley between two Victorian apartment buildings, everyone gets deathly quiet while the tour guide starts explaining the manner of the last girls’ death. We stand so still we almost blend into the rust coloured stones, stock still and attentive while he tells us the gory details. Her intestines ripped out, strung along the walls, hanging from the ceiling. Blood covering her apartment, her body torn open, several organs missing. Everything is silent while we stare up at the four-paned window encased in dark red brick, while we form the grisly picture in our minds, considering the gravity of what happened to this girl, and how gross and totally awesome it is.
And to my right, my best friend bursts into peals of raucous laughter.
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Music is the effort we make to explain to ourselves how our brains work.
We listen to Bach transfixed because this is listening to a human mind.
We stand restless, grouped together like a pack of hungry wolves. We wait. The room is already hot, humid, and the show hasn’t even started. Electricity crackles and flares down my spine, pooling in my lower back as a chill - goose bumps, even in the tight press of bodies. Anticipation is palpable, tension thick enough to taste.
When the lights dim, we roar, a sound loud enough to wake the dead. Everything starts with the sudden emergence of bodies from the shadows. We rush towards the stage, a tidal wave, shuffling and shoving. Everything disappears, and all we are is energy, bouncing and rippling over the concrete floor. There’s just heat and sound and light.
See all these people on the ground, wasting time. Try to hold it all inside, just for tonight.
And then there’s a moment where I stop being me. There’s a moment where I become a part of something bigger. There’s that split second when his voice stops floating over the ocean of people, a moment where we aren’t just kids anymore, where we’re part of something bigger.
On top of the world, sitting here wishing.
There’s a moment when the heat of a thousand bodies evaporates on the breeze of voices. There’s a moment when it doesn’t matter that I can’t see the band, that I’m caught behind a gaggle of six-foot giants. There’s a moment where it doesn’t matter that I’m stepping in spilled Coke and that my feet are throbbing, that my hair is plastered to my forehead, that I can barely breathe, that my clothes are soaked with sweat that probably isn’t mine. There’s a moment where it all disappears.
The things I’ve become, but something is missing. Maybe I...what do I know?
There’s a moment where all that matters is the chorus of voices, high above the concrete echo of the building, over the static of the speakers, filling every square inch with something tangible, something more than just words. There’s the blue-white glow of cell phones, a thousand little squares that must look like stars from where they stand. There’s a moment where every kid in that room, every freak, geek and jock, is family. Fucking family.
And now it seems that I have found nothing at all, wanna hear your voice out loud.
And for three and a half minutes, no one in that cavernous, concrete building is alone. There’s not a single soul who doesn’t leave with a piece of that moment lodged in their soul. I hope there isn’t a kid in the place who doesn’t leave feeling like they were a part of something massive and magical.
Slow it down, slow it down. Without it all, I’m choking on nothing.
For three and a half minutes, everyone belongs. No matter where you’re from, what you’d been through, or where you’d go at the end of the night, you were home. You and every other kid in that room were brothers, sisters, and friends.
It’s clear in my head, I’m screaming for something. Knowing nothing is better than knowing it all.
For three and a half minutes, everything was blindingly clear. Everything was laid out, love and friendship and belonging and music and hope.
On my own.
For three and a half minutes, no one was alone. And this is the church of sound, where you are the least and most important person in the room, and we bow to the beat of the drum. When your voice rises up with everyone else, screaming the words you know like the back of your hand, there is nothing else. A community of love, even as a kid stumbles between the barrier and the stage with a broken nose. We are the choir.
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Jesus Christ, I’m not scared to die, / but I’m a little bit scared of what comes after. Do I get the gold chariot, / do I float through the ceiling? Or do I divide and pull apart? / ‘Cause my bright is too slight to hold back all my dark.
I sit here, still and silent, staring at the statue of Jesus hanging from the cross, blank-eyed and bloody, shiny with glaze; staring, eyes roaming, at the paintings of people, naked and dying. At the bloody red heart wrapped in golden thorns. I should be paying attention to the priest at the front, standing behind the pulpit and speaking so highly of my Meme. Focus, focus, please.
But I can’t, I’m here, I’m lost. I am absorbed by the artificial shine coming off the Christ, and the patterned light coming in through the leaded stained glass windows, bejeweling the floor. I feel pinned to the hard, dark, polished wood of the pew, pinned by the downward gaze of the statue. The smell of incense and prayers swirls around, dust particles through the coloured beams of light, and the air presses close.
Flash, and I’m five years old, lying in bed. The air is thick and dusty, and there are people, thousands, pressed close in the dusty streets. The sun is scorching. There’s a man, strung up, blood dripping into his downcast eyes. He’s hanging on a cross by his wrists and his ankles, cut and punctured like a pincushion. I’m not a Christian girl, I don’t go to Catholic school, and I’ve never read the Bible. I don’t know about the crucifixion, about Jesus and his Apostles or God his father. But I know that this, this dream I am having, should frighten me, send me running to my mother screaming about the bloody man, oh mommy, the bloody man. Why then, am I not afraid, staring into His eyes from my five year old body? I’m just lying there, standing barefoot in the dust, three steps away from the Saviour. The air thickens.
Flash, and I’m back in the church, listening to the drone of the priest and staring blankly at the ceiling, lost. It occurs to me that maybe, remembering this, sitting under the sad eyes of Jesus, I should be having a revelation, something that leads me to God and turns me into an ecclesiast, a devotee.
No. I sit here, staring at the fiberglass Jesus, his thorn encrusted heart and the frescoes on the church walls, and I feel nothing.
I leave the same as I entered - not an atheist, and not a believer, but some agnostic in-between who hangs herself on threads of paganism - and with the same old sins tucked up into my coat sleeves.
I leave the same as I entered. I don’t feel purer, cleansed, like I want to turn to God and blindly believe. Instead, I leave with painted porcelain eyes burning into the back of my skull, and a heavy weight somewhere behind my sternum.
I feel guilty, disgusted, because it hasn’t hit me yet, the devotion that so many people carry. I’m left out here alone, looking for something tangible to take its place, something that words and music and late nights have not yet afforded me.
I leave the same as I entered, only maybe a little more lost, with the face of Jesus burned into my retinas like that optical illusion, and with a little bigger gap between me and faith.
I know you're coming in the night like a thief, / but I’ve had some time, O Lord, to hone my lying technique. / I know you think that I’m someone you can trust, / but I’m scared I’ll get scared / and I swear I’ll try to nail you back up. / So do you think that we could work out a sign / so I’ll know it's you and that it's over so I won't even try? / I know you're coming for the people like me / but we all got wood and nails / and we turn, turn out hate in factories.
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“She is full of contrast, more alive and closer to death than anyone I've known,
like a Johnny Cash song or some theatre star.”
“The stars are always there but we miss them in the dirt and clouds.
We miss them in the storms. Tell them to remember hope. We have hope.”
She belongs in a twisted, static world of chemicals and slow death. She is like a television, flashing and blinking, but not listening, never listening. She hides behind the wall of substances and scars, trying to escape from the pain and the hate and the loss. Tries anything and everything to numb herself and silence her demons, to quiet the voices wailing in her head. She calls me late at night from payphones and her bedroom, broken and crying, when even the drugs can’t numb her. We don’t talk much, because after a while I run out of ways to tell her she can live, and she runs out of ways to tell me she wants to die.
If I could have, I would have erased all her memories, of the boy, the suicides, her father, the drugs and the bleeding, the things I don’t understand. If I could have I would have, but I know I would’ve lost her in the process, lost who this experience has made her, a beautiful girl with a broken spirit.
One night I walk to meet her in the snow, late, because she called from Seven Eleven and said she wanted to talk. We sit in my living room, saying nothing much at all and watching music videos on television. She’s high, coked out, fucked up, and I can’t even tell - I’ve never seen her any other way. I don’t realize until later that every day at school she’s using, she’s high on chemicals, too many lines of blow a day; heroin other days, deadly and numbing in her veins. She doesn’t believe me when I tell her that I’ve never done drugs. Months later, I tell her that she is why I never will.
In the spring, she tears her arm apart with a razorblade and wears gauze to school like an accessory, unconcealed by her sleeves. I don’t know if she even thinks to hide it, if she even cares if someone sees. She draws stars on her eyes where tears should be. She belongs to the darkness.
Fast forward. A few months ago, she wrote in her online journal that she had been clean for two weeks. She hadn’t told me she was quitting, and I never dreamed that it was any more than an idea she entertained when she didn’t think she could go on, an idle fantasy she liked to play in her head when she hit rock bottom again. I prayed, but I never dreamed. But slowly and surely and all of a sudden, she began to emerge, to unravel. A slow transformation that is still taking place, months later, a breaking down of walls and an unfurling of her insides that will take time, and love, and hope.
It has been a long time, months, since she’s gone off into her chemical reality, since she’s painted another red slash on the canvas of her skin. I think, I hope at least, that this is the truth. I like to think that maybe I helped her, on the phone and in words, with television and awkward silence. Sometimes she thanks me, for not giving up on her, for not walking out when everyone else was running away.
And for now, she falls into the arms of her girlfriend, who knows what it’s like to belong to the darkness and the pain, and talks to me when she needs to. She has finally found someone who knows where she’s been better than I ever could without walking straight down the path she has taken, dangerously close to destroying myself. Still, my door and ears are always open.
Today, she no longer belongs to the pain and the drugs. She belongs to hope and love and truth, and a better tomorrow.
Today, she belongs to herself.
&&&
So let's drink to forgiveness, / let's drink for regret, let's drink to the ones we've loved and lost, / let us never forget.
Jesse stumbles in around one AM, soaked from the rain and the tears streaming down his face. There’s mud smeared up the legs of his skin tight blue jeans, on his skeletal hands. His hair is plastered to his forehead in the vibrant shade of blue - teal, aquamarine, sky, electric - that he prefers, dripping and wet. He chokes on his words, he pleads,
“Where’s Kayla? I need...”
And I don’t even hear the rest of his sentence before I’m out of my chair, leaping across the few feet to the stairs where Kearyn meets me with wide eyes, already worried. He’s hysterical, drunk, barely able to tell me the problem through his sobs and cold, shaking hands. We head unsteadily down the wood stairs, arms on shoulders and wet feet slipping, and he falls into a blue satin upholstered dining chair, unable to make it to the couch beyond.
“I don’t need you to take care of me,” he whispers while I’m sending off armies, troops to gather dry clothes and put his wet, muddy ones in the dryer, his soaked shoes over a vent. I don’t listen to him. He may not need me, but I am here, and I am cleaning up the mess and not going anywhere. He tells me in garbled words, drunken syllables, about vomit and harsh words, crying and fear. He ran home in icy rain, slipping on the wet grass, only stopping to puke, afraid of someone. I only half understand his strings of vowels and emotion, and when he’s calm, dry, loved enough I send him to bed, Jen’s bed, telling him not to sleep on his back, just in case. He tells me he’s sure he threw it all up on the way home. Unfortunate, but reassuring.
And then just before he heads upstairs, clean and dry, he turns on his heel and tells me something else in a low voice, thick with something, maybe vodka or unshed tears. I don’t know.
“He pushed me against the wall, and said ‘We don’t need your faggot ass at this party.’”
And something snaps inside me, breaks in half and lets out a torrent of black, red and rage. He trudges off to bed while I hide shaking hands, pale and drawn, and I walk into the kitchen, trying to swallow the bitter taste in my mouth.
“What’s up?” Aaron says, always concerned, because he knows how I am, the way I take care of people and the way I kill myself when I can’t fix, heal, stitch, love. He sat and watched me, changing Jesse’s clothes, talking in soft words and melody. I’m sure him and Jeff can read the anger in my eyes, the way my fists are clenched and the way my whole body is screaming, pouring out black and red.
“They called him a fag and pushed him into the wall!” I spit, not at him, but at anyone, everyone, the walls, the floor. I am seething, boiling, almost unable to function with a head full of venom. I almost expect him and Jeff to laugh, to crack a joke, well, he is one, isn’t he?
Because, well, they’re boys, they’re straight, and I know they’re uncomfortable, sometimes, with James and Jesse, the way things are. So I wait, I pace, for some joke to slip out, some other piece of glass to lodge in my brain.
But his face just blanks, and then rearranges into a flash of anger while I pace on the ceramic tiles, doorway to sink, almost twitching with anger.
And suddenly, they’re there with me, back and forth and trying to calm me, trying to cool me down. It’s unanimous, words and actions, that if it weren’t for the rain, the three of us would walk over and teach the kid a lesson, pound his drunken face in, anything to make him listen. But really, really, we know it’s just talk, angry words without meaning. We know it’d be no use.
You can’t fight violence with violence, ignorance with ignorance.
And eventually, Jesse saunters back out of the bedroom, tired but considerably more sober and considerably more sane, considerably more steady. I’ve heard someone else’s drunken variation of the story, someone else soaked in rain and vodka, which is maybe better, maybe just drunk talk, maybe not as bad as I thought. I’m not sure who I believe, and I don’t care who’s right, I am still clenched fists and white knuckles behind a smile. I am still angry at everything, at the injustice the world possesses and the way nothing is right, everything is wrong, and there is nothing I can do about it.
And yet I’m glad, joyous, that I was there when he came home. That I was sitting on the couch with my legs crossed, wishing for sleep, watching the rain run down the window. That even though it was his own fault, drinking too much too young, I was there to clean him up and love him. Maybe, maybe that’s unhealthy, pouring so much of myself into everyone and leaving none for myself.
Nonetheless, I wouldn’t wish for anything less. I am who I am, and I do what I do, and the only thing I really understand is how to love. I am the girl held together by glue and stitches, music and friendship, and he is part of my seams, no exception. He is a piece of me, and when someone hurts him, calls him names they don’t understand, a piece of me breaks off and embeds myself in him, to heal.
He could come home drunk every night that I’m there, soaking wet and muddy, and I wouldn’t love him any less.
Maybe, maybe I’d love him more.
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