Waiting For the Boom
I finally got back to writing again, and this is the result. A free-verse story told in three acts--a count-down, if you will--about the abusive side of my relationship with my father. Very different in tone than the last one, as I decided to rip the bandaids off some pretty old wounds here.
And for those of you who like to know such things ahead of time, this poem/story/whatever-you-want-to-call-it is approximately 2,041 words, and it does come with a trigger warning for descriptions of physical violence against children & babies. I know that sounds hard to read, but these were demons I felt I had to exorcise. This is the best way I've found for accomplishing that.
---
Three...
He's going to try to kill us.
I didn't just think it;
I believed it.
Sirens were blaring without a sound.
I was on high alert,
planning what I'd do,
mapping where I'd run,
imagining how I'd hide.
Sometimes I try to look back now & remember
what must've happened prior to that moment
for an eight-year-old to feel that type of certain fear,
but so much of my childhood--my whole life, really--is nothing more than black space
illuminated solely by scattered flashbulbs hanging
just out of reach,
flashing violently
on & off.
It's the brain's way of protecting itself,
I know.
The soul is strong,
but fragile.
Any bone
can be broken.
It may heal, but it will never be the same.
At times it's like watching a movie;
you're just the camera,
filming some actress
who looks almost like you.
But it is you.
Sometimes I can only see the stage
from a cloud high above,
as if my soul had actually fled my body
in an attempt to escape --
a near-death experience
without the hope
of any approaching tunnels of light.
(The burgeoning darkness inside was deafening.
I squeezed my eyes shut & covered my ears,
but it continued to bleed through.)
My sister once told me,
as a child,
she too had thought he would kill us.
She used to imagine that he'd sneak in our room at night
and light her bed on fire while she slept,
visions of sugar plums dancing --
turning pitch black with smoke.
What does a child do with that?
Your father is supposed to be the one
who protects you from the boogeyman,
not be
the boogeyman.
If someone else had seen us,
they probably would've thought
there's a happy family, sitting together at the park.
It was a sunny day,
and I should've been thrilled
my dad even wanted to talk to me.
But it was so unusual
as to be immediately suspect.
Something was definitely up.
I loved my father, idolized him even,
but I didn't trust him.
Even as an infant, he said,
I'd refused to let him hold me.
Babies aren't supposed to remember much,
but some permanent part of me
instinctively remembered
him lifting me high in the air,
shaking me above his head
and shouting like a mad man.
I wouldn't stop crying.
I don't know what would've happened to me
if my mom hadn't walked in.
Except I do
have an idea.
There was that one time
my sister and I sat, terrified,
on our matching pink canopy beds
for what felt like hours
while our dad threw down a thundering rainstorm of rage
upon our sweet little brother's delicate head,
shouting & slamming doors & throwing him in his crib
so hard
that it bounced back against the wall.
His hitched scream went slicing through the air.
I had never felt so helpless.
I wanted to help him,
felt I *should* help him,
but I couldn't move.
Our step-mom returned later
and apologized, blaming herself,
brushing his behavior off entirely.
But I digress.
There are too many of these tales.
It turned out he hadn't planned on murdering us;
instead, he wanted to ask us
to live with him
…or never see him again.
Again, I should've been happy
or so I mistakenly thought
at the time.
But his face was a little too close,
a little too
intense.
I couldn't climb down
from my rooted branch of fear.
This wasn't good. Even the ground knew it.
When my sister said no,
an unknown commotion began upstairs.
I don't know what happened;
all I remember are the screams,
the crying,
and the thumps
as her body was thrown up against
what I assume
must've been a wall.
As an adult,
I asked my sister once what she remembered
about that day.
She said she recalled making eye-contact
with our step-mom as he dragged her away,
screeching, "Why won't you help me?!"
I stood in the kitchen,
frozen & hating myself.
Later, I found out he drove her home
and shoved her out of the moving vehicle,
telling her she would always be
a loser.
She was eleven years old.
After, he returned
and got right up in my face while I tried to color,
tried to be normal,
his body trembling like a live wire,
face manic & shiny--
wide-eyed & masked
with a desperately feigned air of forlorn excitement--
smiling just a little too brightly,
and telling me how,
if I lived with him,
all my sister's toys would belong to me now.
The whole room would be mine.
I knew it wasn't right.
But then my step-mom kept telling me
how selfish it would be
if I decided to keep living with my mom.
She'd already had me all those years.
My poor dad.
If I lived with him,
he could finally be the father I'd wanted
and deserved
for so long.
I was too intimidated to bring up
all the times I'd asked to spend time with him
outside our visitations
and been summarily ignored.
I just wanted to make everyone happy;
I didn't want to make my dad angry.
So I tremulously said yes
and instantly regretted my words.
They told me I would have to testify in court,
then drove me home
where my mom was already hiding in her room, crying,
and my aunt was glaring down at me
and asking, how could you.
Nearly two weeks passed,
and, with my mom's support,
I called my dad to explain
that I didn't really want to live with him,
but that I would love to see him more.
He told me nonchalantly that he hadn't really thought I'd move in with him anyway,
but that he'd expected "more" from my sister.
Soon after, he hung up.
If he hadn't anticipated my answer to be yes,
or for that decision to matter,
why had he put me through asking?
The next time my mom saw him in court
for child support,
he abruptly asked the judge to change our visitations
from bi-monthly
to monthly.
He claimed he was doing it for us.
Even the judge was annoyed.
He never took me up on my offer
to spend more time together,
yet for years he would bitterly complain
about how he was always treated
as a "second-class parent."
We moved on like it had never even happened.
But it undoubtedly had,
despite my step-mom's future emphatic denials
that her husband had ever lifted a finger
against his eldest daughter.
In truth,
somewhere within my head & heart,
that day never ended.
I'm still there, waiting.
***
Two...
My eyes darted back & forth
to the steering wheel,
and I felt a blistering desire
to reach over & yank it to one side,
hard.
I wanted to crash the car & run.
Instead I silently sat
and listened, stone-faced, as my dad ranted
and raved,
careening dangerously across the road
at top speed.
Just another major tragedy
played to a minor key.
One more memory
to bury & hide.
All over a two-week vacation.
My sister and I didn't want to go.
School was about to start.
It should've been nothing more than a ripple
in the water;
instead, it built up a hurricane
that uprooted all of our lives.
He called us that night and got into a heated argument
with my then fifteen-year-old sister,
threatening to come over & beat the crap out of her
if she wasn't waiting for him by the door.
I remember her running in a panic out to our step-dad
who assured her he wouldn't get past him.
Meanwhile, I frantically ran to my room & grabbed a suitcase.
I was only 12, and my mom still helped me pick out my clothes for school each day,
but I randomly began throwing in items left & right.
I had no idea what I was doing
in any respect.
I couldn't see straight.
It was like being inside
the Crooked Man's house,
floors & ceiling all sliding to one side.
My sister stood in my warped doorway, trying to convince me
that I didn't have to go.
I was weeping,
bothered more than anything else
by the fact that my mom wasn't home,
so I couldn't say goodbye.
Of course I had to go.
True to his word,
our father showed up at our door
like a wolf in a fairy-tale, ready to huff & puff
and blow our house down,
but our step-dad blocked him like a statue
and ordered him back to his car --
where he waited for me inside, furiously smoking
& blasting his rock n' roll.
I remember him snidely calling my sister a coward
for asking him to join her in counseling.
Again, what a loser.
That was the moment I think something inside me snapped,
but looking at me then,
you would never have known.
Years later, my mom would tell me I was like a robot --
that it was good for me to cry,
because I held too much in.
She antagonized & provoked me into frenzied hysterics,
then rationalized the merit of her work.
To be fair, her heart was in the right place.
It was her mind that was all askew.
She didn't see
that I'd learned to coldly pack my feelings away
just like I had my mismatched shirts & shorts
all those years ago.
I don't remember much
of what happened during those two weeks.
I mostly remember two things:
one: staring at my sister's empty bed every night & crying myself to sleep,
and two: sneaking away to call my mom whenever the coast was clear.
She kept telling me it was okay that I didn't get to say goodbye.
It wasn't okay. What if she'd died?
What would my last words to her have been?
It was the end
and the beginning
in all sorts of ways.
My sister and father never saw each other again.
I continued seeing him,
which generally made me out to be
either a blind, heartless traitor
or a loyal, haloed saint
in the eyes of my family.
It was easy to delineate.
On one side stood my mother's relatives --
on the other, my father's.
I was stuck in the middle
like a frayed rope being pulled side to side
in a clueless & careless game
of dysfunctional tug-a-war.
All I wanted was to keep my foot in the door
in case he someday opened it more widely & invited me inside.
All I wanted
was for everyone to be happy.
I didn't know that wasn't an option.
There are no happy endings
in the trenches.
***
One...
Tick
(You need to lighten up, Rachael…
I'm sorry, but I can't pretend to care when it's your mother
…maybe we can talk some time when you're less emotional.)
Tick
(I don't owe you any advice. I don't owe you anything...
why do you keep calling it your *home*?!)
Tick
(Yeah, I got your messages...they were pretty weird.)
Years passed between us with my arms outstretched,
reaching for his embrace,
only to be met with his silent, unyielding back;
his mercurial, superficial cheer,
& deft manipulation.
(I kept waiting for the boom
to let me know when it was finally over.)
I kept daydreaming
that, one day,
he'd call me & say,
"I'm in counseling,"
or, "I've joined A.A."
More to the point, "...I'm sorry."
The rational side of me knew
that he'd sooner die in an electric chair
than sincerely apologize for the things he'd done.
The most painful part of me knew
that he'd consider it a throne.
He was the King of his kingdom.
It was our duty to obey his commands
and genuflect our own needs
whenever he graced us with his god-like presence.
My sister's actions had been the ultimate form of treason.
I was forever on probation as a result
of his own self-hate.
Most people don't realize what little esteem
some narcissists actually hold themselves in.
The bravado is a necessary act
of self-preservation
and shame.
(...of fear)
Even now, I see the smoke
and wonder when the final explosion
will reveal itself.
Nobody ever told me to follow the wisdom of
one T.S. Eliot:
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.
(Tick)
---
Fin
In case any of you didn't recognize the T.S. Eliot excerpt at the end, it's from his poem (one of my all-time favorites) The Hollow Men.
And for those of you who like to know such things ahead of time, this poem/story/whatever-you-want-to-call-it is approximately 2,041 words, and it does come with a trigger warning for descriptions of physical violence against children & babies. I know that sounds hard to read, but these were demons I felt I had to exorcise. This is the best way I've found for accomplishing that.
---
Three...
He's going to try to kill us.
I didn't just think it;
I believed it.
Sirens were blaring without a sound.
I was on high alert,
planning what I'd do,
mapping where I'd run,
imagining how I'd hide.
Sometimes I try to look back now & remember
what must've happened prior to that moment
for an eight-year-old to feel that type of certain fear,
but so much of my childhood--my whole life, really--is nothing more than black space
illuminated solely by scattered flashbulbs hanging
just out of reach,
flashing violently
on & off.
It's the brain's way of protecting itself,
I know.
The soul is strong,
but fragile.
Any bone
can be broken.
It may heal, but it will never be the same.
At times it's like watching a movie;
you're just the camera,
filming some actress
who looks almost like you.
But it is you.
Sometimes I can only see the stage
from a cloud high above,
as if my soul had actually fled my body
in an attempt to escape --
a near-death experience
without the hope
of any approaching tunnels of light.
(The burgeoning darkness inside was deafening.
I squeezed my eyes shut & covered my ears,
but it continued to bleed through.)
My sister once told me,
as a child,
she too had thought he would kill us.
She used to imagine that he'd sneak in our room at night
and light her bed on fire while she slept,
visions of sugar plums dancing --
turning pitch black with smoke.
What does a child do with that?
Your father is supposed to be the one
who protects you from the boogeyman,
not be
the boogeyman.
If someone else had seen us,
they probably would've thought
there's a happy family, sitting together at the park.
It was a sunny day,
and I should've been thrilled
my dad even wanted to talk to me.
But it was so unusual
as to be immediately suspect.
Something was definitely up.
I loved my father, idolized him even,
but I didn't trust him.
Even as an infant, he said,
I'd refused to let him hold me.
Babies aren't supposed to remember much,
but some permanent part of me
instinctively remembered
him lifting me high in the air,
shaking me above his head
and shouting like a mad man.
I wouldn't stop crying.
I don't know what would've happened to me
if my mom hadn't walked in.
Except I do
have an idea.
There was that one time
my sister and I sat, terrified,
on our matching pink canopy beds
for what felt like hours
while our dad threw down a thundering rainstorm of rage
upon our sweet little brother's delicate head,
shouting & slamming doors & throwing him in his crib
so hard
that it bounced back against the wall.
His hitched scream went slicing through the air.
I had never felt so helpless.
I wanted to help him,
felt I *should* help him,
but I couldn't move.
Our step-mom returned later
and apologized, blaming herself,
brushing his behavior off entirely.
But I digress.
There are too many of these tales.
It turned out he hadn't planned on murdering us;
instead, he wanted to ask us
to live with him
…or never see him again.
Again, I should've been happy
or so I mistakenly thought
at the time.
But his face was a little too close,
a little too
intense.
I couldn't climb down
from my rooted branch of fear.
This wasn't good. Even the ground knew it.
When my sister said no,
an unknown commotion began upstairs.
I don't know what happened;
all I remember are the screams,
the crying,
and the thumps
as her body was thrown up against
what I assume
must've been a wall.
As an adult,
I asked my sister once what she remembered
about that day.
She said she recalled making eye-contact
with our step-mom as he dragged her away,
screeching, "Why won't you help me?!"
I stood in the kitchen,
frozen & hating myself.
Later, I found out he drove her home
and shoved her out of the moving vehicle,
telling her she would always be
a loser.
She was eleven years old.
After, he returned
and got right up in my face while I tried to color,
tried to be normal,
his body trembling like a live wire,
face manic & shiny--
wide-eyed & masked
with a desperately feigned air of forlorn excitement--
smiling just a little too brightly,
and telling me how,
if I lived with him,
all my sister's toys would belong to me now.
The whole room would be mine.
I knew it wasn't right.
But then my step-mom kept telling me
how selfish it would be
if I decided to keep living with my mom.
She'd already had me all those years.
My poor dad.
If I lived with him,
he could finally be the father I'd wanted
and deserved
for so long.
I was too intimidated to bring up
all the times I'd asked to spend time with him
outside our visitations
and been summarily ignored.
I just wanted to make everyone happy;
I didn't want to make my dad angry.
So I tremulously said yes
and instantly regretted my words.
They told me I would have to testify in court,
then drove me home
where my mom was already hiding in her room, crying,
and my aunt was glaring down at me
and asking, how could you.
Nearly two weeks passed,
and, with my mom's support,
I called my dad to explain
that I didn't really want to live with him,
but that I would love to see him more.
He told me nonchalantly that he hadn't really thought I'd move in with him anyway,
but that he'd expected "more" from my sister.
Soon after, he hung up.
If he hadn't anticipated my answer to be yes,
or for that decision to matter,
why had he put me through asking?
The next time my mom saw him in court
for child support,
he abruptly asked the judge to change our visitations
from bi-monthly
to monthly.
He claimed he was doing it for us.
Even the judge was annoyed.
He never took me up on my offer
to spend more time together,
yet for years he would bitterly complain
about how he was always treated
as a "second-class parent."
We moved on like it had never even happened.
But it undoubtedly had,
despite my step-mom's future emphatic denials
that her husband had ever lifted a finger
against his eldest daughter.
In truth,
somewhere within my head & heart,
that day never ended.
I'm still there, waiting.
***
Two...
My eyes darted back & forth
to the steering wheel,
and I felt a blistering desire
to reach over & yank it to one side,
hard.
I wanted to crash the car & run.
Instead I silently sat
and listened, stone-faced, as my dad ranted
and raved,
careening dangerously across the road
at top speed.
Just another major tragedy
played to a minor key.
One more memory
to bury & hide.
All over a two-week vacation.
My sister and I didn't want to go.
School was about to start.
It should've been nothing more than a ripple
in the water;
instead, it built up a hurricane
that uprooted all of our lives.
He called us that night and got into a heated argument
with my then fifteen-year-old sister,
threatening to come over & beat the crap out of her
if she wasn't waiting for him by the door.
I remember her running in a panic out to our step-dad
who assured her he wouldn't get past him.
Meanwhile, I frantically ran to my room & grabbed a suitcase.
I was only 12, and my mom still helped me pick out my clothes for school each day,
but I randomly began throwing in items left & right.
I had no idea what I was doing
in any respect.
I couldn't see straight.
It was like being inside
the Crooked Man's house,
floors & ceiling all sliding to one side.
My sister stood in my warped doorway, trying to convince me
that I didn't have to go.
I was weeping,
bothered more than anything else
by the fact that my mom wasn't home,
so I couldn't say goodbye.
Of course I had to go.
True to his word,
our father showed up at our door
like a wolf in a fairy-tale, ready to huff & puff
and blow our house down,
but our step-dad blocked him like a statue
and ordered him back to his car --
where he waited for me inside, furiously smoking
& blasting his rock n' roll.
I remember him snidely calling my sister a coward
for asking him to join her in counseling.
Again, what a loser.
That was the moment I think something inside me snapped,
but looking at me then,
you would never have known.
Years later, my mom would tell me I was like a robot --
that it was good for me to cry,
because I held too much in.
She antagonized & provoked me into frenzied hysterics,
then rationalized the merit of her work.
To be fair, her heart was in the right place.
It was her mind that was all askew.
She didn't see
that I'd learned to coldly pack my feelings away
just like I had my mismatched shirts & shorts
all those years ago.
I don't remember much
of what happened during those two weeks.
I mostly remember two things:
one: staring at my sister's empty bed every night & crying myself to sleep,
and two: sneaking away to call my mom whenever the coast was clear.
She kept telling me it was okay that I didn't get to say goodbye.
It wasn't okay. What if she'd died?
What would my last words to her have been?
It was the end
and the beginning
in all sorts of ways.
My sister and father never saw each other again.
I continued seeing him,
which generally made me out to be
either a blind, heartless traitor
or a loyal, haloed saint
in the eyes of my family.
It was easy to delineate.
On one side stood my mother's relatives --
on the other, my father's.
I was stuck in the middle
like a frayed rope being pulled side to side
in a clueless & careless game
of dysfunctional tug-a-war.
All I wanted was to keep my foot in the door
in case he someday opened it more widely & invited me inside.
All I wanted
was for everyone to be happy.
I didn't know that wasn't an option.
There are no happy endings
in the trenches.
***
One...
Tick
(You need to lighten up, Rachael…
I'm sorry, but I can't pretend to care when it's your mother
…maybe we can talk some time when you're less emotional.)
Tick
(I don't owe you any advice. I don't owe you anything...
why do you keep calling it your *home*?!)
Tick
(Yeah, I got your messages...they were pretty weird.)
Years passed between us with my arms outstretched,
reaching for his embrace,
only to be met with his silent, unyielding back;
his mercurial, superficial cheer,
& deft manipulation.
(I kept waiting for the boom
to let me know when it was finally over.)
I kept daydreaming
that, one day,
he'd call me & say,
"I'm in counseling,"
or, "I've joined A.A."
More to the point, "...I'm sorry."
The rational side of me knew
that he'd sooner die in an electric chair
than sincerely apologize for the things he'd done.
The most painful part of me knew
that he'd consider it a throne.
He was the King of his kingdom.
It was our duty to obey his commands
and genuflect our own needs
whenever he graced us with his god-like presence.
My sister's actions had been the ultimate form of treason.
I was forever on probation as a result
of his own self-hate.
Most people don't realize what little esteem
some narcissists actually hold themselves in.
The bravado is a necessary act
of self-preservation
and shame.
(...of fear)
Even now, I see the smoke
and wonder when the final explosion
will reveal itself.
Nobody ever told me to follow the wisdom of
one T.S. Eliot:
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.
(Tick)
---
Fin
In case any of you didn't recognize the T.S. Eliot excerpt at the end, it's from his poem (one of my all-time favorites) The Hollow Men.