(no subject)
I need to write something. I think. I don't know.
There is something beneath everything that I don't quite understand. Every day when I'm driving the winding streets of Eugene, or I look out of this window and see the upper halves of trees slowly waving in the Pacific coast winds, I realize that nothing is the same. My entire life is fragmented, in pieces punctuated by travel, and change, and then a return to normalcy.
The first five years of my life I spent in a few different homes in San Diego. I remember my mom's Latina friend Rose, and her two daughters, who were probably around ages 8 and 10. I know they were "big" to us, my sister and I, who were only ages 4 and 1, or 2. She turned 2 in Japan, didn't she? There is a significant image in my memory of the short, boyish-looking blond girl with questioning blue eyes, and bared lower teeth. That dirty face, those pudgy cheeks. An innocent, demanding visage that I helped corrupt.
I remember the several planes we took to Japan. That was the first big change. We lived in at least three places when I was very young. My mom described some of it to me when we were driving west from Minnesota. My dad's mother's house was our first home. She had a thousand cats and a handful of dogs, and fleas to go around for all of them. I ended up with fleas myself. Mom and Dad moved out of there into an apartment, which my dad and I visited a few winters ago for the sake of nostalgia. I remember falling down the carpeted steps when I tried to roll down the stairs. What? I was like, five. Maybe four. I don't know.
In Japan we moved into a house that I think belonged to another family who was vacationing elsewhere. Most of what I remember are old home videos of the storm windows, the wood-paneled walls, the hardwood floor of my room, the TV with only a few channels in English, the bunk beds my sister and I shared, the metal toilets, the entire-bathroom-shower. What I personally remember are my mom and I exchanging Japanese phrases. I knew a lot more then than I remember. I remember she often made peanut-butter cookies, and stuck a hershey's kiss in the middle of them. Our dining table was short, like most Japanese dining tables, and we sat on pillows, not chairs. That's the tradition.
We then moved into an apartment across town, across the street from the school where I went to kindergarten. There was a boy named Mikey. He was my first boyfriend. He and his father came by one day, and they gave me a plastic, hunter orange necklace, with faux beads shaped like hearts. I wonder if that boy still remembers the little girl he met in kindergarten.
We got two cats, which I named Squiggy and Shirley. They were my first pets. My dad told me, "Now we can really use the term 'scaredy-cat.'" My dad was only home once every few months. He always brought back presents in his green duffel bag. It was like a vacation when he was around. He'd always shave his mustache when he was gone, but let it grow back when he was home, because I liked it. After a while when he was home, he would be as boring as mom. In retrospect I know it's because their marriage was suffering. I was never aware of it.
I used to draw on the walls. I wasn't allowed markers anymore. One time I wrote my name, on a piece of paper. The first time I'd ever written anything. Mom was on the phone with her sister or her mom, and she stopped and looked, and told whoever she was speaking to that I'd written my name. She was proud of me.
I first began to suspect there was something odd going on between my mom and her friend Toby when she would go over to his place when I wasn't home. I was too young to understand what an affair was, but they were both married to other people. I somehow thought to suspect that Toby was somehow romantically involved with my mom. I told her this, but she told me, "No, we're just friends." I was naive enough to believe her. Now I know the truth.
That was when the algorithm of my fragmented life began. My parents divorced. Mom moved in with Toby in Oklahoma. I had two new siblings, Toby's children; Karri, and Toby Jr. We called him little Toby.
I remember Oklahoma being dry, usually sunny, with prickly grass in the front yard, and "stickers" from plants that were covered in sharp, rigid spikes, that often got painfully lodged into bare feet. I remember the children. There were two other white families in the area. Corey's family, who later lived next door to us, and some child whose abused cat eventually came to reside at our house, and had kittens.
The important thing is, summer had a significant meaning, every year. When we were out of school in May, it was only a short wait before it was time for us to head west to California, to spend a month or two with Dad. That's where this feeling comes from, leaving somewhere familiar to be acquainted with a new, shining place. Dad would drive us all over San Diego. I remember the suburbs and the city, and El Pollo Loco. I remember my family, my aunts and uncles and their children, and the places where they lived. I remember the military bases we visited, the beaches we'd spend hours at, the hot parking lots that were too hot to walk on, so Dad carried us.
I remember enjoying all of it, taking all of it in for as long as we could because we knew, eventually we'd be going home again. What I remembered most is how different San Diego was from Oklahoma, and eventually Minnesota. Yuccas and palms were everywhere. Desert plants were decorations, and lined the streets and yards. The roads were often in poor condition, and the shops were dirty and disheveled because my family usually lived in poorer areas. Most houses had flat rooftops, in the form of a tar finish, a pueblo style, or corrugated steel.
My mom moved us suddenly north to Minnesota, when I was old enough to start yearning for the things I had before. I remember my friend, Karen, who I had my first heart-to-heart with in 4th grade. I remember feeling sad, most of the time, without completely understanding why. Karen asked why I was sad. I told her I didn't know but I felt like that was an asshole thing to say. So what I told her was that I missed my friends in Oklahoma. She said something wise beyond her years. "I'm sorry your friends are gone, but you're here now. You have new friends. You should move on."
Karen turned out later to be more shallow and to not care for me as much as she did her other friends. She was the beginning of my social isolation. I clung to her, knowing the feeling wasn't mutual. I forced her to be my friend, by choosing her to sit with me when we had desk assignments and I got to choose who I shared a table with, and she'd asked me to let her sit with Jessica so Jessica wouldn't have to sit with Falayla. I refused, and picked Karen anyway, who Jessica and I battled over, because I knew I had nothing to gain from their plea. I had to make ME happy.
But I don't think that was why I was sad. I think it was my mother. Ever since we were young, my sister and I could both see how exhausted she was. From work, from us, from her wretched love life.
Every summer we visited my Dad. Every end of the school year promised another visit to paradise, from the problems at home, to the new greener pastures that would be our temporary home. For years it was flying or driving to California. But eventually he got moved to Maryland. I was thirteen when that happened. It was momentous, because I finally got my wish.
For years I always begged Mom to let me live with Dad. Life with him was more comfortable, less tumultuous, and stable. That of course was an illusion. Dad would time his Naval deployments so that he could be home in the summer. He couldn't realistically care for us. Mom always said no. I made a compromise. I wanted to live with Dad for a year.
The year he moved to Maryland was that magical year. I remember the way Mom broke it to me that it could happen, that it was reality. So that happened, and Dad played father for a year. It exhausted him, because he never did, and STILL doesn't understand what it means to be a PARENT. He was fortunate to have his wife, who raised a daughter, Stacia.
After that year the visits resumed every summer, until I was sixteen. That was the year that my dad raised his hand to my sister, after shoving her to so that she'd fall backwards on her bed. It wasn't a sexual context. He was just yelling at her in her bedroom, and he got angry. He pushed her over, but did it so she wouldn't be hurt. But the sheer physical POWER of what he'd just done frightened by him and my sister. My sister flew home early. My dad and I visited Seattle, and went into the space needle, but eventually I went home too.
He never invited us back out, after that. I thought it was because he didn't want to see us. I learned years later that it was because he didn't think we wanted us to see him. But he wasn't man enough to confront us on that. He wasn't man enough to ask, to face the biggest conflict in his life. It was easier for him to suffer on his own, to guilt himself, than to communicate with his children. It's a flaw I understand, because it was mine too. It's something I know I need to be aware of, because my dad and I are the same at our cores.
A year later I dropped out of high school. I didn't tell my dad until months later. I blamed myself for the inadequacy for years, taking it on as my personal failure. I figured I was the only one to blame. Again, it was years later that I realized that it might have been avoided if I'd had the right encouragement. If someone had tried to help.
But no one helped. It's not right to blame them, but it's also not my responsibility to feel like I owe them ANYTHING for their inaction. My family, my dad, my mom. They saw me fail. They didn't try to stop it. They never helped me. That is life. I shouldn't have faced that alone at 17, but I did. Life IS being on your own, watching your own back. People don't stop to help you. You're expected to take care of your own damn self.
I wish I could go back and... there's no point in wishing. There's only the future. I have to craft one out of the scraps of my past.
The point is that, this is what Oregon feels like. The new area. The unfamiliar places. The different weather. The trees, the crows, the squirrels that run the fence outside this window. I had no expectations when I came out here. So my mind has defaulted to the childish wonder and appreciation I had for California, Maryland, and Washington. This is all new and beautiful, but something in me is waiting to go home.
And "home" to me is a disgusting word. I know Minnesota. I hate everything about it. I hate my goddamn family, I hate my mother. I hate the tormented sister that I psychologically abused without having any grasp on the long term effects of the nasty things I said to her. I hate the routines. I hate the roads. I hate fucking all of it.
I don't have to go home this time. This is my home. This is the philosophical synonym of moving in with Dad that I've always wanted. It's a warped perception, but that's what this is to me. I don't want it to be that. I want it to be Oregon. I want Blake to stop being an illusion to me. I want to see this for what it is.
And I don't know if this novelty will wear off, or if I'll get used to it. Will this feeling go away? Or is this how my life is going to feel like from now on?
Was I really ready to leave on my own? The thought always terrified me in my childhood. The point at which I become my mother, who is independent from her mother. Was I already separated from her?
I don't miss her. My phonecalls with her are shallow, as she talks about the mundane routines of her life. Grooming the dogs, tending her garden, talking to Crystal, escapades with Donnie. She is my former life.
What I have now is... a new start. A new everything. A new beginning. A life, not stemming from the events of my past. A place that I've chosen on my own, not because of my family, the joke that it is.
Have I left the Matrix? Or have I entered it?
A life, not stemming from the events of my past.
I don't accept it. I can't believe it.
This is a dream. I don't know whether I want to wake up. I'll be devastated to wake up in my old life, without ever having really touched my lover. But I don't want to live in an illusion.
I don't know...
What do I feel...?
There is something beneath everything that I don't quite understand. Every day when I'm driving the winding streets of Eugene, or I look out of this window and see the upper halves of trees slowly waving in the Pacific coast winds, I realize that nothing is the same. My entire life is fragmented, in pieces punctuated by travel, and change, and then a return to normalcy.
The first five years of my life I spent in a few different homes in San Diego. I remember my mom's Latina friend Rose, and her two daughters, who were probably around ages 8 and 10. I know they were "big" to us, my sister and I, who were only ages 4 and 1, or 2. She turned 2 in Japan, didn't she? There is a significant image in my memory of the short, boyish-looking blond girl with questioning blue eyes, and bared lower teeth. That dirty face, those pudgy cheeks. An innocent, demanding visage that I helped corrupt.
I remember the several planes we took to Japan. That was the first big change. We lived in at least three places when I was very young. My mom described some of it to me when we were driving west from Minnesota. My dad's mother's house was our first home. She had a thousand cats and a handful of dogs, and fleas to go around for all of them. I ended up with fleas myself. Mom and Dad moved out of there into an apartment, which my dad and I visited a few winters ago for the sake of nostalgia. I remember falling down the carpeted steps when I tried to roll down the stairs. What? I was like, five. Maybe four. I don't know.
In Japan we moved into a house that I think belonged to another family who was vacationing elsewhere. Most of what I remember are old home videos of the storm windows, the wood-paneled walls, the hardwood floor of my room, the TV with only a few channels in English, the bunk beds my sister and I shared, the metal toilets, the entire-bathroom-shower. What I personally remember are my mom and I exchanging Japanese phrases. I knew a lot more then than I remember. I remember she often made peanut-butter cookies, and stuck a hershey's kiss in the middle of them. Our dining table was short, like most Japanese dining tables, and we sat on pillows, not chairs. That's the tradition.
We then moved into an apartment across town, across the street from the school where I went to kindergarten. There was a boy named Mikey. He was my first boyfriend. He and his father came by one day, and they gave me a plastic, hunter orange necklace, with faux beads shaped like hearts. I wonder if that boy still remembers the little girl he met in kindergarten.
We got two cats, which I named Squiggy and Shirley. They were my first pets. My dad told me, "Now we can really use the term 'scaredy-cat.'" My dad was only home once every few months. He always brought back presents in his green duffel bag. It was like a vacation when he was around. He'd always shave his mustache when he was gone, but let it grow back when he was home, because I liked it. After a while when he was home, he would be as boring as mom. In retrospect I know it's because their marriage was suffering. I was never aware of it.
I used to draw on the walls. I wasn't allowed markers anymore. One time I wrote my name, on a piece of paper. The first time I'd ever written anything. Mom was on the phone with her sister or her mom, and she stopped and looked, and told whoever she was speaking to that I'd written my name. She was proud of me.
I first began to suspect there was something odd going on between my mom and her friend Toby when she would go over to his place when I wasn't home. I was too young to understand what an affair was, but they were both married to other people. I somehow thought to suspect that Toby was somehow romantically involved with my mom. I told her this, but she told me, "No, we're just friends." I was naive enough to believe her. Now I know the truth.
That was when the algorithm of my fragmented life began. My parents divorced. Mom moved in with Toby in Oklahoma. I had two new siblings, Toby's children; Karri, and Toby Jr. We called him little Toby.
I remember Oklahoma being dry, usually sunny, with prickly grass in the front yard, and "stickers" from plants that were covered in sharp, rigid spikes, that often got painfully lodged into bare feet. I remember the children. There were two other white families in the area. Corey's family, who later lived next door to us, and some child whose abused cat eventually came to reside at our house, and had kittens.
The important thing is, summer had a significant meaning, every year. When we were out of school in May, it was only a short wait before it was time for us to head west to California, to spend a month or two with Dad. That's where this feeling comes from, leaving somewhere familiar to be acquainted with a new, shining place. Dad would drive us all over San Diego. I remember the suburbs and the city, and El Pollo Loco. I remember my family, my aunts and uncles and their children, and the places where they lived. I remember the military bases we visited, the beaches we'd spend hours at, the hot parking lots that were too hot to walk on, so Dad carried us.
I remember enjoying all of it, taking all of it in for as long as we could because we knew, eventually we'd be going home again. What I remembered most is how different San Diego was from Oklahoma, and eventually Minnesota. Yuccas and palms were everywhere. Desert plants were decorations, and lined the streets and yards. The roads were often in poor condition, and the shops were dirty and disheveled because my family usually lived in poorer areas. Most houses had flat rooftops, in the form of a tar finish, a pueblo style, or corrugated steel.
My mom moved us suddenly north to Minnesota, when I was old enough to start yearning for the things I had before. I remember my friend, Karen, who I had my first heart-to-heart with in 4th grade. I remember feeling sad, most of the time, without completely understanding why. Karen asked why I was sad. I told her I didn't know but I felt like that was an asshole thing to say. So what I told her was that I missed my friends in Oklahoma. She said something wise beyond her years. "I'm sorry your friends are gone, but you're here now. You have new friends. You should move on."
Karen turned out later to be more shallow and to not care for me as much as she did her other friends. She was the beginning of my social isolation. I clung to her, knowing the feeling wasn't mutual. I forced her to be my friend, by choosing her to sit with me when we had desk assignments and I got to choose who I shared a table with, and she'd asked me to let her sit with Jessica so Jessica wouldn't have to sit with Falayla. I refused, and picked Karen anyway, who Jessica and I battled over, because I knew I had nothing to gain from their plea. I had to make ME happy.
But I don't think that was why I was sad. I think it was my mother. Ever since we were young, my sister and I could both see how exhausted she was. From work, from us, from her wretched love life.
Every summer we visited my Dad. Every end of the school year promised another visit to paradise, from the problems at home, to the new greener pastures that would be our temporary home. For years it was flying or driving to California. But eventually he got moved to Maryland. I was thirteen when that happened. It was momentous, because I finally got my wish.
For years I always begged Mom to let me live with Dad. Life with him was more comfortable, less tumultuous, and stable. That of course was an illusion. Dad would time his Naval deployments so that he could be home in the summer. He couldn't realistically care for us. Mom always said no. I made a compromise. I wanted to live with Dad for a year.
The year he moved to Maryland was that magical year. I remember the way Mom broke it to me that it could happen, that it was reality. So that happened, and Dad played father for a year. It exhausted him, because he never did, and STILL doesn't understand what it means to be a PARENT. He was fortunate to have his wife, who raised a daughter, Stacia.
After that year the visits resumed every summer, until I was sixteen. That was the year that my dad raised his hand to my sister, after shoving her to so that she'd fall backwards on her bed. It wasn't a sexual context. He was just yelling at her in her bedroom, and he got angry. He pushed her over, but did it so she wouldn't be hurt. But the sheer physical POWER of what he'd just done frightened by him and my sister. My sister flew home early. My dad and I visited Seattle, and went into the space needle, but eventually I went home too.
He never invited us back out, after that. I thought it was because he didn't want to see us. I learned years later that it was because he didn't think we wanted us to see him. But he wasn't man enough to confront us on that. He wasn't man enough to ask, to face the biggest conflict in his life. It was easier for him to suffer on his own, to guilt himself, than to communicate with his children. It's a flaw I understand, because it was mine too. It's something I know I need to be aware of, because my dad and I are the same at our cores.
A year later I dropped out of high school. I didn't tell my dad until months later. I blamed myself for the inadequacy for years, taking it on as my personal failure. I figured I was the only one to blame. Again, it was years later that I realized that it might have been avoided if I'd had the right encouragement. If someone had tried to help.
But no one helped. It's not right to blame them, but it's also not my responsibility to feel like I owe them ANYTHING for their inaction. My family, my dad, my mom. They saw me fail. They didn't try to stop it. They never helped me. That is life. I shouldn't have faced that alone at 17, but I did. Life IS being on your own, watching your own back. People don't stop to help you. You're expected to take care of your own damn self.
I wish I could go back and... there's no point in wishing. There's only the future. I have to craft one out of the scraps of my past.
The point is that, this is what Oregon feels like. The new area. The unfamiliar places. The different weather. The trees, the crows, the squirrels that run the fence outside this window. I had no expectations when I came out here. So my mind has defaulted to the childish wonder and appreciation I had for California, Maryland, and Washington. This is all new and beautiful, but something in me is waiting to go home.
And "home" to me is a disgusting word. I know Minnesota. I hate everything about it. I hate my goddamn family, I hate my mother. I hate the tormented sister that I psychologically abused without having any grasp on the long term effects of the nasty things I said to her. I hate the routines. I hate the roads. I hate fucking all of it.
I don't have to go home this time. This is my home. This is the philosophical synonym of moving in with Dad that I've always wanted. It's a warped perception, but that's what this is to me. I don't want it to be that. I want it to be Oregon. I want Blake to stop being an illusion to me. I want to see this for what it is.
And I don't know if this novelty will wear off, or if I'll get used to it. Will this feeling go away? Or is this how my life is going to feel like from now on?
Was I really ready to leave on my own? The thought always terrified me in my childhood. The point at which I become my mother, who is independent from her mother. Was I already separated from her?
I don't miss her. My phonecalls with her are shallow, as she talks about the mundane routines of her life. Grooming the dogs, tending her garden, talking to Crystal, escapades with Donnie. She is my former life.
What I have now is... a new start. A new everything. A new beginning. A life, not stemming from the events of my past. A place that I've chosen on my own, not because of my family, the joke that it is.
Have I left the Matrix? Or have I entered it?
A life, not stemming from the events of my past.
I don't accept it. I can't believe it.
This is a dream. I don't know whether I want to wake up. I'll be devastated to wake up in my old life, without ever having really touched my lover. But I don't want to live in an illusion.
I don't know...
What do I feel...?