Brigit's Flame Entry - August Week 1 - Catalyst -
brigits_flame August Week 1 Entry - Prompt: Catalyst
Word count: 4000 words
Genre: Personal narrative
Warnings: explicit discussion of the following: drowning, obsessive-compulsive behavior, mild self-mutilation, unhealthy body image discussions
Notes: This is a personal narrative. I've previously written on these experiences and memories, but this time I am choosing to label it as personal narrative as opposed to fiction. Written in three parts.
A Secret
I
It started the winter of my seventh grade.
I don’t actually remember-I regret my impatience that keeps me from keeping a diary-but logically, it must have been seventh grade. It must have been winter too, because winter was when the seventh and eighth graders had their regularly scheduled swimming unit of the year.
I attended the same school for twelve years, and that makes it easier for me to-not remember-but work out when things happened. I must have had swimming in the morning, because the seventh and eighth graders had their core classes (math, science, and humanities) in the afternoons, and their electives (foreign language, art, music, PE, and whatever else) in the mornings. I think I had it second in the mornings, not first, but ultimately that doesn’t matter.
What matters is that there was a class right afterwards.
(I know this must be the case because seventh and eighth graders have a short period called “Exploration” between their morning electives and lunch, so regardless of when PE was, there was always a class afterwards.)
We shrieked as we shivered our way to the locker room one very long flight of stairs (outdoors) down. After we got to the locker room, we attempted modesty as we peeled the clammy swimsuits away and changed back into T-shirts, jeans, and jackets. I had a locker in a corner, on the third row of five, and I mastered the art of draping my towel around me in a makeshift curtain while I stripped and dressed. My hair lay in tangled mats around my face, and I combed my fingers through the sticky, chlorine-logged strands and yanked it bank in a ponytail.
It was many hours before I went home.
*
The truth is, I don’t remember how it started. I can figure out when, where, why, how (the who and what is a given), but I don’t actually remember.
Remember is such a strange world. Do I still remember how it started if I didn’t for a long time? Do I still remember why it started if my own brain was lying to me? Do I actually remember when and where if I don’t actually have a concrete memory of “when it started”?
It started the winter of my seventh grade. My mother picked me up from school. We drove the five-to-seven minute drive home (depending on whether or not the traffic lights were in our favor) and took the elevator to the fourth floor from the basement garage. The apartment units in this building were two-story apartments, and once we let ourselves into the apartment I toed off my sneakers and climbed up one flight of stairs to the study. I dropped my backpack down by the computer and sat down to boot it up.
My hair was dry and still smelled strongly of chlorine. I ran my fingers through it, and it pulled away from my scalp in sticky clumps. There was a sudden rolling sense of wrongness that started from my head and made its way down my fingers. I reached up with another hand as the computer slowly creaked its way into start up and started separating the strands from each other. As I did so, I clenched each freshly separated strand between my thumb and forefinger and ran them gently down the length, feeling each twist and knarl.
There was, again, that sense of wrongness.
It was not hard-it still is not hard-to twist the strand around my index finger once, twice, and then pull. It came out cleanly, at the root, and then the wrongness was gone.
I took a deep breath, eyed the still loading computer, and then reached up again.
*
I’ve always liked my hair. I was never very tall as a child-it wasn’t until the end of middle school that I started to grow and eventually hit my acceptable height of one-hundred-and-sixty-four (sometimes five, it the measurement was taken right when I woke up) centimeters. I had a tendency to slouch, and it grew more pronounced when my best friend was a good ten centimeters shorter than me. I wore round purple-frame glasses that had the ends all roughed up because when I first got them I had a tendency to chew on them in anxiety. My eyes were small and my nose was stubby and my two front teeth were creeping from “slightly over-bitten” to “rather over-bitten”…but I had lovely hair.
It was long, thick, and black with light brown highlights. A friend thought I dyed it when I visited her during the summer, and didn’t believe my absent-minded comment that no, I’ve never dyed my hair, I’ve never even curled it before. My mom commented that it was just like hers-except hers was a bit more wavy, the highlights a bit lighter.
I should have known-I did know, back then-that it wouldn’t have lasted. My father’s genetics would have caught up with me. My mother’s genetics would have caught up with me. Both of them were going gray by the time I hit middle school, and it wasn’t just their age-my father at 50 and my mother at 45.
I saw my first gray hair the winter of seventh grade. I pulled it out, a vicious yank, and ran my fingers through sticky, chlorine-matted hair to try to find more.
*
I found more.
After a while, and many hairs, I couldn’t see anymore. But my fingers remembered how my hair felt when they were twisted and rough from chlorine, remembered how the white hairs tended to be rough to the touch, with almost invisible kinks. My fingers found the hairs in the back of my head, and it didn’t matter if they were white or black because they were wrong, all wrong, and my hair was beautiful and the best part of me.
It was always-back then, and still, sometimes, now-just one more. Let me find one more and then it’ll be better.
*
It started the winter of my seventh grade.
The summer before high school, my mother took me to a hairdresser. They started at my hairline and worked further and further back, moving locks of hair forward and forward until the wide gaping hole in the middle of my forehead was covered. Then they snipped the ends shorter and shorter until a layer of thick bangs lay on my forehead.
Nobody could see the patch in the middle of my forehead, the gaping bald spots behind my ears… but there was nothing they could do for the spiraling expanse of emptiness that was growing at the back of my head.
I twisted my fingers through my hair, found a strand with a kink, and yanked it out with perverse viciousness.
I hated my hair.
II
I was a stranger to self-loathing when it started; I never had a need for it. I was short and my eyes were small and my nose was flat, but there was still that boy in second grade who called me “pretty”, and even though I remained oblivious, I was always vaguely aware that my features came together with a pleasant cadence. I was top of my class for years, and teachers used to comment that I was, “actually smart” in a bewildered tone to my mother, who nodded with a growing sense of accomplishment.
Self-loathing was new, but familiar at the same time.
As the younger sibling of two, and I had the dubious pleasure of being the “safer” child. My parents experimented on my brother, and turned to me one and a half years later with dubious experience. That did not stop him from being smarter than me, so there was always a sense that I could be better than I was.
So it was not hard for a strangled sense of “could be better” to twist into self-loathing.
It’s hard to identify this feeling-one would think that it would be easy, but I found myself remarkably good at deflecting my thoughts around. I reached up, yanked out a hair with absent-minded loathing, and reminded myself that this was better.
At some point, it didn’t matter if I thought it was better or worse. My hand moved on its own and I didn’t know how to stop it.
*
I was very good at deflecting my thoughts, at making excuses for myself, at avoiding the subject. I could write a textbook on avoidance, can still, in a minute, come up with a thousand reasons to avoid facing the truth.
There was a girl named Dorothy, and sometime in seventh grade she stopped eating. We weren’t close despite having the same piano teacher and being in orchestra together, but news about her filtered through a plethora of friends and classmates to me. She stopped eating in seventh grade, turned waif-thin in eighth grade, and slowly, ever so slowly, started eating again.
We were in the same grade, but when I saw her there was only a peculiar sense of loathing and aggravation. I could never place my finger on why I hated her so much; even when my best friend at the time commented, ‘She’s anorexic,’ and all I could muster was a sick sense of satisfaction.
I wrapped it in sympathy and platitudes. I had never been vindictive before-cruel, sometimes, short-tempered, always, but never vindictive. But no matter how hard I tried, I could never muster any sympathy for her, just like I could never muster any sympathy for myself.
*
I didn’t need to feel any sympathy for myself. Each tangled knot I pulled out was making me better.
It started the winter of seventh grade, but it never stopped. Even after the swimming lessons stopped there were ruined strands to remove from my life. Next year the swimming lessons started up again and I ran my fingers through sticky chlorine-filled strands and pulled them out faster and faster and faster. The lessons ended, the hand movements didn’t.
It was all wrong. I was all wrong. There was something inherently wrong with me, and this was pulling it out, digging out the wrongness from the roots so I would be better. I left my hair scattered on the hardwood floor of the computer room, until the hairs tanged the wheels of the chairs and they glided on a carpet of my hair instead of rolling on wood.
My mother cried. She told me to stop. I told her that she didn’t understand and she said that she didn’t care, that I should just stop.
I told myself that I wasn’t like Dorothy. I could stop when I wanted. I would stop when I was perfect.
I was very good at lying to myself.
*
When I finally tried to stop, it was too late, so I stopped trying. I just became better at hiding it.
I systematically thinned my hair, avoiding any one area, and then chewed the strands and swallowed them. That was hard, and they stick between my braces and teeth, so I coiled them and knotted them and hid them inside wads of tissue paper. I flushed my hair down the toilet and sprinkled it in my hairbrush-and my mother’s, sometimes.
Every time I thought that I was able to stop, it started again. The itch crawled under my skin and the only way to get it out was to pull it out by the roots.
It started the winter of seventh grade, but it never ended. I choked on self-loathing the same way I choked on water when I tried to drink it-absently, until I was used to it.
*
There’s something I haven’t said yet. I haven’t talked about how I used to love swimming-until the winter of seventh grade. I haven’t talked about how I suddenly couldn’t drink water unless I consciously tried to swallow.
You see, I didn’t think it was important.
The only thing that mattered was being better. Oh, I knew that pulling my hair was wrong, that it was only hurting myself and that I should stop. I saw the patches of baldness that weren’t there before, listened to every one of my mother’s lectures, felt the self-loathing myself.
I reached up, curled my fingers in my hair and pulled.
It started the winter of my seventh grade.
But as I said, I was good at lying to myself.
III
It did not start the winter of seventh grade.
I was a senior in high school, and school had only started for a few days. It was Friday though, and we had the weekend in front of us, a fairly empty weekend, as our teachers had yet to begin assigning long complicated assignments and the most either of us had were a few problems for math or a reading assignment or two for English. My friend and I started at the sports park a few blocks away, and spent a few hours dangling from the rope jungle gym before making our way down the street. We stopped by the McDonalds in the basement of a shopping center, me with a chicken sandwich and her with a fish burger-our usual choices at McDonalds. Then we kept walking.
We walked south, stopping by a stationary store to look at pens and notebooks. We walked out with a pencil or pen, talking in half Mandarin half English. There was a park at the intersection where I lived-and she lived only a street away, and since we had the rest of the year to fall behind on our school work and the entirety of summer to catch up on, we went there.
As far as parks went, this one wasn’t bad. There were several plastic exercise machines, and we played on those in lieu of the swings we used to swing on in another park. There were trees and patches of grass, and we commented on our future, our past, our present. There was a pool of water, black and opaque in the darkness and I stared down into it.
It looked bottomless, and I said as such to my friend.
The next day I thought about that bottomless pool and thought: I wonder what it’s like to drown.
And then I remembered
*
It must have been sixth grade, afternoon-because swimming was in the afternoon for sixth graders-and some time between winter and spring, or maybe fall and winter, or maybe just winter itself.
I don’t actually remember.
It must have been sixth grade though, because I started pulling out my hair in seventh grade (or is it the other way around, I started pulling out my hair in seventh grade because it happened in sixth grade? I don’t know, I can’t remember no matter how hard I try). But it must have been sixth grade because before sixth grade Dorothy was shy and awkward but healthy and my friend, and after sixth grade Dorothy was fading and skeletal and I loathed her but couldn’t explain why.
It must have been sixth grade, in the afternoon, when I almost drowned, because that’s the only time that makes sense.
I say so to my friend. She says, ‘don’t you think you’re thinking too much about this’ in English but mostly Chinese, and I shrug.
I forgot, I tell her. I forgot that this happened for six years-five and a half, I correct in my head. We’re sitting in a McCafe between school and the sports park, drinking overpriced chocolate milk (for me) and overpriced tea (for her).
I can’t remember anything, but I can work it out. I lay it out to her in the pieces that I’ve put together in the past few weeks-a flashback, the first I’ve ever had, and then the choking anxiety of drowning that doesn’t seem to leave me. Except it’s no longer anxiety about drowning, or anything like that, but a desperate yearning to remember.
It makes sense now, but I don’t tell her about pulling my hair out, about the gasping sense of wrongness that’s permeated my life from seventh grade. I focus on remembering. I focus on the problem of forgetting.
There’s a disconnect between me and my brain; if I can’t trust my own mind, what can I trust?
*
Her name was Dorothy, and she didn’t know how to swim.
She was one of the few who couldn’t in our class. While the rest of us worked on our stamina and technique, she languished in the beginner section with a kickboard. It was only a class of twenty, but everybody in our grade-one-hundred-and-ninety-eight when we graduated high school-knew that Dorothy was the only girl who still couldn’t swim. It was made worse by the fact that we had grown up with her from elementary school, and so she should have had the same mandatory swimming lessons every year that we did.
One day, near the end of our mandatory swimming unit for PE, the instructors gathered together and said that we were going to have a bit of a contest. We would be separated into groups-I don’t remember how large-and compete against each other to swim to the deep end of the pool, grab a heavy brick, and then swim back to the shallow end to construct a floatation device out of various objects to hold it up. Each group had a kickboard to help transport the brick.
Dorothy was in my group. There was scorn and good natured disgust-there was no way we could win if we had Dorothy in our group. It was obnoxious. To top it off, we didn’t even get an extra kickboard for her to balance it out.
When I say this now, it’s not hard to draw the conclusions. The story will play out like a tragedy-she’ll lose the kickboard, and almost drown. She’ll never quite recover from the trauma, and the pressure from her parents and the realization that she had no control over her life will drive her to anorexia and then later recover from it.
I have never quite liked Dorothy after sixth grade, and I never knew why until my senior year of high school.
*
I have never been a strong swimmer, by sheer lack of athletic ability. When I was younger I tried to play every sport I could, and somehow managed to become a perpetual ball magnet. Regardless of whether it was tennis or soccer or even rugby, my head suffered.
I didn’t consider myself lucky that I was a good swimmer. I had been swimming since I was in pre-school, and I was fully aware that I wasn’t strong enough physically to swim well, but I was better than decent by the sheer fact that I had been swimming for years. With the arrogance that comes of privilege, I assumed that everybody was like myself.
But it wasn’t arrogance that day in the pool.
We were the last group, on the far right end of the pool. It was slow going as we made our way to the deep end to pick up the brick. Dorothy clung to the kickboard and we were all slower as a result. Somebody, I don’t remember who, dove and hauled up the brick. Somebody else helped heave it onto the kickboard, and we started to make our way back to build the flotation device.
We were slower, and nobody was happy about the fact that we were losing. It was Dorothy’s fault, of course, and she clung to the kickboard and slowed us all down.
I can still smell the chlorine when I think about it. I can see somebody pulling the kickboard away, can remember a sudden realization that Dorothy actually couldn’t swim.
I don’t think I realized it until then. Like I said, I had the arrogance and ignorance that is born from privilege. I knew that Dorothy couldn’t swim, but I did not realize, until then, what not knowing how to swim meant.
I grabbed her and reached for the kickboard at the same time. I opened my mouth and said, “Wait, Dorothy doesn’t know how to swim.” I didn’t think anything of it until she clamped her own hands around my wrists and pushed me down.
*
I was a good swimmer. I could tread water for almost a minute. I was good at swimming, even if I wasn’t fast and didn’t have the strength to actually swim long distances. But I wasn’t a strong swimmer, or a talented swimmer, and none of the safety techniques they taught us had anything to do with when your classmate who doesn’t know how to swim is pushing you down.
I tried to keep her up. I remember this. I tread water until my legs were dying and I thought that the teachers would notice us but they didn’t and then I was screaming for help but it didn’t matter because I couldn’t keep her up anymore.
I don’t actually remember what it felt like, those moments when I couldn’t breathe. I remember that I was scared, that I was panicked, and sometimes, when I think back my breath catches in my throat and I feel a horrible tightness that is nothing like drowning.
I remember that for a long time-to me, perhaps it was only a second-I let her hold me down, because I knew that she didn’t know how to swim so she didn’t understand. I thought that she must be shouting for help but I couldn’t hear anything under the water.
I had never been vindictive before. But I didn’t need to twist my short blunt nails into the soft skin at her wrist, didn’t need to push her down so I could breathe, didn’t actually need to feel that sharp pleasure that she deserved it, that she deserved this for not being able to swim.
I breathed, and suddenly realized I was doing. I tried to haul her up, to hold us both up while I screamed for help. She pushed me down again and again, and I pulled her down with me whenever I couldn’t breathe.
We were rescued, eventually. They hauled us out and I listened to the instructors tell me that next time somebody grabbed onto me, I should swim down and that way they’d let go. Drowning people don’t cling to sinking objects.
I nodded. I listened to them, and I didn’t have the strength to say, but I couldn’t let her drown.
They didn’t say that I did anything wrong, but I heard their condemnation all the same.
*
The same day I slid back into the swimming pool. They asked if I wanted to go back, and not knowing how to react, I just nodded. My classmates were shouting and trying to build the flotation device.
It was like it never happened.
When I got home, my mother didn’t talk about it, so I didn’t. Nobody asked me about it, so I didn’t talk about it. By the time it was the winter of seventh grade, I no longer remembered drowning and oddly enough, nobody else knew it even happened.
Except I did. There was a constant disgust whenever I saw Dorothy that I couldn’t understand. Suddenly I hated swimming. I could no longer gulp down water-my throat conspired against me at each attempt of a swallow.
I started pulling out my hair.
There was a perpetual sense of wrongness that accompanied me as I grew up. It lingered under my skin, an itch I couldn’t scratch at. I curled my fingers in my hair, and pulled-pulled the twisted and broken strands out, leaving only the normal ones. It made me a little bit better.
Just a little more perfect.
Word count: 4000 words
Genre: Personal narrative
Warnings: explicit discussion of the following: drowning, obsessive-compulsive behavior, mild self-mutilation, unhealthy body image discussions
Notes: This is a personal narrative. I've previously written on these experiences and memories, but this time I am choosing to label it as personal narrative as opposed to fiction. Written in three parts.
A Secret
I
It started the winter of my seventh grade.
I don’t actually remember-I regret my impatience that keeps me from keeping a diary-but logically, it must have been seventh grade. It must have been winter too, because winter was when the seventh and eighth graders had their regularly scheduled swimming unit of the year.
I attended the same school for twelve years, and that makes it easier for me to-not remember-but work out when things happened. I must have had swimming in the morning, because the seventh and eighth graders had their core classes (math, science, and humanities) in the afternoons, and their electives (foreign language, art, music, PE, and whatever else) in the mornings. I think I had it second in the mornings, not first, but ultimately that doesn’t matter.
What matters is that there was a class right afterwards.
(I know this must be the case because seventh and eighth graders have a short period called “Exploration” between their morning electives and lunch, so regardless of when PE was, there was always a class afterwards.)
We shrieked as we shivered our way to the locker room one very long flight of stairs (outdoors) down. After we got to the locker room, we attempted modesty as we peeled the clammy swimsuits away and changed back into T-shirts, jeans, and jackets. I had a locker in a corner, on the third row of five, and I mastered the art of draping my towel around me in a makeshift curtain while I stripped and dressed. My hair lay in tangled mats around my face, and I combed my fingers through the sticky, chlorine-logged strands and yanked it bank in a ponytail.
It was many hours before I went home.
*
The truth is, I don’t remember how it started. I can figure out when, where, why, how (the who and what is a given), but I don’t actually remember.
Remember is such a strange world. Do I still remember how it started if I didn’t for a long time? Do I still remember why it started if my own brain was lying to me? Do I actually remember when and where if I don’t actually have a concrete memory of “when it started”?
It started the winter of my seventh grade. My mother picked me up from school. We drove the five-to-seven minute drive home (depending on whether or not the traffic lights were in our favor) and took the elevator to the fourth floor from the basement garage. The apartment units in this building were two-story apartments, and once we let ourselves into the apartment I toed off my sneakers and climbed up one flight of stairs to the study. I dropped my backpack down by the computer and sat down to boot it up.
My hair was dry and still smelled strongly of chlorine. I ran my fingers through it, and it pulled away from my scalp in sticky clumps. There was a sudden rolling sense of wrongness that started from my head and made its way down my fingers. I reached up with another hand as the computer slowly creaked its way into start up and started separating the strands from each other. As I did so, I clenched each freshly separated strand between my thumb and forefinger and ran them gently down the length, feeling each twist and knarl.
There was, again, that sense of wrongness.
It was not hard-it still is not hard-to twist the strand around my index finger once, twice, and then pull. It came out cleanly, at the root, and then the wrongness was gone.
I took a deep breath, eyed the still loading computer, and then reached up again.
*
I’ve always liked my hair. I was never very tall as a child-it wasn’t until the end of middle school that I started to grow and eventually hit my acceptable height of one-hundred-and-sixty-four (sometimes five, it the measurement was taken right when I woke up) centimeters. I had a tendency to slouch, and it grew more pronounced when my best friend was a good ten centimeters shorter than me. I wore round purple-frame glasses that had the ends all roughed up because when I first got them I had a tendency to chew on them in anxiety. My eyes were small and my nose was stubby and my two front teeth were creeping from “slightly over-bitten” to “rather over-bitten”…but I had lovely hair.
It was long, thick, and black with light brown highlights. A friend thought I dyed it when I visited her during the summer, and didn’t believe my absent-minded comment that no, I’ve never dyed my hair, I’ve never even curled it before. My mom commented that it was just like hers-except hers was a bit more wavy, the highlights a bit lighter.
I should have known-I did know, back then-that it wouldn’t have lasted. My father’s genetics would have caught up with me. My mother’s genetics would have caught up with me. Both of them were going gray by the time I hit middle school, and it wasn’t just their age-my father at 50 and my mother at 45.
I saw my first gray hair the winter of seventh grade. I pulled it out, a vicious yank, and ran my fingers through sticky, chlorine-matted hair to try to find more.
*
I found more.
After a while, and many hairs, I couldn’t see anymore. But my fingers remembered how my hair felt when they were twisted and rough from chlorine, remembered how the white hairs tended to be rough to the touch, with almost invisible kinks. My fingers found the hairs in the back of my head, and it didn’t matter if they were white or black because they were wrong, all wrong, and my hair was beautiful and the best part of me.
It was always-back then, and still, sometimes, now-just one more. Let me find one more and then it’ll be better.
*
It started the winter of my seventh grade.
The summer before high school, my mother took me to a hairdresser. They started at my hairline and worked further and further back, moving locks of hair forward and forward until the wide gaping hole in the middle of my forehead was covered. Then they snipped the ends shorter and shorter until a layer of thick bangs lay on my forehead.
Nobody could see the patch in the middle of my forehead, the gaping bald spots behind my ears… but there was nothing they could do for the spiraling expanse of emptiness that was growing at the back of my head.
I twisted my fingers through my hair, found a strand with a kink, and yanked it out with perverse viciousness.
I hated my hair.
II
I was a stranger to self-loathing when it started; I never had a need for it. I was short and my eyes were small and my nose was flat, but there was still that boy in second grade who called me “pretty”, and even though I remained oblivious, I was always vaguely aware that my features came together with a pleasant cadence. I was top of my class for years, and teachers used to comment that I was, “actually smart” in a bewildered tone to my mother, who nodded with a growing sense of accomplishment.
Self-loathing was new, but familiar at the same time.
As the younger sibling of two, and I had the dubious pleasure of being the “safer” child. My parents experimented on my brother, and turned to me one and a half years later with dubious experience. That did not stop him from being smarter than me, so there was always a sense that I could be better than I was.
So it was not hard for a strangled sense of “could be better” to twist into self-loathing.
It’s hard to identify this feeling-one would think that it would be easy, but I found myself remarkably good at deflecting my thoughts around. I reached up, yanked out a hair with absent-minded loathing, and reminded myself that this was better.
At some point, it didn’t matter if I thought it was better or worse. My hand moved on its own and I didn’t know how to stop it.
*
I was very good at deflecting my thoughts, at making excuses for myself, at avoiding the subject. I could write a textbook on avoidance, can still, in a minute, come up with a thousand reasons to avoid facing the truth.
There was a girl named Dorothy, and sometime in seventh grade she stopped eating. We weren’t close despite having the same piano teacher and being in orchestra together, but news about her filtered through a plethora of friends and classmates to me. She stopped eating in seventh grade, turned waif-thin in eighth grade, and slowly, ever so slowly, started eating again.
We were in the same grade, but when I saw her there was only a peculiar sense of loathing and aggravation. I could never place my finger on why I hated her so much; even when my best friend at the time commented, ‘She’s anorexic,’ and all I could muster was a sick sense of satisfaction.
I wrapped it in sympathy and platitudes. I had never been vindictive before-cruel, sometimes, short-tempered, always, but never vindictive. But no matter how hard I tried, I could never muster any sympathy for her, just like I could never muster any sympathy for myself.
*
I didn’t need to feel any sympathy for myself. Each tangled knot I pulled out was making me better.
It started the winter of seventh grade, but it never stopped. Even after the swimming lessons stopped there were ruined strands to remove from my life. Next year the swimming lessons started up again and I ran my fingers through sticky chlorine-filled strands and pulled them out faster and faster and faster. The lessons ended, the hand movements didn’t.
It was all wrong. I was all wrong. There was something inherently wrong with me, and this was pulling it out, digging out the wrongness from the roots so I would be better. I left my hair scattered on the hardwood floor of the computer room, until the hairs tanged the wheels of the chairs and they glided on a carpet of my hair instead of rolling on wood.
My mother cried. She told me to stop. I told her that she didn’t understand and she said that she didn’t care, that I should just stop.
I told myself that I wasn’t like Dorothy. I could stop when I wanted. I would stop when I was perfect.
I was very good at lying to myself.
*
When I finally tried to stop, it was too late, so I stopped trying. I just became better at hiding it.
I systematically thinned my hair, avoiding any one area, and then chewed the strands and swallowed them. That was hard, and they stick between my braces and teeth, so I coiled them and knotted them and hid them inside wads of tissue paper. I flushed my hair down the toilet and sprinkled it in my hairbrush-and my mother’s, sometimes.
Every time I thought that I was able to stop, it started again. The itch crawled under my skin and the only way to get it out was to pull it out by the roots.
It started the winter of seventh grade, but it never ended. I choked on self-loathing the same way I choked on water when I tried to drink it-absently, until I was used to it.
*
There’s something I haven’t said yet. I haven’t talked about how I used to love swimming-until the winter of seventh grade. I haven’t talked about how I suddenly couldn’t drink water unless I consciously tried to swallow.
You see, I didn’t think it was important.
The only thing that mattered was being better. Oh, I knew that pulling my hair was wrong, that it was only hurting myself and that I should stop. I saw the patches of baldness that weren’t there before, listened to every one of my mother’s lectures, felt the self-loathing myself.
I reached up, curled my fingers in my hair and pulled.
It started the winter of my seventh grade.
But as I said, I was good at lying to myself.
III
It did not start the winter of seventh grade.
I was a senior in high school, and school had only started for a few days. It was Friday though, and we had the weekend in front of us, a fairly empty weekend, as our teachers had yet to begin assigning long complicated assignments and the most either of us had were a few problems for math or a reading assignment or two for English. My friend and I started at the sports park a few blocks away, and spent a few hours dangling from the rope jungle gym before making our way down the street. We stopped by the McDonalds in the basement of a shopping center, me with a chicken sandwich and her with a fish burger-our usual choices at McDonalds. Then we kept walking.
We walked south, stopping by a stationary store to look at pens and notebooks. We walked out with a pencil or pen, talking in half Mandarin half English. There was a park at the intersection where I lived-and she lived only a street away, and since we had the rest of the year to fall behind on our school work and the entirety of summer to catch up on, we went there.
As far as parks went, this one wasn’t bad. There were several plastic exercise machines, and we played on those in lieu of the swings we used to swing on in another park. There were trees and patches of grass, and we commented on our future, our past, our present. There was a pool of water, black and opaque in the darkness and I stared down into it.
It looked bottomless, and I said as such to my friend.
The next day I thought about that bottomless pool and thought: I wonder what it’s like to drown.
And then I remembered
*
It must have been sixth grade, afternoon-because swimming was in the afternoon for sixth graders-and some time between winter and spring, or maybe fall and winter, or maybe just winter itself.
I don’t actually remember.
It must have been sixth grade though, because I started pulling out my hair in seventh grade (or is it the other way around, I started pulling out my hair in seventh grade because it happened in sixth grade? I don’t know, I can’t remember no matter how hard I try). But it must have been sixth grade because before sixth grade Dorothy was shy and awkward but healthy and my friend, and after sixth grade Dorothy was fading and skeletal and I loathed her but couldn’t explain why.
It must have been sixth grade, in the afternoon, when I almost drowned, because that’s the only time that makes sense.
I say so to my friend. She says, ‘don’t you think you’re thinking too much about this’ in English but mostly Chinese, and I shrug.
I forgot, I tell her. I forgot that this happened for six years-five and a half, I correct in my head. We’re sitting in a McCafe between school and the sports park, drinking overpriced chocolate milk (for me) and overpriced tea (for her).
I can’t remember anything, but I can work it out. I lay it out to her in the pieces that I’ve put together in the past few weeks-a flashback, the first I’ve ever had, and then the choking anxiety of drowning that doesn’t seem to leave me. Except it’s no longer anxiety about drowning, or anything like that, but a desperate yearning to remember.
It makes sense now, but I don’t tell her about pulling my hair out, about the gasping sense of wrongness that’s permeated my life from seventh grade. I focus on remembering. I focus on the problem of forgetting.
There’s a disconnect between me and my brain; if I can’t trust my own mind, what can I trust?
*
Her name was Dorothy, and she didn’t know how to swim.
She was one of the few who couldn’t in our class. While the rest of us worked on our stamina and technique, she languished in the beginner section with a kickboard. It was only a class of twenty, but everybody in our grade-one-hundred-and-ninety-eight when we graduated high school-knew that Dorothy was the only girl who still couldn’t swim. It was made worse by the fact that we had grown up with her from elementary school, and so she should have had the same mandatory swimming lessons every year that we did.
One day, near the end of our mandatory swimming unit for PE, the instructors gathered together and said that we were going to have a bit of a contest. We would be separated into groups-I don’t remember how large-and compete against each other to swim to the deep end of the pool, grab a heavy brick, and then swim back to the shallow end to construct a floatation device out of various objects to hold it up. Each group had a kickboard to help transport the brick.
Dorothy was in my group. There was scorn and good natured disgust-there was no way we could win if we had Dorothy in our group. It was obnoxious. To top it off, we didn’t even get an extra kickboard for her to balance it out.
When I say this now, it’s not hard to draw the conclusions. The story will play out like a tragedy-she’ll lose the kickboard, and almost drown. She’ll never quite recover from the trauma, and the pressure from her parents and the realization that she had no control over her life will drive her to anorexia and then later recover from it.
I have never quite liked Dorothy after sixth grade, and I never knew why until my senior year of high school.
*
I have never been a strong swimmer, by sheer lack of athletic ability. When I was younger I tried to play every sport I could, and somehow managed to become a perpetual ball magnet. Regardless of whether it was tennis or soccer or even rugby, my head suffered.
I didn’t consider myself lucky that I was a good swimmer. I had been swimming since I was in pre-school, and I was fully aware that I wasn’t strong enough physically to swim well, but I was better than decent by the sheer fact that I had been swimming for years. With the arrogance that comes of privilege, I assumed that everybody was like myself.
But it wasn’t arrogance that day in the pool.
We were the last group, on the far right end of the pool. It was slow going as we made our way to the deep end to pick up the brick. Dorothy clung to the kickboard and we were all slower as a result. Somebody, I don’t remember who, dove and hauled up the brick. Somebody else helped heave it onto the kickboard, and we started to make our way back to build the flotation device.
We were slower, and nobody was happy about the fact that we were losing. It was Dorothy’s fault, of course, and she clung to the kickboard and slowed us all down.
I can still smell the chlorine when I think about it. I can see somebody pulling the kickboard away, can remember a sudden realization that Dorothy actually couldn’t swim.
I don’t think I realized it until then. Like I said, I had the arrogance and ignorance that is born from privilege. I knew that Dorothy couldn’t swim, but I did not realize, until then, what not knowing how to swim meant.
I grabbed her and reached for the kickboard at the same time. I opened my mouth and said, “Wait, Dorothy doesn’t know how to swim.” I didn’t think anything of it until she clamped her own hands around my wrists and pushed me down.
*
I was a good swimmer. I could tread water for almost a minute. I was good at swimming, even if I wasn’t fast and didn’t have the strength to actually swim long distances. But I wasn’t a strong swimmer, or a talented swimmer, and none of the safety techniques they taught us had anything to do with when your classmate who doesn’t know how to swim is pushing you down.
I tried to keep her up. I remember this. I tread water until my legs were dying and I thought that the teachers would notice us but they didn’t and then I was screaming for help but it didn’t matter because I couldn’t keep her up anymore.
I don’t actually remember what it felt like, those moments when I couldn’t breathe. I remember that I was scared, that I was panicked, and sometimes, when I think back my breath catches in my throat and I feel a horrible tightness that is nothing like drowning.
I remember that for a long time-to me, perhaps it was only a second-I let her hold me down, because I knew that she didn’t know how to swim so she didn’t understand. I thought that she must be shouting for help but I couldn’t hear anything under the water.
I had never been vindictive before. But I didn’t need to twist my short blunt nails into the soft skin at her wrist, didn’t need to push her down so I could breathe, didn’t actually need to feel that sharp pleasure that she deserved it, that she deserved this for not being able to swim.
I breathed, and suddenly realized I was doing. I tried to haul her up, to hold us both up while I screamed for help. She pushed me down again and again, and I pulled her down with me whenever I couldn’t breathe.
We were rescued, eventually. They hauled us out and I listened to the instructors tell me that next time somebody grabbed onto me, I should swim down and that way they’d let go. Drowning people don’t cling to sinking objects.
I nodded. I listened to them, and I didn’t have the strength to say, but I couldn’t let her drown.
They didn’t say that I did anything wrong, but I heard their condemnation all the same.
*
The same day I slid back into the swimming pool. They asked if I wanted to go back, and not knowing how to react, I just nodded. My classmates were shouting and trying to build the flotation device.
It was like it never happened.
When I got home, my mother didn’t talk about it, so I didn’t. Nobody asked me about it, so I didn’t talk about it. By the time it was the winter of seventh grade, I no longer remembered drowning and oddly enough, nobody else knew it even happened.
Except I did. There was a constant disgust whenever I saw Dorothy that I couldn’t understand. Suddenly I hated swimming. I could no longer gulp down water-my throat conspired against me at each attempt of a swallow.
I started pulling out my hair.
There was a perpetual sense of wrongness that accompanied me as I grew up. It lingered under my skin, an itch I couldn’t scratch at. I curled my fingers in my hair, and pulled-pulled the twisted and broken strands out, leaving only the normal ones. It made me a little bit better.
Just a little more perfect.