The Lost Child

Last night, I gulped down an orange-flavored melatonin drink, knocked back a cortisol manager pill and a magnesium capsule, and slathered on some lavender-smelling cream meant to calm the adrenal glands. All of this in the name of sleep, which has been difficult to come by during this summer of unemployment. Sleep seems to be a reward reserved for tired people, folks who pour their energy into jobs or families. It isn't for those seeking gainful employment, and it certainly isn't for those seeking themselves.

In the warm, fan-stuttered darkness, I kick the sheets and toss pillows, hoping to get comfortable. I wrap my arm around my partner, bury my face in her neck, pull back to scratch my cheek where her hair tickles my skin, turn over so as not to bother her, bump into my cat who rubs his toothy gums across my jaw and jams his paws against my throat, set him at the foot of the bed, get up, go to the bathroom, head to the kitchen, drink some water, return to the bedroom, crank up the window AC, pop in a pair of earplugs, settle under a sheet, close my eyes, breathe...breathe...breathe, silently ask the darkness to carry me deep enough for dreams, hold my breath, breathe, sigh, and click on my smart phone.

Maybe I'll find what I'm looking for on the Internet.

Open Letter #8, to my step-father for the holidays

Do you remember our first Christmas together in Pennsylvania?  How the presents under the tree sparkled in the sunlight shining through the large wall of windows in the living room?  There were more presents under that tree than I'd seen under any tree this side of a movie screen.  I remember sitting in a great unfurling of wire-rimmed ribbons and red and green wrapping paper, how we fed the colors to the fire before I slipped into my new down jacket and winter gloves and ran out the door with Fred, both of us clutching the sleds Santa had brought us.  Mine was a sturdy plastic green dish, a shade lighter than my coat.  I remember how the snow twinkled, how I sailed down the driveway so fast, not even the wind could touch me.  I remember thinking that things had changed.  I remember feeling safe.

That Christmas came two years after the morning I woke up in my dad's bed and the cops came to take my statement and less than a year after we'd moved from Florida, where the pieces of my life lifted from their moorings and flew around me like hurricane debris.  You know what I'm talking about because you saw some of what went on, and we told you the rest to get back at our mother.  But what you don't know is that it wasn't the presents I noticed so much that Christmas in Pennsylvania; what I saw was the lights shimmering on the tree because the power hadn't been cut off, what I heard was Christmas music rather than the phone ringing with bill collectors, what I felt was a stomach full of hot chocolate and orange juice and sticky buns, and what I understood was that with you around, I would no longer have to worry about not having enough to eat or not being able to see to do my homework because Mom hadn't paid the electricity bill.  Furthermore, I knew I could count on you to ask me about my day, to take me in your arms and listen to me rattle on about my adventures in the woods behind our house and the books I was reading and what I was learning in school.  You had become, in a relatively short time, a more dependable and doting parent than the ones who'd raised me.  And this was difficult to believe because you were also a tyrant.  I knew you'd never look at me the way my molester father did, and I knew you'd never be as cold as my mother, but you ran hot, and I had plenty of reasons to hate you.  Still, you never knew, I don't think, how grateful I was and am for many of the things you did.

One of the first and most cherished things you ever did for me was teach me to fish.  I remember the slippery rubber of the squid you bought for bait, how when I grabbed it from the box you kept in the freezer, it froze my skin, and how when I dangled a thawed triangle of the flesh between my fingers, it wiggled insouciantly.  You taught me how to wrap the bait around the hook so as to hide the barb, how to cast the line off your dock, how to spin the reel and jerk the pole to tempt the fish, how to bring one in without losing it, how to free myself from a snag.

When I'd catch one, no matter whether it was a tiny sunfish, a gluttonous puffer, or something actually admirable like that barracuda we had to pull up with a net, you were always glad for me.  You showed me how to remove the hook gently so as not to tear off the fish's lip.  You urged me to put the fish back into the water quickly so it could go on taking its chances with this life, and that was part of the fun too, watching it shoot off like a backwards firework, a flash and then nothing but the brown bottom of the canal.

I remember the time Fred couldn't get hold of a particularly slippery fish, how it slapped wildly against the sea wall, how when he finally got a rag around it, he labored too long to remove the hook, and when you came outside to help, because you wanted to spare my brother, because you wanted to change things, you took the still-gilled fish gingerly in your bear-sized hand and pushed it back and forth just under the water's surface, like a kid playing with a toy truck, attempting to give it life.  I remember my brother's tight little forehead, the way he squatted on the sea wall watching your hand, watching the fish, watching the water turn red with its blood, watching it float onto its side when you let go of it, how his own mouth opened and closed and opened soundlessly as he stared at the rigid gills and the broken scales, how you said, mercifully, "He's still in shock," while moving quickly to retrieve the fish, your hand pumping that fish through the water like a doctor pumping a chest with his fists, how you wanted what we wanted, how in your better moments, you loved us.

Evolution of a Diarist (not to be confused with a diarrhea-ist, which is similar with regards to force, but only sometimes with regards to content and location)

Let me explain:

I've had a LiveJournal blog, which I began at my first girlfriend's behest, since I was eighteen years old, and it has served me well.  I'd like to talk about it, but first I have to go back in time, to LJ's predecessors in my life, to the beginning of my need to express myself in words.

I had a natural inclination to write when I was a child.  I remember when I was only six and seven years old, lovingly, carefully, like a watch-smith with her magnifying glass and tiny tools, transcribing scenes from movies, turning the pictures into words on the page, sometimes rewriting plots and embellishing my favorite moments, making them my own.  I remember writing tales about animals, about everyday objects; nothing lacked magic, nothing was storyless.

I always kept a journal growing up.  The first one I remember had a puffy, yellow plastic cover and a cheap gold lock and key.  I remember it not so much for what it contained but for what it revealed.  When I was nine years old and in the fourth grade, the man who would become my stepfather broke into it.  I remember seeing it beside his ashtray on the side table next to his recliner.  The key glittered atop it, and maybe I imagined it, but it shined guiltily like the eyes of a Labrador Retriever that allows thieves to burglarize a house in return for a good rubdown.  I remember how my skin burned as Roger, a nicotine-stained smirk on his face, quoted lines at me: "When I walk into a room, I want to make all the boys swoon." I can still remember the way he laughed, how each ha-ha-ha sunk deeper inside me, every one burning like an ember.  It was then that I realized I would not have any privacy, that words written down could be found and used against me.

To my knowledge, I stopped journaling for a few years, funneling my creativity into school book reports and assigned stories.  But when I was thirteen, I started two journals, dedicating one to poetry and the other to dream analysis.  I wasn't scared of my secrets being found out because I was tired of having to keep everything inside; it took more energy to keep myself away from the page than to pour myself out.  It was around that time my stepfather's abusiveness piqued.  He had by then made everyone in the family feel smaller.  He'd thrown my mother down the stairs while my sister, brother, and I pretended to sleep through yet another explosive argument.  He'd kicked me in the back and chased me through the woods in what I thought would be the last minutes of my life.  He'd called my sister so many names, I was sure she'd forget her real one soon.  And he'd turned my younger brother from a sweet, genial boy into a dangerous, drug-abusing stranger.  I wrote the following poem, half-way hoping, I think, Roger would find it, and we could finally end all pretenses of safety and security in that house.

What He Says


Hurdles come and they go
Don't deal with your problems
Bottle up the pain
Forget expressing yourself
No psychiatric help
You're wrong all the time
I'm always right
Angry fits and flying fists
Foul language pouring out
Don't waste your time
You'll never be anything
I hate you
I don't need help
You need to get a life
Get some friends
I am perfect
Why can't you be like me
What's wrong with you
Nothing's wrong
I'm just fine

Later, when I began realizing I was attracted to females, I penned poems about secrets, about hiding, about feeling different, about wanting to be normal, loved, and accepted.  I wrote love poems to crushes, wondering if I'd ever be able to share them.  I half-hoped my family, from whom I'd hidden this part of myself, would find my poetry journal and make me share, but my siblings were more interested in stealing CD's from my room than anything else, my mother never showed any interest in anything of mine, and my stepfather was ordered to leave the house when I was fourteen after it was discovered he'd ruptured my brother's eardrum by throwing him across the kitchen and into the stove.  So I kept my poems to myself.

I began my dream diary because my dreams intrigued me.  During the day, I was a nerdy, bookish girl with few friends who spent much time reading in bed and sitting in the woods observing deer and murmurs of starlings.  But at night, in my sleep, life unfurled in more vibrant shades.  Animals shimmered and spoke; aliens landed in my backyard and spoke to the foxes living in the woods surrounding my house; when I ran, I could fly.

When I was sixteen, a friend gave me a dream dictionary for my birthday, and my dreams started making a lot more sense.  Soon, I couldn't pretend they were just stories; I couldn't ignore their messages.  And as I slid deeper into teenagerhood, my dreams changed.  Some of them terrified me.  When aliens came, they abducted me.  When animals talked, they whispered threats in raspy voices.  I hurt people.  I slit throats and ran from shadows.  I woke up not knowing who I was, what I was, when I was.  Everything gleamed in the dark of my dreams; everything had teeth.

Sometimes I woke up crying out of fear.  Other times, out of disappointment; I'd finally come out to my family, and they'd embraced me--but when I woke, I'd realize it was a dream, that I was still worried my twin sister would call me a freak, that my mother would disown me.  I'd dream of holding hands with my best friend, of an innocent kiss on the cheek, waking to find myself in a world where Matthew Shepard's blood still stained the air, where Brandon Teena's were murdered everyday and people were not only fine with that, but relieved.  I filled hundreds of looseleaf pages with sweaty scribbles and tears because words were a refuge.

It was vital that I write.  There were things I did not want to tell others and things that needed to be said but had to wait.  There were things I didn't understand but that I itched to explore; words spilled from me like beams of light cutting through the darkness, like crumbs that could lead me home.  They were ever-ready, and I was grateful.  But gradually, they became too many and too heavy.  Not to mention too messy!  My handwriting had steadily deteriorated since I'd graduated from the mandatory handwriting classes of early grade school where the impeccability of a letter's curves was held in high regard; as a teenager with a wild need to express myself and an agile mind, I had no intention of slowing down to cross my t's or dot my i's.  Fortunately for me, a new age had dawned.  America Online, email, AOL Instant Messenger, and a mandatory keyboarding class converged to make me a nimble typist and savvy internet user.  And so began my relationship with online journaling.

Its benefits were immediately apparent.  No longer did I have to spend countless minutes sifting through pages of sloppy scrawl to relive a dream, poem, or memory from months past.  I could simply pinpoint the month or tag and quickly link to a neatly-typed entry.  And because I could type a good deal faster than I could write, I found I was less anxious while writing, less worried that I would miss a word or idea.  My fingers could almost keep up with my brain.

I liked, too, how I could share my entries or make them private.  In this way, I learned about audience, purpose, and the other fundamental building blocks of writing.  I chose my words carefully, wanting my audience to take me seriously, to listen, or to laugh.  I wanted my readers to feel something, to care. Finally, I wanted to share my words; after so many years of tucking them into drawers, smashing them between covers, and keeping them under lock and key, I could no longer keep them to myself.  They were aching to get out, and blogging online allowed me to breathe more deeply than I ever had.

But times are changing again.  I'm changing.  LiveJournal is not the same kind of platform as Blogger or Wordpress.  It's like an electric typewriter, straddling the old and the new, trying to keep writing simple in a world that is growing more complicated.  I want to keep it...for my private entries, for the secrets I'm nervous to reveal even to myself, for vitriolic, childish rants that would make the devil himself flush with shame.

I'd like to use this new blog to test my mettle as a writer.  To be honest, hard times, existentially, have fallen upon me, and I have wondered for the past several years if I have what it takes to write, if I even have the right to call myself a writer, despite its immanence in my life, despite years of writing-centered learning and teaching.  Can I rebirth my writing-self with this blog?  Can I garner an audience, even an audience of one?  Will anyone want to read my words?  Should that even matter?  I don't know, but I'm willing to find out.  Because my life--not my heartbeat or breath, but my purpose--depends on it.  Because once again, I'm feeling lost, wondering what my days are all about, and I'm hoping words will save me...from a life of settling, of fear, of doubt, of apathy.  If you are reading this, perhaps you, too, are looking for rescue.  Maybe we can save each other from meaninglessness, stranger.  Maybe words can be that powerful.  I sure hope so.