“There was a cast party after the play. I was so upset that the production was over, utterly confused by the blinding intensity of the feeling, and I didn’t dare cry in front of the other students. I told them that I needed to write, found a notebook, and sat off the kitchen at the house, writing who knows what, while they had their party in the other rooms. They left me alone, but really, I wanted to be with them. I didn’t know how to be sad or appropriately social. It was… isolating.”
Bring out the dark tales now, to be told on bent folding chairs in church basements and around the pitted ashtray posts of alano clubs. The dark tales don’t look any lighter through the lens of time. Streets lined with tired duplex houses burdened me twice a day when I rode the groaning, hissing bus back and forth from school. My city was ugly, poor, and boring. Dad worked overtime, Mum was miserable. When she talked to me at all, she said I needed to lose weight, and put me on a diet. I was always hungry that season. I wasn’t sure I liked being gaunt. My breasts were almost gone. Nobody noticed that I was hurting, and it would've taken an industrial strength diesel winch to pull that out of me, if anyone had even known to ask.
I ran away at fourteen, with a boy I met while he was truant and loitering outside my new school. He’d said he was fifteen but he was seventeen. I stayed at his foster home that night, hiding among the tumbling dust bunnies under his bed in the room he shared with his foster brothers. He tried to penetrate me with his impossibly hard prick, and when he couldn’t get it in, he sucked his thumb like a baby while he jerked off.
I went home the next day. Dad was relieved and cried when he saw that I was safe, Mum merely looked exasperated, and the smug face she’d been wearing while I was gone –the one she wore when Dad gave her attention– changed to the look of disapproval I was used to. It was the last week in February, now I was grounded till the end of June. I was made to see a counselor with a hyphenated name who looked too much like Mum for me to trust. I read him my poems, which were about nature and loneliness. When I dyed my hair red she tantrummed, but I’d stopped caring about her storms and icy fronts. She couldn’t shun me with the red hair, I chose the same shade as hers, and it grew past my shoulders.
My little brother and little sister, joined but untethered, like a strand of buoys floating away from a slip, floated over to me when Mum went back to work. Mum chose the graveyard shift. Dad had moved out. The little ones came to me in the evening, while I was in my room, writing on a portable electric typewriter and smoking butts. They sat on the frameless bed I’d made up like a couch. My sister cried. “Who’s going to mow the lawn?”
“I will,” I reassured them. The next day, I mowed it.
Instead of watching TV downstairs, they lounged on my bed. “Who’s going to make supper?” Mum was asleep, she had to get up at 9 to go to work.
“You need a shower. Off with you. I’ll make us something.” They ate the hotdogs and Kraft dinner, and I let them wash the dishes, filling the sink with dense suds for them to play in. When Mum got up she was so pleased that I’d taken responsibility that I softened. I chased her approval and the fellowship of my siblings by keeping up with this same dance for a time, but later I pinched my older sister Lumi in her soft tricep area and insisted she shoulder some of the care while I worked on I Never Saw Another Butterfly after school.
I’d swallowed all of my fear and auditioned for the play, speaking lines from my diaphragm, voice strong, diction clean, as I’d taught myself to project when singing. I got one of the main parts. I lent all my pain to the work, and the themes of courage, perseverance, and loss were themes I could see in my life too. The world was bigger, older, and more horrifying than I could grasp, but it had sublimity, beauty, and love that I wanted to swallow whole, and I wanted the right to insist that others witness and validate it too. I still well up when I hear the motif of The Moldau, which captures it all. I felt like I must be mad to think such things, and that I might rather die than bear it.
I was an up and coming bad-ass. I’d learned to apply a persona to my being, how to put on airs and be something I knew I wasn’t naturally. At my new school I was tough but post-punk cool, in long black skirts with combat boots thrifted from the mission. The art teachers fawned over my drawings and let me take an AP art history course. The drama club teacher took my one-act play and produced it. I had friends, the rag-tag artists and the quirky theater kids, but I couldn’t sleep. They didn’t really know me. They had no idea I was just a void with no real personality who couldn’t do maths, or that the reason I knew so much about film was because I studied how actors emoted so that I might understand people. I was desperately lonely. I listened to music as if I needed it to breathe. I would stare out the window all night, through the sweeping trees and into the arching sky, and wish I lived with my Nanni. I wanted to go away somewhere for a long, long time.
My sister Lumi stalked around the house like she was above it all. Whenever I could, to break her, I would do ridiculous dances and zany skits, hurl wild insults or give her some sort of present. She was hot and cold, but even the familiarity of that had a comfort. I was envious. I didn’t know how not to care, and I couldn't name my deeper feelings, so I pushed them down.
“After (the tragedy) I struggled. It didn’t make any sense, and how it had all been before was just so normal… I didn’t know what trauma was. I’d never had to cope with anything major, just the small stuff, you know, family stuff, being an outsider, which I’d gotten the hang of by seventeen. I never risked sharing feelings, either out of fear of being belittled by my dad or because I didn’t have a good grasp on ‘em. I knew basic feelings. But these were big, distracting feelings. What had happened was serious. My parents didn’t know what to make of it, they, like, tried to keep me focused on school, to apply for college. I felt like a robot. I didn’t want to live like that.
After a while I went to them with, you know, said I was depressed, lost… and they told me to tell my guidance counselor at school the next day. So I did, and I trusted the guy, he knew my folks… and that mother fucker told me he was taking me to the hospital, immediately… and then left me alone! He locked me in his third floor office with an open window, after I bared all and told him I felt suicidal! I pushed some shit off of his table out the window, I was so pissed off. I don’t know why I got into his car, I guess it seemed unreasonable to risk disobeying an adult when my dad was who he was. But this jackoff brought me to the emergency room and within two hours I was committed. I went absolutely apeshit once they got me upstairs. The nurse was terrified of me and my rage. She apologised over and over again. I ranted about my parents, that this was illegal, all that. She said my dad had given a verbal okay over the phone. It took several people to hold me down, and I didn’t surface for days. They kept giving me thorazine.”
to be continued
I was in a production of I Never Saw Another Butterfly in high school, too.
Oof, this hits hard. The way adults and systems brutalize vulnerable children who don’t—can’t—conform is tragic and enraging. Thank you for telling your story, it’s important.