that room

this talent for silence has always come easy.

i stare at the screen of my cell phone and watch your drunken rage blip up again and again and again.  i watch the little line of three winking ellipses and imagine the curl of your lips.  i imagine you screaming at the tiny device in your hand what a bitch i am.  how selfish.  how horrible.

we haven't spoken in nearly a year but tonight apparently you've grown suddenly impatient.  i can see the half-drained bottle of Makers Mark sitting next to you and, as i watch the next angry text bubble burp into existence,  i think, "you're acting just like my asshole father would act when he was drunk and needed someone to yell at," needed a small, powerless, female form to absorb the rage of his inadequacy:

15 years old, standing silently in the doorway to my father's bedroom as he ridiculed my clothing: "you know, Angela Marie, the baggier your jeans get, the more ordinary you become."

and tonight, your text: "you know what, Angela, cool fades."

the implication being that i am unworthy of even the smallest accolade, even the tiniest crumb of acknowledgement and self-satisfaction. in actuality, you've inflated my accomplishments. or maybe i've just come so far from being the inadequate girl you once knew that it is hard for me to see my survival for what it truly is: unexpected and astonishing. 

at 18 years old, sitting in the corner of my father's bedroom trying not to cry, eyes downcast, as he screamed at me about what a bitch my mother was, how heartbroken he was that no one seemed to care about how much he had suffered during their marriage and during the years since. how he had promised himself he'd be patient and that "when the kids are old enough, I'll finally get to tell them the truth about what a goddamn bitch their mother is. Only now it's all sour grapes and I don't get my due! I hope that bitch rots in hell, Angela! If I had a gun, I'd blow her fucking head off! And YOU! Where have YOU been in all this when I needed someone to talk to? Do you understand how hard this has been for me?  DO YOU UNDERSTAND!"

and tonight, your text: "I don't have anyone to talk to" standing as pathos amid an unprovoked barrage of insults and condescension that run from midnight until 4am. how many times did you called me a bitch? 

i set my phone upside-down on a pillow next to the bed, snuffing the flash and buzz of your assault.  i pick up the book on the night stand and open to where i'd left off. i hold it close to my face.  for several minutes my eyes pass over the same few sentences, my brain not retrieving the information of the text.  i try again but only half of the information comes through.  divided, i persist, but half of me is back in that room.  in every room that has ever qualified as "that room."

i curl further into my blanket and say the words out loud: "i am not that little girl anymore, asshole. i do not have to sit here and listen to your drunk, mean bullshit."

i begin again at the top of the page. 

who knows...

Part of the issue here is that I have trouble seeing the line between what is right to say, what needs to be said, and what might simply be a desire for revenge or a moment of righteous self-pity.  Part of the issue here is I am also a bit of a Goodie-Two-Shoes, always have been, who is petrified of hurting other people's feelings.  Somewhere along the line, I convinced myself that being kind (even to a monster) is more important than telling the truth, that hurting a person's feelings was the worst thing I could do.  This was not merely a child's logic borne of her own experience of pain and hurt feelings.  In fact, perhaps I am wrong to say that I convinced myself of this belief.  It was taught to me.



                                                                           .  .  .



I do not communicate with the members of my family.  Not really.  My brother, sister, and nephew are the only blood relatives I sometimes see and with whom I sometimes speak.  There are the occasional text messages we shoot to one another, out of nowhere and full of questions about the past:  "How old was I when we lived in the house in Alviso?  How old were you?  Had Kelly been born yet?  Do you remember all the crazy frogs in the backyard?"  Our attempts to chart a history and get the facts straight, to establish the time-lines of the tragedies that seemed not to let up for long.

There are also the occasional postcards I send my grandmother, a practice I took up only after moving to New York from California several years ago. My eyes filled with tears when I sat with her in her home in Redlands, saying goodbye before my departure east, and she asked me in a small voice, "Do you think you might ever move back to California?" I haven't mailed a postcard to her in a over  year.  She has not mailed a postcard to me.  It isn't a grudge and there is no ill-will.  I can't claim lack of love as a reason for this distance either.  This is just the way it is. It is the way it has always been.  I do not send Christmas cards to any of my aunts, uncles, or cousins.  I seldom reach out to them when there is a birth or marriage.  They seldom reach out to me.  It isn't a mode of living which I seek to amend or change.  I do not feel badly about it.  In fact, I rarely think about it.  The familial silence which flows around me, warm and silken, is luxurious; a hot shower where I sing my lungs out, unheard, unknown, unembarrassed. 


                                                                             .  .  .



A few weeks ago, I looked up a few, old friends from Junior High and High School on Facebook.  I was stunned by how old their faces looked smiling out from the glow of my cell phone. Not how old, really, but how tired.  Their cheeks seemed slack.  The skin around their eyes, thin.  They looked dehydrated.

Some had finished High School.  Some had not.  Most had become parents.  Most of the people who had become parents were single parents.  Some had custody of their kids.  Some did not. 

The pictures of their homes looked eerily familiar, similar in the extreme to the houses and apartments they themselves had been raised in, homes in which I had sometimes spent the night.  But these were not the same homes of our youth. Or, to say it more accurately, these were not the same walls. Perhaps that was why looking at photographs of the grown-up versions of childhood friends filled me with a sick cascade of dread: Had their parents succeeded in turning their kids into versions of themselves, the very people we had spent so many years vowing we would never become?  Or had those dire times only been dire for me?  Maybe our punk rock pledges of rebellion were the simple folly of youth, just the type of things kids say at that age? Or maybe their parents hadn't "succeeded" in anything beyond the normal operations of making a family? Nothing sinister. No diabolical plots to squelch the life-force out of their children. No ransacking of their progeny's talents and dreams.  One generation simply reared and raised the next.  Traditions were handed down: Memorial Day weekend at the river and Grandma's meatloaf recipe and Crazy Uncle Larry's political agenda. Maybe what I was looking at was simply the next track in a family's evolution?  Maybe I had been the only one in need of escape.

But as I stared at these faces, at once so familiar yet strange, I began to remember the uncomfortable things.  The things we aren't supposed to talk about anymore. The things that creep forth in random nightmares or deep within the swing of drunken, 2am confessions.  The things we are supposed to have gotten over by now, now that we're adults.  I remember what happened to these children.  I remember what happened to me.  They look dehydrated because they are still there, trapped in the searing furnace blast of longing that parched and plagued our adolescence.