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.
No comments:
Post a Comment