June 28th 2010

(sometimes, things like this happen)

I spent most of my life hidden under the floorboards. And then, everything went fuzzy. I have spent countless hours and times trying to recall who or what was important to me for those years through this radio static. It never worked so I eventually stopped like how I'd drag my nails on the outside walls of CVS waiting for my aunt to buy her cigarettes. I'd drag them all up and down until my mom said STOP. Sure, everyone called me "sweet pie" and "honey" and "angel" for the most part but that was just the grown ups and they only liked me because I was one of them. So, because everyone called me "angel" I had it in my head that I was going to heaven some day, but heaven was anywhere but home and sooner or later I gave heaven up and started looking for home in smaller things, my teddy bear. My mother's lipstick, cereal box toys, plastic dinosaurs, rings five sizes too big. And I cried through all of it, especially to see my brother born. He was a little ball of dough kicking and rattling all night long. I'd try and sing him lullabies but my mom, our mom who was consistently a different person told me STOP. She said, I could sing outside but dad'd lock the door if I did and I sure as hell didn't have any key so I stayed in. My room became some sort of womb where I could be reborn over and over again until, perhaps, finding what, I thought, were bits of me. Something I could call "mine" because no matter how much money I saved up my parents took away at some point because it was really their money-- no matter how many dishes I wiped or toilets I cleaned, it was theirs. My money was theirs but I sure wasn't. I wanted to badly to tell them this new thing I could say was mine-- was that; I wasn't theirs. Because here's the fact: the only part of me is myself. That's pretty good, I thought I could count it in STOP's or times I was assumed to be an "angel" because I'm too dumb to talk. But dumb as in dumbstruck from my father's hand and mother's mouth, mother's screams. My screams were what really did it. They were why I could not break from them in the first place, because my life would creep into my dreams and make them into nightmares. All my fears and troubles became literal, physical interpretations of what my life really was and really is. I was the one who woke mother up. I was screaming, not my baby brother. I'd wake my father instead. I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry. But he says STOP. He says, go to bed. But I cry because I'm scared and cry more because I can't tell them what's happening in my head and even more because I can't even talk in the first place. Tell them that they raised a mute. And now, I can speak to them proper but not timed right at all, really. I get mad too fast. I yell and say STOP... Even when I don't mean it. Even when I don't love them --I do love them! I love them! But I love her much more, and my baby brother who isn't a baby anymore. He isn't a ball of dough he's roughened and crusted around the edges into a muddy, ten year old brother who can't tell his rights from his lefts. God, I was so much smarter but they don't see that because he can talk, because they didn't know and they'll never know, it's none of their goddamn business.

and it's really none of yours either. But that doesn't matter, through all this the swimming pool water I managed to see something. I tried to remember and recall and recollect all of that I didn't remember. And it worked, oh lord did it work, oh lord I am an angel. I kept thinking this over and over again: the STOPs and the "angel"s and how myself is myself and all of this is happening at the same time- my friend is driving me home and as we pull from the solid wooden garage, we plunge into darkness with only the headlights before us.