Every time I turn on the computer to feel the satisfying clackety clack of the keys flowing under my fingertips, I feel the acute absence of pen and paper. The lack of subject matter. The emptiness of the moment. I don’t know how to relax.
During the nothing years of my adolescence when my father kept me prisoner in my windowless bedroom, counting down hours until he would appear to tuck me in in the dimly sunlit eight thirty evening, creativity and angst abounded. My pens came full of poetry that fell out onto the page the instant the two met. I would go into a trance and emerge with volumes perched on my knee, neatly penned, occasionally signed in the blood of my elusive artistic self. Now the trance doesn’t come. I’m left sitting in a residue of the future that prison built. The lights are too bright and the words are miles in the past, my memory a fog of self preservation that leaves me frustrated rather than safe. I lived from one self created disaster to the space new abusers built in the between, then on to the next. I never thought of myself as “one of those girls” but now everything is fine for the first time in my life and it tastes like an overused dishrag. A little too dingy, feeling like pruned fingers and no idea what to do next.
Sit down. Take a deep breath. What is there to say? So much. So, so much, but the memories elude or hurt me, the words live in that world of waking dreams I can’t enter intentionally and I’m left, perched on the edge of the chair anxiously looking for something else to do. When I can’t find it I feel empty. Listless, discontent and useless. Who am I if I don’t even know what I want to do? I want to write. I want to write, goddammit!
I’m awash with partial memories. I want to write a memoir, to get it all out in prose as a form of artistic exorcism, but the memories are so murky and out of sequence. Maybe I’ll just plunge into them, little excerpts within chapters of my life.
There was one sweltering, sunny chapter five years ago. On this day at that point in time I had been out of my abusive relationship, that taught me what a tweaker was exactly, for five days. I was staying in the basement at a friend’s parents’ house. My two small children and I were sleeping on an air bed in a small space no one used, and my friend’s sister was babysitting the kids as an act of charity while I tried to find work and housing. Their parents wanted to know how long we would be. I was nervous, awkward and tense. I had no idea how long I’d be. I had no experience being a single mother. Well, that’s not exactly true. I had five days’ experience.
Ironically, it was my estranged father who swooped in and helped me leave my ex. I called him and he arrived with his truck an hour later while my ex was at work. The neighbors watched us, and called him to tell him I was making off in the night with his kids and some tall, bearded man. He hoofed it back, but we made it. He was furious I had taken the car. I stayed with my father for one night. He kept calling my son by the wrong name and had me sit between my one and newly three year old and clean the table as they ate. That first night, after the kids went to bed, he asked me why I had told his family he raped me. I couldn’t even begin to touch that subject and simply broke into silent tears as he berated me for my lascivious rumour as I shook, unable to speak in my defense.
You see, my father has decided there’s no molestation except rape. By this logic, anything nonpenetrative is not a trespass in the eyes of my father’s own personal god. The deity of his imagining who finds my father one of his only true disciples, the one who should have been chosen as pastor those twenty one years ago when the congregation chose an older man instead of their youth pastor, and ruined his dreams of serving god before an audience. He boycotted the church and retreated into his Westpoint delusions, taking his family to church on fort and turning that one semester at the military academy into his time “boxing in the army.” He taught his daughters the fear of that place where military and religion meet, and further served his pious ego. How tall stands he before all others; how tall stands he before god whom only he truly knows. And his godless daughter tried to ruin him with her lies because he didn’t come to his bastard grandchild’s first birthday party. That’s the only reason he can see for the story. I stayed with my friend the next night and that summer was the last I spoke to my father.
All I want is to write. Why are the horrors so much more colorful than my growing handfuls of positivity? Someone said, “Namaste,” to me this morning. I laughed when he left. I may have called him a dork. Is that unkind, or is that just the type of realism that burns in my fingertips, begging me to let it out? I just want to write….I just want to write
It was…what? Couldn’t have been a month after that the DSC died. Dead in the alley behind the liquor store and no one else seems to see the perfection in that. When a free climber falls to his death, at worst it’s, “What did he expect?” and at best, “That’s how he would have wanted to go.” But the guy that gave up family and beds and food to be drunk on the street corner outside the drive through coffee place- they all say it’s so sad. I will never be done. There’s always something else to say. A place is not so much a stationary location as it is a state of being. As in Your Place. A frame of mind. An emotional condition. A safe place. To be put in your place. To put into place. I am his concept. And he is mine and a lot of people never get to have that, don’t know where to look. I don’t think you can look, and some people get tired of drifting around, waiting for it to happen to them.
On the Wing 