DRAFT: This module has unpublished changes.

Shaping my Style:

Of Transience, Melancholy and Morbidity, Pt 4

 

October 27, 2013

 

“You were always too quiet, too introverted for me,” my ex informed me when trying to explain in part why our lives had fallen apart. It was not the first time I would hear those words pertaining to my social interaction with others, nor would it be the last.

 

Yes, I am often oddly quiet, yet words are as integral to my life as images, fleetingly representing the memories, the impressions, the lingering ghosts of times past, those nearly forgotten people, places and events that have served to shape who I am and how I represent my world.

 

Yet too all often, words remain stuck in my mouth, floating through my brain, flooding into my thoughts on dark, lonely nights.

 

 

“Why don’t you ever ask the difficult questions?” he insisted.

 

 

When I grow weary of my own words, I reach for a book, losing myself in other’s words instead, enjoying the imagery painted by my favorite authors, descriptions of long-lost worlds, long-lost places, long-lost people.

 

Ghosts.

 

 

“Ssssshhhhh,” she hissed from the other side of the bed, “and stop moving before I give you a reason to make noise.”

 

The “reason,” appearing in any sentence, always meant pain.

 

My brother had started attending full-length school days as a first grader, and I was left at home, wandering alone through the normally over-crowded house. I hated the word “school,” even though I didn’t fully comprehend what it signified.

 

My eldest half-brother had left for ‘Nam, my eldest half-sister for college (an education that ended quickly because of a hasty, mid-semester marriage), and my youngest half-sister had married her childhood sweetheart weeks before he, too, had left for ‘Nam.

 

Only my mother’s “real” children (her word) remained at home, so the girls were no longer sharing a single bed in the basement as we did as soon as I was old enough to no longer sleep in a crib.

 

We were disbursed throughout the house, and as youngest, my brother and I shared a single wood-paneled room.

 

The yellow-brown warmth of the paneling still bore the shadows of what had once been a built-in bunk bed from which my brother had fallen a few months before. After “cracking his skull” and being admitted to the hospital for what seemed like several weeks, he returned home to a room with two twin beds placed side by side.

 

The only do-it-yourself project I remember sharing with my mother as a young child had been the destruction of the bunk bed, assisting her as she pulled it angrily piece by piece out of the beautiful wood paneling, leaving unfilled, gaping scars marking the time-worn, now bare wall.

 

Sleeping had always been difficult, even before he and I were allowed to share the same bedroom.

 

As the youngest, he and I were always the first to be spirited away to bed, and I would lie awake for hours listening to the voices of my older siblings, sometimes laughing, sometimes angry, but most often muted to hushed whispers, at the same time sometimes envying their age, sometimes deeply relieved I was no longer among those constrained by the ever-present tension that lingered in the hallways like ghosts.

 

After the voices had ceased, after I had counted the movement of my four older sisters as they would one by one file into bed, I would still yet lie awake, listening to the sound of the furnace or the settling “pops” skulking in every older home, listening for the furtive footsteps of whatever monster I knew lurked somewhere under my bed, under the stairwell or in the upstairs hallway, waiting for me to creep quietly, quickly, into the bathroom.

 

The monster was not one of my active childhood imagination, but the steely grip of my eldest brother as his hand would clamp over my nose and mouth, preventing me from making a sound while he inflicted pain upon my small body, preventing me at times even from breathing.

 

From him, I learned to hold all sorts of bodily fluids as tightly as possible, releasing them only when my small body could no longer contain them, sometimes soiling myself, resulting only in more pain, this time inflicted by my mother because she would have to do yet another load of laundry.

 

Before my younger brother had been whisked off to school leaving me to face the wrath of my mother alone, he and I had endured most interesting forms of chastisement, including once being tied together to our clothesline pole for chasing one another through the cool, freshly hung clothes rather than dutifully helping her snap dry the small undergarments I had just soiled.

 

Our laughter, our games, our constant motion became our defiance, allowing us to escape her smoldering anger, even at the risk of evoking its resultant pain.

 

And now, as I lay beside my mother, again “shooshed” into silence, I turned my back away from her, silent tears dropping onto the pillow, wrapped tightly around my head in my own childish attempt to muffle the sound of my breathing, taking slow breaths set to the rhythm of her own.

 

Silence came naturally. Breathing did not.

 

 

“If you ever tell anyone, I will kill you,” he threatened, forcing my breath from me with pain, not allowing me to take in another because of his cupped hand.

 

 

“Breathe, Rj, breathe,” he would have to remind me. He was the only one who ever allowed me to breathe, encouraging me to take in air at my own pace, never trying to steal it away, at the same time encouraging me without judgment to find my own words, my own style.

 

 

That year, once my brother had entered school full time, she had taken a night job as a waitress, explaining to my objecting father that she could sleep throughout the day now that I was the only one remaining at home, adding that I could quietly color or flip through books as she rested.

 

Throughout those long, lonely, fear-filled, tedious days, the box of crayons and stacks of books always remained closed, taunting me as I peered out from the crevice created by my clenched pillow. If I had ever attempted to reach for them, I would have met with an angry hiss issuing from the other side of the bed.

 

The fact that they were beside me was enough. I was familiar enough with their contents by this point to be able to see the images, hear the words, escape into the world the artists and authors had created.

 

Eventually, assured by their nearby presence, stilled and silenced by her wrath and after my child-sized lungs ached from pacing them to match her slow, sleep-induced ones, the voices in my head would finally grow quiet as well, and I would at last sleep.

 

 

DRAFT: This module has unpublished changes.