Childhood Reckoning.

It’s 11:00 on a Sunday morning and the purr and grumble of the neighbor’s lawn mower is penetrating through the thin walls. When the blade stops, the sound of birds chirping and the echoing of children’s laughter take its place. If I close my eyes, I can taste what freedom feels like. But I’m sitting on the floor, tracing words with my fingers through the tan carpet, the one with the fading maroon stain in the hallway. It was about a month ago that she broke a mirror and asked 10 yr old me to clean it up. I felt the shard go through my foot before I saw it, it went in through the bottom and poked its way through the top of my bare feet. I didn’t have shoes on because I didn’t have any that fit and because no one told me I could prevent disaster. The pain shot up through my leg and I was relieved I could still feel something besides loneliness, I whispered an ouch to make sure I still had a voice. But did I have a voice if no one ever listened to it? I sat down and tried to pull at the glass and it wouldn’t budge. One thing about scrawny, long limbed 10 yr old me is that I could contort myself into a pretzel and so I did, for a better look at this war wound. My eyes now even with the shard of glass and I’m looking through it when I see her appear. On the other side of my pain, as usual. And not ever in between it, the pain and me. And when she left, I knew she was coming back with a belt. The one that had her father’s initials in the leather. And she’d use it to show me how to stack and stack pain. My crime besides existing was blood all over the carpet. It’s been about an hour since I’ve heard my own voice. Because she is sleeping. I only talk or sing when she has company or is at work, or at the bar down the road called The Ice House. And I think it’s ironic that she goes there to feel warm. Angela told me that her mom has her sing to all of her friends and I pray she doesn’t ask me if mine does the same. And when she does, I lie. And invent this made up mother who doesn’t think I was a mistake. I taught myself to write poetry, songs and stories, thinking it safe from her wrath. I’m 14 and almost the same height as her, but around her I feel anything but tall. It’s so quiet in this house that my pen scratching the paper is the only sound I hear. I think it’s safe, but I was wrong. Footsteps. She throws open the door. I’m so quiet, yet the loudest person in her world and when I run outside in the middle of winter, she teaches me that coldness is warmth because of the numbness. I make perfect grades, I can run like the wind and play guitar. People say I’m pretty at 16 but I don’t think so. She always calls me sin with brown eyes but my eyes are green. I took her lesson in stacking pain and hid them in words in journals and from her. Books and books hidden, stacked, until they weren’t anymore. I’m walking home from school, past the buses and pick up lines, moms in suburbans and dads in nice trucks. I knew, I could feel that she’s found them and now knew something about me no one did. It felt like robbery and when she set them on fire, I felt it in my bones. Darcy from the church was there and a Priest I never met, and some guy who held me down while they splashed me with holy water and held my face against the floor until I had carpet burns on my cheek and a bloody nose. They came every week for months and they helped her teach me that people who are religious are dangerous. And when the strange man I didn’t know locked the door behind him yet again, I knew she knew. White noise and his hand muffled sounds. I learned it’s a good idea to never tell anyone who you are because truth is a weapon, and I wasn’t strong enough to take it back from their hands. She has so many prescription bottles on her counter that she won’t miss it when I take one or five. And when I swallow every pill from one, no one notices my absence. And when I wake up on the bathroom floor, I pay for my decision for days. I do it again weeks later. But I wake up and pay for it again, not yet realizing I’m a survivor x 2. And when I escape her grasp, I go through stages. Grief, anger, bitterness, arrogance, bad decisions and good ones too. People are puzzle pieces and I learn that even when they go missing, you can still tell what the picture is. And when they come to stay, it’s like everything I ever wanted in a mother is found in them. Pain is stacked and unstacked and restacked until I kick the hell out of it and let it lie where it may. I learn I don’t have to be religious to be spiritual, and that you are the company you keep. I have two sons, they are compassionate, sensitive and tough too. And I have a daughter. She’s confident, tall and comfortable with who she is inside and out, she’s the kindest human I have ever met. She’s lying on the bed, giggling at a book, with her ukulele resting on her leg. She can and will burst into song at any moment. I smile. None of this is her story. The cycle is broken. I did it. So I let it go. Words on a paper, ashes into the air, disappearing ink. Burned journals that were never mine to keep. Gone. Love, Kara