03.24.01

Sometimes I wonder how it all started.

There are the pictures. They are the only proof I that at some point, underneath everything, I was pure.I go to my photo albums for proof, to search for evidence, documentation of how I came to be this way.

They rarely help. I can’t remember anything until first grade, and by then it is too late. I can’t remember not feeling this way except for the pictures, and then it comes in flashes, the memory of feeling completely in myself without reproach.

Mostly I feel as if I am observing the life of someone else, an identical twin. Sometimes I look at the pictures and am suddenly filled with rage. The albums resemble a flipbook. You can watch a brown-skinned, round-bellied child with happy, open, laughing eyes transform first into a sad looking girl and later into a withdrawn, distant young woman with eyes that are filled with shame, sorrow and anger. I want to gather the round-bellied two-year-old into my arms, sometimes, and take her away from the next twenty years. I want to keep her safe.

These are the rare times that I experience anger as a pang of intuitive knowledge deep in my gut. The rare times when I don’t assume that I have always been this way,full of darkness and shame. I can sometimes look at pictures of a laughing, beautiful five-year-old and recognize that she couldn’t have done anything on her own that would fill her with such self-hatred and shame.

There are other times that I want to take the child, the child who was me, and kill her. It sounds horrible. It is. I want her to die rather than watch the pain blossom and grow inside of her until it strangles her slowly. I want to kick her, pull her hair, to yell at her for being so vulnerable. So stupid. So ready to trust.

What I remember isn’t enough and yet it’s too much. What I don’t remember eats at me.

I wonder if anything that I believe to be true is true, or if the lies and my memory have blended everything together into one gray shadow that doesn’t tell me anything.

I imagine a book about my life that I could take out of the library and read.It would explain things, rearrange the facts until they are like round pebbles, all in a row.

Of course, there's the fear.

The fear of knowing.

The fear of not knowing.

And this time, it's my landscape to explore.

***

xoxo,

moonbird

design by: outbox