Do you have a middle name? What did you like to do when you were growing up? What was it like growing up in Utah before anything was here besides farms? What were your parents like? I have nothing of your mom I can hardly remember your dad anymore. All that I have is the memory of a photograph. He is sitting on a purple Adirondack deck chair. He is wearing a blue Hawaiian shirt. He is smiling. His eyes are closed, his mouth is open. His hair is white and thin. I remember his warmth and his smell. Some sort of aftershave that I have associated to him.
I remember a moment from the morning of his funeral. You are in the bathroom putting on makeup. The smell of your going-out perfume lingers in the hallway. You are wearing a black dress, black jacket, and a colored stone necklace. You were crying. I leaned against the door frame and watched you get ready. I don’t think I had ever seen you cry before. It hurts still to think about. When I would drive by the cemetery where he is buried I think back to that morning. I tried to offer you one of my toys to cheer you up. You laughed and said you were fine and told me to go get ready.
For as long as I can remember you have always been just fine. Even when I know you aren’t. But there is nothing I can do to make anything better. I hug you. You tense up and feel like a corpse. I try to make you laugh with my stupid jokes, I poke fun at myself, exaggerate the situation, say something absurd. You will only offer a short laugh and force a big smile. You close your eyes when you really smile. Just like your dad did in the photo. I will sit near you, silently waiting for you to reach out and tell me the pain you are feeling. Waiting for you to say something. Anything.
But the words never come.
I came across a journal you were keeping a number of years ago. You were out of town and I was bored. I was snooping through your office. The door is almost always closed, and you know when anyone tries to open the door. The journal was under your desk. It was hidden. As if you knew that someone would be poking around. Maybe you do know me. There were three, maybe four pages of entries.
“Car ride with Ethan today. Quiet as usual.”
“…I feel like I cannot raise my children the way I would like, to the ideals that I have. I worry that they will never get to know me. Andy gets angry when anything religious is talked about. I feel like a prisoner in my own home…”
“..I am not happy with my life. Sometimes I wish I could go away. But I cannot, this is my life...
You are so deep inside yourself. Creating an inner distance within yourself. What wound are you protecting, even now in the twilight of your life? Why won’t you tell anyone? Is the reason so bad that no one can ever know? Are you scared you will not be worthy of love after you say?
Do you want me to ever truly see you?
Do you ever want to truly see me?
I grew up scared of you. Your yelling and temper kept my brothers and I docile and disciplined. We would never question you, never fought back. Not until I was in middle school. I remember we would both get so angry at each other. On the nights when you wouldn’t work downstairs in your office you would read after dinner. You would call me out to the living room and I would sulk down the hall, maybe slip into the bathroom. Stalling. Slowly and deliberately I would walk onto the carpet of the living room and plop down onto the couch furthest away from where you were seated. My eyes seeing red already, my body tense, ready to attack, fists clenched, holding back the inevitable tears to come.
We would act out the same altercation almost weekly. Like waves against the shore, carving me into the human you want. Set by set.
It would begin with you telling me about the losers in your high school. Losers who didn’t give a shit about learning, didn’t give a shit about seemingly anything. You would tell me that I just needed to grow up and decide to care. These talks would last for an hour or two. You would stop talking, pick your book up and pretend to continue reading. I would get up, fighting back tears, and biting my tongue to redirect the pain.
I remember one occasion snapping and breaking character. I screamed out, “I had enough of this shit.” What shit that was I couldn’t say. Maybe it was the way I felt like shit for not expressing who I was at school, or who I pretended to be. Or it was the shit I felt for dating people who did not return the love that I gave. The shit I felt for hanging out with people who did not respect me. The shit I felt for lying. The shit I felt for stealing. The shit I felt for sneaking out. The shit I felt for trying to disown and distance myself from you. The shit I felt for the hatred I had for myself.
But fuck. It was just easier to blame you.
On this occasion I stood up. Before you had finished our talk. You told me, “To sit my ass back down.” I didn’t. Instead I stormed out of the living room and slammed my fist into the drywall. I felt so much rage and hatred. I had taken up punching things. Driving fast, or making impulsive decisions to release my rage. My knuckles forever imprinted in the drywall around the house. There are more knuckle marks down the hall at the entrance to my bedroom. Pain was the quickest way to cope with intense feelings, frustration, and guilt. I was fucking up, you had called me on it, and I needed to deal with it.
You saw me.
I saw you years later. You and I were fixing a burned out headlight in the garage. I was pointing a flashlight into a mess of molded plastic and steel. You had your giant fingers jammed into the headlight housing and were struggling to unhinge a spring that held the bulb in place. You started swearing under your breath. Then cursing out loud as if I wasn’t there. I can feel your anger still. You began to direct your cursing at yourself. “My life is really shit” you say, “everything is shit.” I realized that I was not with you there in that moment. You were alone. Within yourself. I tried pull you back and tell you to stop and just slow down. But you are gone.
You and I are the same person.
You had a heart attack in September. I had just gotten back to my apartment. I sat down on the sofa and checked my phone, I saw the text from mom. I was physically two states away, alone, and instantly my mind transported me back to all of the fights we had.
I have cried before. Over women, after fights, and when cutting particularly potent onions. But nothing like this time. I still cry when I think about that day. When I think about how differently things could have been.
Luckily I was able to see you again. You recovered quickly, your doctor telling you to go and enjoy your life. You act strong, unchanged. You went back to work only a week after you had the surgery. But in my eyes all I can see is the time ticking by until I can no longer see you.
It took me halfway through my twenties before I started to be honest with myself. The moment I saw myself for the first time. The moment I saw the person who I was becoming happened early one morning, or late one night. Depending on one’s perspective. I had been uptown drinking after class. Gone through lines of cocaine. We were all laughing, yelling, and playing street hockey in an alley near school. This had been the weekend and evening ritual for a few years. Not to brag but a few weeks we had managed to get drunk every evening.
But not the cocaine. This was a relatively new and quite short lived pass time. I liked the way it made me feel. Alcohol allowed me to be happy, allowed me to be loud, allowed the winter of my soul to experience a temporary spring. Alcohol gave me the transient ability to see and absorb life as beautiful as it should been seen.
But cocaine let me fly.
Cocaine gave me the permission to embrace my mania. It gave me the permission to speak as fast as my thoughts could surface. It would let me scream down streets on my bike, allowed me to be aggressive and violent. Like a middle finger held up into the air cruising through red lights and traffic. Wild eyed, focusing on every detail while at the same time nothing at all. I had been imprisoning by myself and cocaine was the unlock.
I stopped enjoying cocaine after a particular night of partying. I remember blinking and then finding myself into a bathroom. I took a piss. I remember washing my hands feeling the warm water. Then I looked up and started to laugh.
Who the fuck was this piece of shit looking back at me!
It was the first time I had experienced a disassociation like this. His cheeks and nose were cherry red, veins crisscrossed the bridge of this persons nose. It was as if all the blood in his face was concentrated in these areas. His eyes were distant and intense. It was like looking through into a window of an abandoned barn, only inside that barn was another barn on fire. He had my teeth though. That same gap toothed smile.
Boom.
My heart stopped, I stopped laughing, the blood that had collected in my face seemed to pour through my empty skeleton and onto the bathroom floor. So ended my flirtation with cocaine.
It would still take me another year to flush my emergency gram down the toilet however.
It wasn’t until 2015 that I really started caring. That was three years ago. I am still in the daily process of thawing my soul, which I have been trying to keep numb my entire life.
It is in moments of pure joy when I feel my progress. When I feel the springtime within my soul.
I was biking home in an unexpected downpour this August. I was wearing a denim jacket, jeans, and a new pair of black sneakers. The sky had opened up about midway through my commute home. I was unprepared, cold, and now drenched. The drops large and falling so quickly that I was nearly riding blind, my glasses displaying my distorted and drippy reality.
I began to feel the urge to shut down my consciousness, to black out and push through the situation. Instead of numbing my soul I released it. My face and spirit became wild. Eyes open wide, mouth open as wide as it could, my cheeks pulled back into a smile, and I laughed.
Look at myself.
I am wrapped in a damp denim blanket pedaling my ass off on my way back home, rain mixed with sweat drip down my face, off my nose, and into my mouth. Yet I am completely free and truly happy. It is in these little moments that my soul experiences a springtime, freedom that before I would have needed some sort of permission to feel.
When did you both feel free? Free from yourselves, and free from others. Have you found yourself re-imprisoned? I imagine the soul does not freeze as easily the second time. Or perhaps this is the other way around. Your soul will not thaw the same. Did you feel free when you saw your three sons laughing and talking together on Mother’s day, two years ago? It somehow came up between the five of us that we were all proud of each other. Proud of where we all were and where we were going. My brothers and I attributed that to our upbringing. You both are beautiful and amazing people.
I hope you get to see who I see.
Love always,
e
