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[werifestaria-blog]

M

That’s how I’ll be talking about people. Single letters. If I run out I’ll add more letters, but until I do, this will work.

M was my mother. A few days ago marked the anniversary of her death. Seven years it’s been. 

What was she? She was my rock. My angel. My life-giver. I was 13 when she died and before then she was the best thing in in my life. 

I have exactly two memories from before I could remember things. The first was a tumbleweed, or a cloud of smoke, or cartoon characters fighting. I can’t remember what it was exactly. Maybe it was an atom, the electrons racing around. Or god, a mass of energy swirling in upon itself. Maybe it was a cloud of smoke from one of my mother’s cigarettes. It might have just been a face, twisted with infant eyes into a blur. I don’t know. But that is the very first thing I can remember of my existence.

The next was the earliest house I can remember. The one I spent my very young childhood in. In it, my mother was changing my diaper. I remember it from outside my body. About five feet away, watching her change me. As I grow older so does the me I am watching, until the memory becomes some strange thing where my mother is changing the diaper of my adult self. 

There’s no reason to talk about my mother, really. Only that I consider her the beginning of myself. She’s where I started and, while there is not much that I’ve kept to myself, she deserves another telling.

The next memory I have is her and my father giving me a PlayStation 1 and Spyro: Ripto’s Rage. I was ecstatic and even now, that game remains a classic. I could never beat it, though. I believe I got stuck at the last boss.  

Next we’ve moved. Only a neighborhood away. Into the house my dad owned and rented out to my mother’s parents. When my mother’s mother died, though, I believe her father moved in with my mother’s sister and we moved into the house. 

The next few years are a blur of snatched memories. My mother drank Sierra Mist in a big plastic cup with plenty of ice. I remember it became habit to ask her for a sip. I remember her eating stuffing at four in the morning. I remember her falling asleep, a cigarette in her hand, the cherry burning holes through her blanket. I remember she liked Doctor Who and Supernatural. I remember telling her that one day I’ll go to the moon and bring her back a moon rock. She once told me to go to my room and I rolled on my bed and my foot knocked a hole in the wall.

I wish I had a lot more. I wish I could dredge her up in my mind. I barely remember her voice, her smile, the color of her eyes. Whether as a coping mechanism or a result of years on medication, she has become a ghost within my mind. A thing that enters my memories only once every few years and is lost again. All people have an essence in the way they talk, act, gesture, smile, and I wish that I could remember hers.

I do remember races. My father drove a race car in a race a few cities away. I remember us going, us getting a little area in the benches. Still she is a ghost in those memories, only appearing for seconds in my mind.

My mother’s life until her death was a steady decline of motivation. Or a steady descent into depression. 

My sisters were mentally ill, or disturbed, or just raised wrong. They would cause fights. They would throw things. They would grab knives. They would curse and nothing but my father would stop them. They were normal people most of the time. Average teenage girls, I would describe them, who sometimes had episodes of insanity. Or at least, that’s what it seemed to me as a child.

I’m not going to describe the domestic violence. To me it seemed a battleground between my sisters and between them and my mother. An argument would start, lines would be drawn, and I would take my little brothers into another room in case something sparked my family to violence.

Everything seemed normal. I didn’t understand it wasn’t until the day sister stabbed my mother. When it was I can’t remember. Why, I can’t remember. it was any other day. I take my brothers into the side room, they fight. I’m standing there, as I always do, listening in case something goes wrong. I was 11, I think? 

I get an urge to look. I open to door, peek out, and my mother is on her knees in the fetal position in the kitchen. I see my sister, J, lunge the knife down into her back, twice, and then run to the living room. I don’t understand. I hit my sister with a broom as she runs but she’s not herself so she doesn’t care. 

Did the ambulance come? Did my father come? I don’t know. My mother survived, was in the hospital for awhile. My sister can be charged with attempted manslaughter or something. My parents don’t press charges. They forgive.

The next few years become a blur. My sisters still cause problems. I believe my mother had a problem with pills, though i don’t know if it was new or not. 

My father, L. I see him outside one day I’m not sure when this happened. He’s angry. Walking to the van. I hear him say “I’m going for a divorce on Tuesday”. My parents don’t get divorced, but the words stick with me.

Somewhere in this my mother is sitting on the couch. Was this before the stabbing? After? I don’t know. I remember sitting, or kneeling, at her feet. I hug her leg, I think. I ask her “What will we do when you die?”. I don’t remember her answer. I would kill to know her answer. 

Fast forward. I come home from my friends house. I’m 13. I’ve been up all night. My father says he’s going sledding. Asks if I want to go. I don’t. I think it’s fine. I go to bed. Later I wake up and stuff happens and they come back. My father is carrying my mother into the house. She fell asleep at the sledding place. He lays her on the couch and says to let her sleep. We all notice that she’s breathing weird but none of us have any sense to do something about it. We let her sleep.

In front of the couch my mother’s sleeping on my father put the back seat of the van. We didn’t need it in the house, but he put it in there for some reason. I put in Prince Caspian and watch it, my mother sleeping behind me. I keep looking at her, making sure she’s alright. I go to sleep.

I wake in the morning to EMTs in the house, my mother laying on the floor. They’re putting her on a stretcher. I’m still tired. I’m worried. My father tells me to go sleep in the other room. I do. I wake in the morning to the house filled with family. Someone talks to me. My mother is dead.

[werifestaria-blog]

Perspective

I hate beginnings. So I’ll let that be mine. I created this blog apart from my main one because there are things I’d like to say that I only feel comfortable saying through anonymity. Like many people, I want to be known. Not famous, or popular, or worshiped, though those are not out of the question. I want to be known like a book. Like a song. I want to take comfort that there are people in the world, few they may be, that know me.

But I also fear it. I have a fear that the people who know me will look at me in a way that I don’t want them to. That my attempts will fall short, my words be looked at with disgust, my thoughts be used against me. I crave being known with the deepest intensity. Yet it is also something that has broken me in the past. And so anonymity is my middle ground.

I’m going to be posting on here a lot, even if nobody reads a thing I write, because this is my only outlet for that realm of word and thought that I can’t trust myself to give to the people I know. Maybe people will read it. Maybe they won’t. I no longer want to keep these things to myself, though. Political thoughts, sexual desires, anger at the people I know, love that can’t be said, regrets that fill my mind. Orson Scott Card, in Ender’s Universe, had a Speaker For The Dead to lay bare the entirety of a human. So that will be this. Self-therapy. Perhaps one day I’ll trust myself to tell others these things too.