Anniversary

Three life-times ago (you with your boy/girl eyes and slender wrists) turned on me that night. Your upper lip pulled down tight over your teeth like a shade hastily pulled down with a fat cat on a windowsill, pointing your long, delicate yet boy-acting finger in my whimpering face resting just in front of the rest of my terrified head that swam with whiskey, shock, fear, and utter confusion all at once, somehow manifesting in tears and me backing myself against our hallway wall just inside the door to our 1970’s throwback studio apartment with the olive green carpet that followed me for many years of my life.

You broke. You broke us. You broke me.

That was the night I first heard the paranoid ramblings of your mother in you. That was the first time I saw you out of control. That was the first time I was your enemy. That was how you broke me.

I left home looking for something. I was looking for what you gave me. You were looking for it, too. We all were. In that little gayborhood in Seattle, amidst the cool mist that carried whiffs of roasting coffee and clean snow and ocean and pine across your nose and skin and hair, in that cocoon of like minded, like-victimized, like-veganed, like-belongingness.

I morphed into something of a stereotype; like an exponentially exaggerated externalized form of my inner leanings taken a few steps down the continuum to a place that felt like research or relatable experimentation. I was down with it, but I was not all it. To this day, I identify with these groups in advocacy, but swam back to the shallow end of the pool where I was born and where I am comfy, albeit wiser and more aware that there is a world outside of my tiny existence, and that I (am) could be many versions of myself given a multitude of situations and settings.

THAT is wild to think about. That is something that, given the benefit of too much sun and water, might make a person do things like hop lilly pads without warning or much thought other than that it’s an option and why not.

It’s safe to say that I have reinvented myself several times over by now. I also would venture to place a comfortably safe bet that many of my loved ones would perceive that I have done this in several non-traditional, questionably sane, possibly flakey ways. I would not begrudge these types of assessments of my life from an outside vantage. I might be quick to make similar observations if I were not me. Hell, I might even make them about myself if I sit here and think about it too long right now.

The point, which is dancing like a moth in a lidless jar right now, is that on that night, in our softly lit cocoon, in the New World where I felt loved and understood and emotionally nourished, you did that thing to me that they did. You did what made me leave them and make a new home. You punched me in the face with your words. You smashed my head against the wall by making fun of me for crying. You reached inside my skull and with both hands, wrung my brain until it bled by telling me that I was crying to manipulate you because, “that’s what you do.”

You left bruises on my heart and my mind unable to hear the words the way that people say them to me anymore. The twist you gave my brain mangles the words into backhanded implications, and I hear them all wrong, but so clearly.

You told me that I placed too much value on comfort and that it made you ill. I believe that this was a tirade that came at your second such episode in response to my expressing my disinterest in traveling with a squatter punk circus and that I was going to look into school because I wanted to have health insurance and be “comfortable”. I learned that particular day that I was fond of that word, used it often, and made you nauseous with it, especially in reference to comfort food, which was indulgent, unhealthy, and disgusting.

Shamed, for what I say, my weight, my lifestyle, my food choices. You reinforced every terrible thing they told me. It was pretty bad to have two parents who did not nurture or soothe, but rather corrected and criticized and yelled and punished and publicly ridiculed. And then to enjoy five, FIVE years with you of total relief of that, of filling voids and repairing self-esteem. They were great years. We laughed and talked and we played cards, spades mostly, and we sang and played guitar and smoked lots of pot and daydreamed and worked at the pizza place together.

I loved us. We were fun. I loved our friends and our cat and our tiny kitchen and our creepy landlord. Until you broke us. And then I didn’t. It took a lot of glue to get over you. Now, twenty years since we ended, I think about you. I wonder what happened that night that you came apart. I wonder how many times it has happened since. I forgive you. I am ok now.