TW DRUGS, TW DOMESTIC ABUSE
Thereâs a crash in the kitchen and your heavy eyes canât open wide enough to let you see over the top of the bars on your crib. All you hear is your fatherâs laughter, itâs much louder than your small cries trying to find a way to ask what is wrong, what happened, are they ok. His laughter devolves into your motherâs name, questioned once or twice calm and confused before it too gets louder and louder and louder with more and more panic, panic, panic. The door opens and shuts and there is silence. It stretches for hours, interrupted only by the occasional murmured call for your parents. That should have been the first sign to authority that no child belonged in that house - drugs, abuse, abandonment - especially not a baby your age, but what was another case of crack heads on the records in the grand scheme of things? To you it would have been the world.
Maybe the second sign would have been the winter days when German snow piled high outside the doors of your elementary school and the only thing you had to wear were sneakers with holes in their soles and the sweatshirt youâd been sporting since kindergarten that was still too big. No matter how many people looked you up and down, you could not find a way to open your mouth and tell them what they already knew. Your screams were trapped in the tattered fabric that hung from your too frail body and they would not acknowledge the loudness in your silence. And when the other children took your mute mouth and still tongue as a weakness and used it as an excuse to consume you with all the words you could not say, you sunk further and further, deeper than your eyes in your head and the voice in your throat.
Silence became you, more at home than even on the playground and the classroom. At ten you cannot remember a time when you sat on the couch with your parents to watch TV and they didnât do a line off the coffee room table, because there wasnât. Sunday morning cartoons and smoke filled lungs every weekend and the mother of the twins in the apartment next door would just round her eyes and shake her head softly whenever you passed each other in the lobby. Was it your fault for not asking? For not finding the words and the will to open your mouth and tell somebody that this was not ok and that you needed someone to help you? At thirteen you can remember a time when you used to watch the TV when you sat on the couch with your parents instead of snorting white powder with a dollar bill beside them.
The kids in high school left you alone much better than they did when you were seven and part of you wondered if it was because they understood or because they became afraid of you. How many times did a freshman come into the bathroom and see you sitting on the sink with a belt pulled between your teeth and a needle in your arm? Most of them were right, your silence became your weakness after all. Itâs because you couldnât find a way to tell your parents to stop when they shoved your nose in it or stuck it in your vein that you ended up like this, right? Itâs grew impossible for you to get through a class period without scratching at the bend of your elbow and those same teachers whoâd watch you pick at the marks on your arm couldnât help but be shocked when you received âAâ after âAâ. Those Aâs arenât the only thing your brains earn you. Smart, pretty, little, persuasive, at least you became less reliant on your parents and found ways to get your own drugs. Â You pout and you bat your eyes, âfirst oneâs free, right?â, theyâd melt for you because your ass was tight and you looked like an angel.
Maybe those fourteen year old girls were right to be afraid, because if youâd turned around and looked in the mirror at your back youâd have see the black bile seeping into the whites of your eyes too. It began burning, and you werenât sure if it was because you werenât getting enough in your blood or up your nose or if was because that slow crawling, bubbling bile churning in every open cavity of your body was anger. It brimmed behind your teeth, and where you used to be afraid to open your mouth because you were afraid of them, their lack of control, what they would make you (what they have made you), you kept it shut then to keep that dead black anger inside of you.
But, bile can only build for so long and where you used to easily swallow all the words you wanted to say this hatred you let fester pushed the rot up your throat and you choked on it. You were 18.
He came into your room, and where you usually wouldnât have been home, tomorrow was a big test and you still have dreams for yourself. You donât know what heâs on, but it doesnât matter because heâs always the same - absent and out of control. Most of you doesnât pay attention to him, never have before because heâs just so damn pathetic, but you wished that you would have. Batting eyes and smart mouth wonât get you out of this one, youâre too small and heâs thrown you down fast for someone so not sober. The knife is in your bedside draw and heâs trying to land a blow and then the knife is in his back and heâs on the ground. Whoops.
God, nothing felt like that, nothing had ever felt like that. It wasnât the way the noise pushed out of him, all the noise and all of the screams you had had building in chest since you had the ability to produce sound, but it was the way it left you. Through your open mouth, gaped and shocked, through your eyes finally not clogged by the neverending haze of white powder and smoke, through that knife gripped so gingerly in your slight and slender hand when you pulled away. It might have been him you made bleed, but it drew from you all the bubbling black bile that had been suffocating you from the inside of your still lungs and throat and it let you speak.
That was the only and the last thing you said as you passed your mother heading for the backdoor, not that she heard you. Those people were never going to hear you.
Juno found you two weeks later when you were trying to con one of his people with those pouty lips and doe eyes. When he looked you up and down like so many before him had, there was not denial or pity in his face but instead decision. Those many that had come before him had been nothing but passive glances or loose ended, out of control actions but he gave you all of the decisiveness and structure that your life had been lacking; a certainty that you craved and more than that; he heard you. It was all youâd ever wanted.
There was no experience you had to offer him, no skills that at surface level fit into the plans he had, but that building bile behind your eyes was potential, it was a malleable anger, slow and black, and it found an outlet through the knife that night, so it would do it again. The way you work your way through someoneâs head became another skill he taught you to control and within six months he had you working the job.
God, nothing ever felt like that.
For the first time in your life, it was you who had the power and the control - of yourself, of the situation, of the information, of the other person. You didnât realize it was what youâd been lacking, and it became you. So quick were you to blend into the mold of decisive, determined, clever, serious, because that was what you had been meant to become all along; it was why you never fit with those out of control, out of reality addicts your parents were no matter how many drugs they helped you shoot up into your body. That knife became your medium, an artistâs paint brush, and it was beautiful. You crave it, youâre addicted to it, and maybe youâre too quick to it, maybe youâre too willing to have others bleed for you, but not only was no one stopping you, they wanted this from you.
And you loved it. As long as you could, that is. Six years of a life spent peeling skin and lapping up the blood from spilled wounds should be long enough, but for you nothing was ever going to be enough. You ached for it; after the gang was disbanded it was your futile attempt to integrate yourself into the masses that caught the attention of the someone that directed you here. No one like you was ever going to blend in, doe eyes fixated on raw meat. You are no animal - you are an artist, and this is where you belong.
