“One of my earliest memories is a memory of being excluded.
Everything that happened on that day, with minor variations, would then go on to happen countless times, the sum accumulating and blurring into one giant smudge the color of crushed hopes: ash gray. The same words would be repeated and repeated endlessly, the same expressions, consequences, wrongful conclusions drawn. The same hollow feeling flaring up, the same sharp ache inside, sharper than the slap or a punch my mother landed over my lips whenever I'd say something she disliked. The same slow dissipation of that ache into forced oblivion. On each repeat, one handful of soil would be scooped up and taken away forever, and the pit would widen and widen and widen. A slow and steady communal project: the digging of an abyss inside me. The scarring on the pit’s edges: ever-so-slightly redder and rougher than it had been prior. That’s all there is in the end, at the end of all things: the result, not the process of digging.
But they say: you always remember your first. And I do. I remember.
My father, who had me for the weekend, brought me to a grown-up party. Not like he didn’t have others to leave me with and go to that party alone and drink himself into singing, shouting, and a stupor; his own father, overwrought and perpetually drained, with guilt-inducing accusations always soundless, always written on his pudgy face, would have taken on the Burden that was me, for yet another day.
No, my father brought me over to that party because he wanted to show me off. After all, I was a beautiful child. My eyes were just as huge and just as full of dread as they are now, but my skin was softer, my lips hadn’t yet lost the faith and the smile and the moisture, and my curls would have been considered angelic if only angels were allowed to have charcoal black hair.
He wanted others to praise him for owning such a beautiful object. He was not alone in his aspiration. In fact, most of the adults present, right after showing their beautiful children off to each other, had unloaded their beautiful children-objects, regardless of age, into a separate room like hats and coats. They said, ‘to play together’, which meant ‘not bother them’. The adults then formed a noisy congregation and lit a dozen cigarettes, and poured and poured.
What a great relief it was, I’d bet, to take a break from us, the needy creatures (what a great decision it was: to bring a child into a world that hates to be inconvenienced, into a family of people who hate each other and do not know they’re ill, into a mother who can’t raise a child for shit and never wanted a child in the first place).
In that crowded room, I knew no one. But I wanted to know those children. I wanted to belong, to play, to learn and touch.
To talk and talk and talk to them.
My father loved to flaunt this one too, as if my chattiness was his own achievement. As if it was an achievement and not a symptom: ‘Her first word, by two months! And the word wasn’t mama or dada! She started talking long before she was able to sit upright! Not babbling, legit talking! By one, she formed entire phrases! By two, she started having long conversations! At three, telling her own bedtime stories to herself!’ They’d laugh and praise him every time, through ill-conceived and misguided envy.
I know now: many of them thought that he was lying about such an achievement, such a gifted child, but he wasn’t lying, and a scream for help is not an achievement, and there is no such thing as ‘gifted child’; there’s ‘hereditary illness’, there’s ‘learning disability’, there’s ‘executive dysfunction’.
Deprived, living off scraps, I felt proud whenever I heard him flaunt, whenever I heard them laugh, despite the words untold. He never mentioned how no one bothered to participate in those conversations with me, he never mentioned how I was telling those stories to myself alone in a dark room, because I had no other choice and no one else telling me other stories. The games I invented had worlds within worlds in them, but I had no one to play with either.
I had no siblings. No friends. No playtime. No sandboxes. I had no one to talk to. No one listened.
More than anything, I wanted to be included in Play.
But minutes or maybe seconds later, two older boys — much older, perhaps as impossibly old as nine — told me I was not allowed to participate in Play. Except, they used different words. ‘Go away, you’re annoying’ and ‘don’t touch that toy, it’s not yours’ and ‘shut up shut up shut up’ and ‘fatso’ — these, I do remember, but there were more, many more, punctuated by shoving and disgust plastered on their faces.
I would never be able to remember what exactly I’d said to make them want to rid the play, the room, themselves of me. To make them want to punish me. To make them want to see me hurt. But I could generalize and statistically be right. I could guess. I could guess that it was nothing special or offensive: a proposal of a new game the rules to which I took too long to explain, a casual too-honest observation accidentally spoken out loud, a solution no one asked for, or a reaction that arrived too late and thus missed the mark, making me ‘slow’ and ‘weird’ and thus a fair target for ridicule. I was being myself. To them, Myself was unacceptable.
In the dark and long hallway to which I was banished, I stood for a long dark time, not knowing what to do. Terrified of being alone, I ended up doing the only thing I could: I went into the Adult room, because they hadn’t explicitly told me to shut up and go away.
Cooing at my tears yet not wanting to establish the cause for those tears, much less solve the cause, the adults passed me around like a lost object until I landed on my father’s lap, over cigarette ash and a wine stain. I told him what ached. I said that other children didn’t want to play with me. I asked if I could stay here. I promised to be quiet.
Instead of saying yes, he planted me on the floor, grabbed my wrist, and dragged me back to that room. Instead of establishing what those boys had said and done, instead of explaining to them why they were wrong, he yelled at them, threatened them: they had an obligation to include me, or else. Instead of protecting me and shielding me, he left me there: chow for the wolves.
The boys now thought I was a tattletale. They said more words to me.
They did things. The things hurt less than words. The things left smaller marks, the marks that faded.
All I knew for certain back then: I deserved those words and I deserved those things, I did not belong and never would, I was horrible, I was worthless. Everyone hated me and my games and my stories. And I should have hated my stories too.
But I didn’t. I couldn’t hate my stories. I never would.
For a long, long dark time, my stories were all I had.
All I know for certain now: it was not my fault, and it was not my fault that I did not know that it was not my fault, and I would give anything, anything, anything to go back in time and tell Myself just that, to hug and cradle her in my arms, to tell her how precious she is, how beautiful and gentle, how she does not deserve to be excluded and shoved and called names and beaten and scratched and have her clothes torn. How much I love her. How much I love her laughter and her smile and her stories. How sorry I am. How infinitely, unfathomably sorry I am.
All I know for certain now: I would then tell Myself to hide behind my back — a strengthened, fearless, grotesque-looking back criss-crossed with hundreds upon hundreds of rugged, word-shaped scars. And then, talking talking talking all the while, I would make an example of those two boys by beating them into a bloody pulp, within a millimeter of their lives, leaving marks all over them to better remember me and my words by, and then I’d straighten up, crack my shoulder blades, and walk out the door. It’ll just be a minute, koritsi mou.
All I know for certain now: fearless, hollow, scowling, I would stride through the cloaca of a corridor into the ugly-laughing noise of the other room, take a well-sharpened knife off that varnished dining table dotted with wine glasses and cigarette burns, and plunge that knife into my father’s belly, and lean in close and twist and drag and drag and gut the motherfucker like a pig, and I would mourn no longer being able to laugh as I’d listen to his screams and watch the life drain out of his face, the face of a stranger. Then I’d whoosh across distances in the blink of an eye, enter the kitchen of horror, and slit my mother’s wrists and throat, for all the words yet unsaid, all the slaps and punches yet unlanded, for my own wrists, and make sure the words and slaps and punches would die and decompose alongside her.
All I know for certain now: I would then take my Child Self into my arms, and I would fly her away, so very far away, to be saved and to live and to grow up in a cozy seaside town she’d dreamed up a long time ago, alone in a dark room. To the place where everyone loves her and she loves everyone. Where the big-city idiot who reclines with a cigarette, does jackshit, and whines about how utopias are not viable because someone always needs to be excluded is the one excluded. Where magic is mundane and can solve anything. Where stories are created and created and retold over communal dinners, and every listener is appreciative, because every listener is me. I’d keep her safe inside that strange little town. As safe as I’d be able. If something slips through the cracks despite my best effort, I’ll push that something out and never let it in again. I’ll turn my hair, my blood, my skin, my very bones into a dome, a barrier that guards that town from the worst criminals of all: those who would endeavor to tell her she is not enough."
