I came into this world two days late, mad as hell. My parents were nine years too far into their marriage. My mom was two years from an overdose attempt and my father, five years from a decade-long disappearance.

My grandfather-- who would later assume my dad's role-- had the quirk of nicknaming all the babies born into the family. Sometimes it took a while, as he needed time to reflect on looks, personality, and memorable moments. Then he would christen them with whatever he found fitting. But mine came in an instant. As I screeched in my mother's arms, wailing in protest, nostalgic for the void, her father pulled me into his age-spotted arms and I settled, growing silent in his embrace.

I like to think that my soul recognized his, that there was some part of me that carried an innate knowing of the traits we shared. But that's a story for another chapter. If you're the skeptical type, then it's a tall tale for another time. My Papa looked at me, and I looked at him, face still flushed with the remnants of my tantrum. On that Tuesday afternoon in the late Southern spring, my nickname chose itself.

Screaming Redcheeks.

Papa was the only one who called me this, and usually shortened it to Redcheeks, rarely calling me by my given name. There was even a paint stick with SCREAMING REDCHEEKS scrawled onto it with a fat-tipped Sharpie, kept atop the china cabinet for the days in which I lived up to my namesake. My tantrums became expected, routine even. I was set off by nearly everything, even trivial matters like the dog not listening or an especially tricky level of a computer game. I was (still am) argumentative and questioned the validity and authority of everyone and everything.

With my history, I find it strange that others describe me as calm or stoic. I was noted as being a polite, intelligent, and motivated child, though that sentiment decreased dramatically in my teens. Anytime I'm complimented on my nature, a montage of screaming fits, unfeeling language, and brazen manipulation flashes through my mind. I think of the year I smashed all the Christmas ornaments during a tantrum, or the time I threw a dining room chair at my mother. I see my children's worried faces and my patterns repeated within them. Then plays a vision of my marriage on the rocks, with my husband wavering on the cliffside, peering into the depths of Irreconcilable Differences.

My temperament breathes in dualities. There's a consistent ebb and flow, tempestuous currents of mood and mentality. There is understanding betrothed to denial. Warm embraces are frozen in a duel with cold calculation. Within hope lives hopelessness. In the absence of mania, comes depression.

I am Screaming Redcheeks. I am Marissa Wolfe.

Somewhere, within the gray of black-white polarities, there have been touches of silver that slow the pendulum just enough to offer glimpses of what healthy, happy, and hopeful looks like. Just enough to strive for. Just enough to snap the paint stick and depart from the path of rage. Anger is birthed from sadness. Sadness is birthed from pain. Pain roots itself, unyielding, into the grooves of the brain and chokes out the chambers of the heart.

And yet, it has been my greatest teacher. My greatest motivator.

The flame-soaked phoenix wails to the heavens, wondering why she's been forsaken, but within her scattered ashes is the chance to start anew. She reforms, entrenched in her cycles, and cries a different song, more knowing than the one before.

The night life happened, I was ten years old, and the air was thick with the kind of oppressive humidity that makes breathing feel like a chore. The living room, dimly lit by the flickering light of the television, felt like a stage set for a tragedy that had been rehearsed in whispers and shadows.

My mother sat on the threadbare couch, a cigarette burning slowly between her fingers, its ember the only sign of life in her otherwise lifeless form. Her eyes were vacant, staring through the television screen into some dark void that I couldn't see but could feel creeping into our home. She had been like this for days, trapped in a silent battle with demons that only she could see. Depression, they called it, but it felt like a possession, something dark and malevolent that had taken hold of her and wouldn't let go.

I reached for the phone, my small hand trembling as I thought to call for help. “Dad…” I whispered into the silence. Dad, we called him, but he was anything but. Likely, he was at some dingy bar, hunched over a drink, his face etched with the lines of a man who had given up long ago. He was always drunk, it seemed, always doing everything he could to avoid being home, to avoid the life he pitied. When he did stumble through the door, it was with the heavy scent of alcohol and regret, his eyes bloodshot and his movements sluggish.

He had his own demons, ones that he drowned in whiskey and cheap beer. I knew he hated himself for not being able to save my mother, for not being able to save any of us. But instead of fighting, he chose to flee, seeking solace in the bottom of a glass and the temporary oblivion it offered.

I stood in the doorway, my small frame trembling with a mix of fear and anger. I hated her in those moments. Hated her for the weakness that seemed to seep from her very pores, for the way she had let herself be consumed by whatever darkness had claimed her. Yet, beneath that hatred, there was a flicker of something else—pity, perhaps, or the remnants of the love that had once bound us together.

She moved suddenly, a jerky, desperate motion that sent the ash from her cigarette scattering like grey snowflakes onto the carpet. Her eyes, now wild and frantic, darted around the room as if searching for an escape from the demons that tormented her. I watched, frozen, as she began to mutter under her breath, her words a jumbled mix of fear and incoherence.

"Mom?" I ventured, my voice small and hesitant. "Mom, are you okay?"

She didn't respond, didn't even seem to hear me. Her muttering grew louder, more frantic, and she clutched at her head as if trying to keep it from exploding. I took a step closer, my heart pounding in my chest, my mind racing with the urge to help her, to save her from whatever horror she was experiencing.

But then she screamed—a raw, guttural sound that cut through the silence like a knife. It was a sound that spoke of unimaginable pain and despair, a sound that would haunt my dreams for years to come. I watched in helpless horror as she collapsed onto the floor, her body convulsing, her screams turning into sobs.

In that moment, I saw the demons. Not as she saw them, but as a reflection of the torment inside her. They were the dark shadows that had consumed her spirit, the invisible chains that bound her to a life of misery and despair. And I hated them. I hated them with a ferocity that surprised me, a burning rage that was only matched by my helplessness.

I wanted to run to her, to hold her and tell her that everything would be okay. But I couldn't move. I was rooted to the spot, paralyzed by a mix of fear, anger, and sorrow. All I could do was watch as the woman who had once been my mother was reduced to a sobbing, broken shell on the floor.

As the night wore on, her sobs eventually subsided, and she lay there, exhausted and spent. I finally found the strength to move, to go to her and wrap my arms around her frail body. She didn't respond, didn't acknowledge my presence, but I held her anyway, hoping that somehow my touch could reach through the darkness and bring her back to me.

In the rare moments when my father was sober enough to speak, his words were slurred and bitter, laced with the pain of a man who had lost his way. He was a ghost in our lives, present but absent, his presence a reminder of the life he was trying so desperately to escape.

I held my mother tighter, feeling the weight of our shared despair. I pitied her, pitied him, but most of all, I pitied myself for being caught in the crossfire of their demons. The night it happened, I realized that I was alone in my fight, that the adults I looked up to were too broken to save me or themselves.

In that darkened living room, surrounded by the echoes of my mother's sobs and the phantom presence of my drunken father, I made a vow. I would not let their demons become mine. I would find a way to fight back, to carve out a life for myself that was free from the shadows that haunted our home.

And as I held my mother in my arms, I promised myself that I would survive. I would endure. I would find a way to escape the darkness, even if it meant doing it alone.

I never thought of death as scary; life on the other hand…life is terrifying. Life is where every bit of suffering is.

September 2023. Introduction.

I was shamefully middling in my reaction for it wasn't the first time someone woke me in hysterics to the news of a relative’s traumatic passing. It also wasn't the first time I didn't respond as well as I should have to the grief of others. If any at all, my response was annoyed how the information was publicized, as much as when and where else it was publicized.

As I’ve gotten older, deaths in my family have become an overdramatization of situations. With each untimely funeral, we become more chagrined, more irrational (believing in curses and such), and more selfish.

It has since become my belief that many traumatic deaths were preventable and have been teetering on the ledge of the very same precipice for so long that most of us had either grown impatient in our watch, moved on, and/or accepted the foreseeable well before it ever happened; the shock, if any, was present simply because it hadn’t happened sooner.

And though there were a lot of cyclic conditions and responses here, I did have one that was a first: I didn't attend Scott's funeral—it was the first family funeral I hadn’t attended.

Truthfully, I had many reasons for not attending, both monetary and logistically. I also had my best friend in state—a trip that had been planned for months, almost cancelled due to COVID then last minute it was resurrected due to new information and regulations; however, these were not the responses that she wanted. My sister was angry. She was angry without saying why she was angry. She had made assumptions as to why I wasn’t there. She felt her trust had been broken by me a few times now.

"You were his favorite cousin!” It was more of an accusation than she had originally intended. I heard the shock in her own voice that she had said it, but they weren’t getting the apology from me that they wanted—the apology I am no longer capable of. Blame it on the 150mg of Venlafaxine I have been taking since the pandemic and my divorce, or the years of emotional, sometimes, physical damage that led up to that dosage that without, I would certainly still be having daily panic attacks, suicidal ideation, with the occasional nervous breakdown/life-spiral where I burn everything down with full intention of not coming back from it…and, of course, the deep well of depression that, at times, appears too daunting to emerge from.

It all wasn’t gone, by any means, and I knew it was there—waiting just below the surface like a Kraken ready to rise from its slumber within mere hours of a missed dose, and with titan power, could destroy everything stable achieved this far. It was that swift—the withdrawal.

Unlike the medications I had taken before this, which would take time to have negative effects in the event that a pill was to be missed; I was absolutely at the will of this supposedly non-addictive chem-cocktail. Being thirteen years without chemical dependency until now, I recognize the hypocrisy the old-timers had warned us of; I had traded one addiction for another—but I found the risk in my case worth it even with the obvious pitfalls should I become less than diligent. But at the age of forty-three I had arrived at a place where all things had found balance, and my thoughts were manageable. I had finally found a numb that was ‘comfortable’.

“You should have been there!" It was a text, but I heard the desperation regardless. She wanted me the feel ashamed. I didn’t. How do you tell someone that you had already grieved this person? This person who, by all standards, was still considered alive but hadn’t really existed for so long?

I had a flashback of my mother's funeral in 1994. I stood stiffly by watching the array of reactions, trying to figure out where I fit in—how I should be feeling in this moment. They later would call it shock, but I was aware. This was before medication, before booze, drugs, any chemicals (unless you count chugging Dimetapp and eating handfuls of Flintstone Vitamins—gee, who knew I’d become an addict?). Confused. Scared. Yet fully aware of the situation, I was.

I scanned each face; some were unfamiliar, though they seemed to have more of a connection with my own mother than I—at least in this moment.

My eyes met my cousin Scott's—blue eyes striking against the redness. His wet face appearing more angry than sad to me. He was a few years my senior and I feared him. He was not tentative about what he felt, nor would he hesitate to speak his mind or share his opinion—unlike me—who was so very quiet and timid outside of my conscious self; yet whose survivalist brain was never still long enough to allow myself to just experience a feeling.

"Why aren't you crying? Don't you even care that your mom is dead? What's wrong with you?" Scott's words wounded. Wounded me enough to carry that memory to this day; still lodged somewhere between the residuum of shame and the scar tissue of acceptance, like a neuropathic pain that reminds me it exists when the season is right.

I looked up to Scott as much as I was afraid of him. I wish I could have been as passionate and disappointed about ‘all of this’ as much as he was.

"You were his favorite cousin!"

"What's wrong with you?" That's what she really meant. What was wrong with me that I didn’t attend my cousin’s funeral. What was wrong with me that I couldn’t cry at my own mother’s. What was wrong with me that I didn’t experience loss the same way as they did. What was wrong with me that I didn’t understand how she felt. That was what she wasn’t saying. And the truth? Burial is for the living.

In my family, we’d rather be blindsided with grief instead of steadily awaiting the worst. That’s the reality of it though. For most humans in general, I suspect it is. As people we tend to turn our faces away from the constant heart break, feigning ignorance of even the most inevitable outcomes, or wastefully rushing through our emptions so we can just get on with it and our empty fucking lives where everything looks great. We do with hope that when the loss does occur, we will feel some of that devastation we shelved for a later occasion—grief we bottled and tucked away somewhere secret even from ourselves, that if found, we’d be surprised…rather than having been dragged through the insipid furtherance of heartache all along which tends to leave us apathetic in the end. Like me. ‘Ignorance is bliss.’

Call me callous, for it’s true, but it has long since been my experience that—if you’re paying attention—most tragedies these days are expected (normal even) and for those of us who’ve had it the worst—we want to hurt. We want to feel something akin to pain, so that we don’t have to instead feel shame at a time we’re more vulnerable to it. Creeping up on us at night when we question ‘meaning’ and such nonsense. We’re not monsters, per se, we’ve simply become so familiar with loss that we now realize everything is lost even before it begins…we’ve become accustomed to mourning existence.

I couldn't go to Scott's funeral because I couldn't mourn a death that was more of a mercy than the life he left, then watch the ritual of posturing that pretended it wasn’t. Such is shame and our own fear of being forgotten that it leads us to these eccentricities—but then again, I’ve been described as eccentric myself. My sister wouldn’t talk to me for months after, furthering my belief that none of us truly know what we’re doing with our time. Maybe it’d be different if I had gone to live with my sister all those years ago, after mom’s funeral, when given the choice. Maybe I would be different. Thoughts like these have a habit of consuming me of late.

June 1994. Part 1. The Sister.

It was two days before my thirteenth birthday. I had asked Mom if I could go with Maxine’s family back to Nebraska for the summer. I was eager to get to know my older sister better. She had long since been my favorite sibling, sixteen years my senior. I hadn’t been around Maxi much, not since I was five, when we left California. Having had a hand in keeping me ‘alive’ those early years in California, she was like a second mother to me, and I was excited that she had suggested Logan and I live with them. And though I knew we’d be safe there and probably loved; I wasn’t sure that was enough anymore. I needed a schema of what life there would look/feel like because things were much different for her now than they were when we were younger. Maxi was just starting a family of her own. I feared we wouldn’t be a priority. I felt that way with all my family those days. Except him.

My aunt and uncle, who were fostering us at this point, they were in disagreement with the plan to summer in Nebraska; mostly because we had become my uncle’s ‘project’. He hoped that we would stay with him and possibly he feared that this time away would break any of the principles he had instilled in us. Quick to manipulation, my survival tactic of choice back then, I knew that if I favored to asking my mother instead that he would not be able to contend with the wishes of a woman dying of cancer—not with all her immediate family around and having more say in our lives than he, though seemingly wanted none of it. This is how all my older siblings had come to here in the first place—all 6 of us gathered together for the first time since fleeing Modesto, to say their goodbyes to our mother.

1986. California.

Years earlier when we were still in California with John (my dad), it was essential to move regularly for his “job”. We moved often and sometimes we even moved without Dad; he’d have to show up later when it was “safe”.

My mom was swept off her feet when she first met my dad. He blew into town driving a yellow corvette (my mom’s favorite color), introduced to her by the town sheriff in that little Nebraska town. He was dropping off another shipment of Mexico’s finest sugar. He brought the party, and my Mom ate it up. She had spent the last year in a bedroom painted black, mourning her husband’s suicide. She had been married and a mother since she was eighteen years old now that she was thirty, she wanted to explore the parts of life she forfeited being the cheerleader, the good daughter, the smart one. She wanted to live dangerously. And she got to.

Other times we moved without Dad because he was the one who wasn’t safe to be around. Usually for only a night or so after he was having a particularly bad episode. I think Mom was less scared of Dad’s unpredictability and more scared of the certainty that one of her teenage sons would eventually kill him if the abuse continued. Both Owen and Shamus had pulled John’s own revolver on him multiple times by now. The same revolver he used to make holes in nearly every room in whatever house we were hiding out in at the time; the nights he had convinced himself that the shadows in his drug-decayed mind told him were real and coming to get him or take what was his.

I remember one night sitting barefoot sobbing on the stairs of a tavern between the top and bottom floor, men at the bar glancing uncomfortably up at my five-year-old self in my baby blue, flannel nightie. I watched Mom across the mountain road, snow flurries and wind ripping at her robe, crying into a payphone as her teenage children tried to convince her to come back inside and away from the call that would lead her back to him. I was scared because she seemed so far away in that moment, and I felt paralyzed there.

We’d all suffered John’s chaos in more ways than one, but the worst of which was how he had sucked the life out of her. He’d broken her in ways only she knew. Eventually, it took my sister Maxi and her partner Jack to get us out of there. Jack was a master mechanic who worked for my dad’s “front”—a wrecking yard in Modesto that John had bought with their inheritance— the money Mom had gotten from the death of my half-siblings father.

Jack traded work for a Chevette from my dad and rebuilt it as a project car. One day when my dad was away or maybe in a heroin coma, Jack handed my mom the keys and said, “grab everything you can in 30 minutes and go”. I watched from the dirty glass of the hatchback as he stood, arms crossed, leaning in the doorway as we drove away. A sentry standing guard.

I felt that too—and there have been plenty of times in my years when I felt everything inside of me say, “grab everything you can and go”.

June 1994. Part 2. The Pity Party.

Mom stared vacantly at me, or rather, the shell that vaguely resembled my mother did. Sallow, crêpey, soft, thin skin so smooth to the touch in was like the slickness of snake or tanned ostrich. Once rich, auburn hair that had lost all its “burn”—now dull, dry, breaking—like everything else about her. Her eyes so large and deep-set in their sockets that when her pupils shivered it was as though they were wild, starved animals pressing themselves in accord to the backs of dens.

My mother no longer responded in human language to us. The consistent pain, insomnia, starvation wouldn’t allow it. If her voice, mouth, and mind did work together it was saved for brief, banshee wails that no parent should have to hear in the depths of the night—that haunting cry of their child; not that of infant for mother’s milk or life, but their fifty-two-year-old daughter begging for their mercy and peace.

And here I was a vapid child who had grown so utterly numb of suffering that I thought this poor creature could still provide for my self-intent from their hollowed being. Her ribs were but a cage for me to escape—to get away from this…from them…from her.

Certainly, some wouldn’t blame me. For any child to be wanting of a normal childhood, an ordinary child’s birthday, a stable home environment with basic child and human needs met—that should be available by default.

I remember sitting at the dinner table eating what I realize now was “dish sink” dinners and ignoring my mother go on about children starving in other countries while we were being ungrateful, turning down food stamps because someone else needed them more, working herself sick. Even to this day, writing about this experience I feel privileged, selfish, ungrateful, and ashamed to be writing this at all. I question whether my experience is valid or if I’m just another poor-me in an entire country of self-pitying, snow-white ingrates.

The point being, I knew so little of stability, consistency, or normalcy at that time that when I had a transitory perception of it given by someone recognizing and addressing my needs, regardless if it was for their own self-satisfaction to feel charitable and nothing to do with genuine compassion, I was so overcome with greed that I was dead-set on keeping it…even as it advanced my apathy toward the more nurturing side of necessity. Nature was winning. I could live without love if it meant a full stomach and the occasional frivolity as well. As for the secret horror that I had been suppressing until now and only bringing to the front of my thoughts in the deep of night, was that if I were free of her—I had a chance.

The thought of not ever having those things— “normal” things like consistent meals, clean clothes, shelter and then going back to merely surviving as we had for the last thirteen years minus two days, this chance passing me by…I felt trapped. I felt trapped by my mother’s illness. By adults with selfish aims or ideas of what, how, or who I should be after she was gone—not just where. And I had no reference points for what was good and safe and loving… “happy”. I don’t remember feeling any of those things as a child. I remember strongly appreciating brief intervals of beauty and accomplishment. Of a job well-done. But that’s the proselytization again perhaps. That if I wasn’t putting effort into the things the adults around me thought I should be, then I wasn’t worthy. Knowing I deserved nurture—those parts of me just weren’t born or awake yet back then. They hadn’t had time to be. The person who would have given them to me had been dying since I knew her.

My Grandmother at least attempted a birthday by baking an angel food cake. She had forgotten, then was angry. She seemed angry with me. She always seemed angry with me. So, despite the heavy mephitis of death overshadowing the occasion, slowly permeating every memory made up to this time spent on that four-season porch. The hospice nurse looked over at those of us gathered around a small table with the makeshift birthday in full swing with a dour expression that matched both my own and my grandmother’s. My grandmother had often referred to me a such— “a dour child”—not realizing it likely was innate to her own genes. All the while the nurse was taking my mother’s blood pressure on the worst pullout couch-bed to survive 70s. That stiff, cream velvet with dark brown depictions of farmers and millers and pilgrims or some shit, I remember well. It wasn’t soft like most velvet but prickly and stiff and all over the couch was hard. “It’s made well.” My grandfather defended every piece of furniture they owned with such a clause. Essentially, if it didn’t outlast the aesthetic of the era, what value was it? In any case, they weren’t comfortable couches, and they certainly weren’t comfortable beds.

My older siblings, grandparents, aunts, uncles—gathered there solely for my mother’s last days—sang the birthday song to me. I am not certain my mother knew what was happening as she lay there staring far through us—through me in my stupid fucking cone hat that made chubby cheeks on an otherwise slip of a child, look even more misplaced. And my thoughts? My thoughts were the same that year as any other…that every year I asked for a chocolate cake with chocolate frosting, but every year I got angel food with white frosting and pink lettering. I hated pink. Ironically enough, my favorite cake as an adult is angel food with white buttercream frosting, I am allergic to chocolate, and now accepting of pink. It’s no black, but pink has its place. Maybe it’s psychosomatic? An atonement? Comfort? Maybe it reminds me of when we were, if not normal, at least whole. All the missing pieces still in place. Or maybe it’s residual indoctrination of what “a young lady should like”.

In any case, received no answer from my mother other than a strained whimper—a solicitation of sort, whether it was begging me to stay or relief that if I leave, then so too could she. Maybe my mom and I were not so distant or different from each other even then.

1993. Christmas.

It was to be, that my brother and I were selected by the school to partake in a program where teacher escorts (discreetly) took kids shopping for Christmas at Walmart. We were hand-selected by teachers to participate and given $500. The teacher would help us with the cart, do math, and make suggestions. I argued with my teacher until she gave in, allowing me to take some portion of that money (meant for clothing, toys, etc. for myself) and spend it on the most basic of provisions of food, socks, underwear, but also a “boombox” for Mom, who could no longer enjoy the entertainment system located in the living room far from her bed in our apartment. Mrs. Thompson started crying and as she had always been fairly stern with me during 5th grade English, I wasn’t sure at the time, but now I understand that she was crying for me.

Mom and I would listen to that boombox as I laid on her floor next to her bed. I couldn’t sleep next to her because at the time she scared me. I had watched Pet Semetary too many times not to associate her with the sister, Zelda. I even had a dream where Mom’s skeletal frame chased me down the narrow, windowless hallway of our apartment that led to her room. I felt ashamed and I hadn’t admitted it to anyone. She asked me before to snuggle with her, a rarity and treat in the past as she wasn’t an affection sort of woman in my memories of her. We’d drift off to her whale sounds, or ocean waves, sometimes Enya if she was feeling spicy. As soon as she was asleep, I’d unwind from her skeletal grasp and go back to sleeping on red shag carpeting, collecting all the Good and Plenty’s she dropped, making piles to pass the time. It was the only candy she could have to herself because there was no way we’d eat that shit. Christmas. It was to be, that my brother and I were selected by the school to partake in a program where teacher escorts (discreetly) took kids shopping for Christmas at Walmart. We were hand-selected by teachers to participate and given $500. The teacher would help us with the cart, do math, and make suggestions. I argued with my teacher until she gave in, allowing me to take some portion of that money (meant for clothing, toys, etc. for myself) and spend it on the most basic of provisions of food, socks, underwear, but also a “boombox” for Mom, who could no longer enjoy the entertainment system located in the living room far from her bed in our apartment. Mrs. Thompson started crying and as she had always been fairly stern with me during 5th grade English, I wasn’t sure at the time, but now I understand that she was crying for me.

Mom and I would listen to that boombox as I laid on her floor next to her bed. I couldn’t sleep next to her because at the time she scared me. I had watched Pet Semetary too many times not to associate her with the sister, Zelda. I even had a dream where Mom’s skeletal frame chased me down the narrow, windowless hallway of our apartment that led to her room. I felt ashamed and I hadn’t admitted it to anyone. She asked me before to snuggle with her, a rarity and treat in the past as she wasn’t an affection sort of woman in my memories of her. We’d drift off to her whale sounds, or ocean waves, sometimes Enya if she was feeling spicy. As soon as she was asleep, I’d unwind from her skeletal grasp and go back to sleeping on red shag carpeting, collecting all the Good and Plenty’s she dropped, making piles to pass the time. It was the only candy she could have to herself because there was no way we’d eat that shit.

No adult was around for us at the time. My brother Shamus lived in the apartment above us, but he was going through a volatile divorce and had his own five children to look after. Mom was so ill—so ill that I would help her to the restroom, check her breath at night, try to feed her condiments because it’s all we had. I was sleeping on her floor every night for a while. This is how it came to be that she was taken from us: my grandmother came to visit, not having been able to reach my mother by landline as our phone bill hadn’t gotten paid. I thought I had done something wrong. She opened the door and immediately she was yelling at me, at Mom. Grabbing things from the closet and shoving them in a bag. Then she left. Next thing I remember she was back with my aunt; Grandpa was carrying Mom one way, and I was being dragged the other.

1994. January. Everything hurts.

The next time I saw Mom was in January. She had said, “everything hurts” in response to me inquiry as to why she was pacing back and forth (this was when she could pace back and forth, or simply stand). We were speaking in the shadows of the four-season porch at my grandparent’s lake house. Christmas lights up and blinking on the tree in the corner. She loved bubble-lights—the dangerous ones that boiled water. The porch was second story and overlooked the lake cove. I think she always felt an attachment to water in general—the sound, smell, the sight of it. It’s where she wanted to be her last days—watching the birds at the feeders in front of the windows, cursing the selfishness of squirrels with the lake as a backdrop. She couldn’t have been more than 100lbs at this time, but she wore that awful muumuu anyway, looking like she was on a Florida vacation instead of dying in the heart of Arkansas. “Everything hurts—sitting, walking, standing, laying, being touched, being. So why not keep moving?” The ugly jewel tone, color block linen swished about her creaking ankles (a family thing—all of the women in our family seem to have ankles that “click”). She stopped to smile at me. It wasn’t a real smile, but it was still rare and the only time I remember looking each other directly in the eyes as we spoke and not because I was stealing Flintstone vitamins from the cupboard or something again. “I’m okay. I’m getting better.

1989. Stranger in the Driver’s Seat.

I was terrified of my uncle from the start. We met him as I was turning nine and my brother ten. In the middle of the night, my mom turned off the ignition of the van—the exposed foam of her bucket seat dry and crumbling as she exited the van. I was awoken by the sound of the door closing. I can still remember how loud those heavy doors were when they were slammed. The smell of gasoline, Virginia Slims, spilled Pepsi. The van was rust-red with the remnants of a blue and white, terribly chipping Navajo band all the way around the body. It had only the two bucket seats and the rest of the inside was royal blue velvet, plush walls and the most grotesque yellow, orange, but predominantly avocado green shag carpeted floor you’d ever seen. Not only did it look like vomit, it also closely resembled it in smell too; it was because of this that we occasionally added our own brand to the mélange. She bought the van for the sole-purpose of moving out of Nebraska, but when asked “where to,” she simply said it was “a surprise”. We didn’t think much of it. We were used to moving.

A man replaced mom in the driver seat—this long-haired, long-bearded, long-in-the-tooth snarling hippie (who could’ve been anyone and Adam but also maybe someone who knew our dad)— we timidly began our inquiries. Immediately we were told to “shut up and go back to sleep!” And no sooner had he put that creaky, rusted-out van into gear, driving for what seemed like miles, that he solidified himself as being someone to fear for years to come after.

They had found Christ in each other, my aunt and uncle, living in a community of displaced adults with all their children and her own two sons of a previous marriage. It was a lifestyle that suited them at that time and grown adults shirking responsibility in the 70s wasn’t anything original; in fact, it was a fairly redundant story for my aunt, though I imagine she was more level-headed than my uncle, wishing to use that hard-earned medical degree of hers and return to society at some point. For now, after her divorce from the boys’ father and the recent rejection of a woman whom she was madly in love with—this made sense to her…accepting the fate that had drawn them together.

My aunt was the third daughter (right after my mother) in an “honest” Catholic family of 4 girls and 1 boy, whom she didn’t seem to feel much attachment toward apart from competing for the role of “the good daughter”. She always had her own agendas and interests and placed those above her other siblings. Most of my mother and aunt’s side of my family had settled in the Midwest, the closest being a 15-hour drive from Arkansas, and my uncle liked it like that way, for it’s one thing to be a pretentious self-aggrandizer for a day or two out of a year for holidays and such—quite another to be capable of proving your superiority as a routine…but now we were ruining that for him.

My uncle, on the other hand, he was a drifter from Florida who dodged the draft by purposefully pissing himself. Son of a single mother with one brother. I don’t recall ever hearing of or seeing evidence that he had any former employment to speak of—he did not acknowledge the authority of anyone other than himself. He was a well-read, unsociable, disparaging man, especially towards his wife’s family: railroad workers, strong and outspoken career women, loud Midwesterners—a melting pot of commonsense, tell-you-how-it-is, salt-of-the-earth folk who couldn’t be duped by my uncle’s self-important, patronizing displays to which he lowered himself to their intellectual level for the sake of counterfeit comradery. They despised him often commenting, “There’s something about him that doesn’t sit right”.

My uncle, on the other hand, he was a drifter from Florida who dodged the draft by purposefully pissing himself. Son of a single mother with one brother. I don’t recall ever hearing of or seeing evidence that he had any former employment to speak of—he did not acknowledge the authority of anyone other than himself. He was a well-read, unsociable, disparaging man, especially towards his wife’s family: railroad workers, strong and outspoken career women, loud Midwesterners—a melting pot of commonsense, tell-you-how-it-is, salt-of-the-earth folk who couldn’t be duped by my uncle’s self-important, patronizing displays to which he lowered himself to their intellectual level for the sake of counterfeit comradery. They despised him often commenting, “There’s something about him that doesn’t sit right”.

He met my aunt at just such a time that a person of his nature would be appealing to someone of hers—he was younger, fun (or so she claimed), and there was a danger about him—perhaps what didn’t “sit right” with the rest of us is exactly what appealed to her…the sociopath. I am uncertain of whether she knew, but he would eventually confide in myself (at the time a young woman of fourteen) that he had attempted to murder his younger brother, leaving the boy brain damaged for life. I would hope that my aunt didn’t know, but two narcissists in a codependent relationship coming out of a final acid trip with both claiming to have seen God and to have been bequeathed with the most holy of hosts anointing upon them—told to go forth spreading his knowledge…I doubt that red flags could have been seen as anything other than just another sign that they were on the right track.

I imagine when my uncle was awoken in the middle of the night to fetch his wife’s heathen sister—recently pulled from the armpit of California and freshly out of a year of hiding in Nebraska from the drug trafficker that spawned her two-wildling children, randomly shows up in his town of Huntsville, Arkansas—to stay under his roof that his wife paid every penny for…I imagine he was pissed.

Not only did he have to host us for a few months, but we’d continue to stay with my aunt and uncle on occasion, mostly days when mom was in or recovering from chemotherapy or radiation treatment; then more often as her illness progressed—all the while against my uncle’s wishes. It took a while, but he did soften; it was gradual, but as he realized we were pliable young minds ever seeking approval, ready to work for it, and not just hellions sent to torture him—he did take special interest in us. We responded well to the reward-system he imposed. Having never won or gained anything in our short lives from compliant behavior alone, our little survival instincts had us all the more eager to please him. Coins, treats, praise… My uncle was doing a good job making us reliant on him, if nothing else. I think it gave him purpose; albeit he was a highly intelligent man, he was often running his social and scholastic coffers dry. He believed the world owed him something without effort or sacrifice—thus giving up his eternal track-switching, lifelong college student career while living off my aunt’s salary and obsequiousness to become our “tutor”. That last acid trip with holy ghost was bearing fruit at last.

June 1994. Part 3. The Funeral.

We left for Nebraska the next morning, my brother and I, along with our older sister. I remember how immediately uncomfortable I was there. My sister Maxi was a new mom, things smelled like urine from potty-training, there were small children which made anxious, and anxiety always makes me feel as though I’ve done a thing wrong even to this day.

My brother and I slept in bucket chairs in the living room. I was miserable. I laid awake most of the night feeling as though I had made a huge mistake. I’ve always been a particular child with separation anxiety and feeling no particular attachment to any one person any longer with this newborn apathy. What a conundrum, right? I’ve spent most of my life choosing, being and feeling alone. Despite being in a relationship or crowd of people, I can still feel completely outside of everything and at times this can either be a superpower or kryptonite. Even with my siblings, who have rarely invested much of themselves into me since Mom’s passing. Mostly they’ve just bailed me out of situations, never sharing their own thoughts or feelings, tribulations, what’s made them happy or upset—the things that round a person out. My siblings have always been 2D, and our mother—basically, a stranger to us all, she never offered false witness, but she certainly concealed much of herself from us; yet, because of how I am, I probably know her best in some ways, because in a lot of ways, I am her—having inherited that omnipresent and duplicitous character she maintained even upon her deathbed.

The phone rang early that next morning, and I already knew.

“Not on my birthday!” I shouted toward the kitchen where Maxi leaned on the doorframe, back toward me in her denim tuxedo, head bent down, hand clasped over mouth. I could tell by her stance. “Not on my birthday!” I screamed it again to make sure she heard me. As soon as my sister returned the phone to the wall, she rushed to me and kneeled like I deserved her attention more than she deserved a moment to mourn—the moment I stole from her.

“No, baby girl! No, it’s not on your birthday! Your birthday is tomorrow!” she wept. I had been so caught up in my selfishness that I forgot what day it was.

I was…I am…so selfish.

When Scott said, "What's wrong with you?"

I suddenly started to sob. Scott couldn't have possibly known that just on the way here, our uncle had told me that crying would be questioning God's will and ultimately a sin; however, that's not why I didn't cry until Scott’s accusation. I was crying because it was the first time someone had said it out loud.

After years of being misled, told God would heal her, that the cancer was in remission, that she was getting better, then going through even more chemo, even more radiation, that we we’re not praying hard enough, that mom was an unbeliever, more starvation, more disassociation, more nausea, begging her to eat, hearing her cry at night, isolation, from family, from friends, abandonment, being pitied, being bullied at school, being told “if your mom hadn’t met your dad, none of this would’ve happened”. After four years, someone said it out loud. That she was dead. And I was relieved.

J.M.Liles ©️2024

I am not a lesbian, she thought.

She knew she wasn't. She insisted to herself she wasn't. It was an honest denial, even though she worshipped and admired women--as a species unto themselves. She was proud to be one. Exalted. Enraptured by estrogenic brilliance.

She thought about women--what they do for the world. Women conceive and make new human beings! They are feminine, from their lactation and nurturing of our babies to their very anatomy--receptive. Held fast within the mothering of the bosom, one is safe. Welcomed by the exclusivity of the vagina, one is the chosen one.

Women give of themselves without hesitation. Put themselves second... then third, fourth...last... They offer what's left--of food, attention, and love--even when wanting, themselves. If God is love, it is woman who was made in His image.

Yes, she loved women. Yes, she loved being one.

She recognized what a woman brings to a relationship. She knew how a relationship is defined by a woman's contribution, input, and even insistence. She knew that should the biochemistry between men and women be deconstructed, hers stands alone as unique, counteracting all of the harm brought into the world by the wizardry--the necromantic alchemy--of men.

She knew women to be magical creatures, so there was never any need to search for unicorns.

She knew how women love. She knew women who love men. She knew women who love women. She knew women who love both. She knew women who love themselves. Thus, she knew what love is. And she knew who God is.

If God is love, there is no God without women, she thought.

When a woman dies, she surmised, there is a moth-eaten hole that remains, ruining the entire wardrobe shared with men.

She thought about her body. Her body as a woman. How a thigh brushing the other is not a mating call but a celebration of her temple. Her holy temple, she thought, and then she would laugh. She felt alive. She felt important--even crucial. She felt real. She felt the Earth rotate around her, even as the men fall off.

She had a clear vision of the world's men and women, perched on her pedestal, placed there by Divine Authority. She watches with women's eyes. She weeps with women's tears. She shouts with women's cries.

No, she thought, I am not a lesbian. But I sure do think about them a lot.

You know how the saying goes: “Whatever can go wrong… will go wrong.”

It's an apt slogan for my existence thus far.

But perhaps that oversimplifies the thing. The phrase shouldn’t end there. A more accurate descriptor might go something like this: “Whatever can go wrong…will go wrong…. except when it doesn’t and goes bafflingly, marvelously right in the most awkward way humanly possible.”

Yes, that’s a better way to surmise my life thus far, because as I sit here and clatter away at the keys, I’m aware that calling my life a failure is a falsehood. I’ve got some pretty great things going on. I’ve got cute kids, a dedicated husband, a home, and a day-to-day existence so sickeningly sweet it’d give your neighborhood pessimist cavities. Alas, you’re not here to read about that part– that part is boring. The things that go right usually are. And hey, I’m here to tell ya that boring isn’t always a bad thing. Boring leaves some space for peace. If you’ve found that (peace, I mean), please let me know– ’cause I’m still searching. So, let’s dive in, why don’t we? I suppose we should start where all good stories do…

At the beginning.

It began before I can remember. It began with a woman much stronger than I, a woman who overcame, a woman who inspires me to be the best version of myself every single day (It’s my mom, duh). Yes, my mother. She is a rare woman. She is the strongest person I know, but not in that harsh, horrible kind of way. She is strength in her gentleness, in her caring spirit, in her meticulous cleanliness, in her arms that encircle with warmest embrace. She is the reason I’m writing this. I hear her soft alto whispering in the back of my mind even now, “You have got to write a book about your life, Pearl– No one would believe it!” But before there was me, there was her. There was him.

He was handsome. He was tall, and lanky but well-muscled with darkly tanned skin and striking blue eyes. His teeth were a little crooked, but he couldn’t help that. He was meticulously well-groomed, almost as if he were trying to make up for something…and, well… he was. His childhood reeked with the hallmarks of parents still caught in the lingering strife of the great depression. Everything you’ve ever heard about the worst-case scenario of growing up poor? It was true for him. He wore it wonderfully well. He drove fast cars and rode motorbikes and blared rock and roll from his custom record setup. He womanized and fist-fought and was recently divorced– twice over. He was a man on a mission. He was a man with something to prove. He wanted so desperately to be what the world had always told him he never would be: a success. A family man. And so, when he saw mama from across the roller skating rink, her auburn locks glittering in the light of the disco ball- so beautiful, so alone... and wrangling three small boys, he just couldn’t pass up the opportunity. He’d tried to start a family with his first two wives, and had one kid by each before the relationships ended, but here was a woman with kids in tow, and boys nonetheless. Instant family. And he could be the hero. They were married less than a year later.

Mama says he showed his true colors for the very first time on the night of their honeymoon. She’d thought she’d found her knight in shining armor, but instead, she’d leapt headfirst into her worst nightmare. When they got married, there were already five kids between the two of them. Mama’s first marriage had ended in divorce, too, and she liked to think of her family with her new husband (my dad, if you hadn’t caught on) as their own little Brady Bunch...But with a darker bent that mama happily swept under the rug, along with the rest of her baggage. The abuse escalated with each day of the marriage, and I think Mama might’ve fooled herself into believing that giving him another baby would fix it. Along came my brother, and she saw a different side of the man with striking blue eyes. She saw him love with reckless abandon.

He loved my brother more than anything he’d ever seen, more than any of his other children, certainly more than my mother or me. But the abuse didn’t stop. Instead, it escalated. Now she wasn’t just doing things wrong with the house, and her clothes, and her hair… Now she was tainting his precious son. She did what she must– she got pregnant again because he didn’t hurt her so badly when she was pregnant. And thus, I came screaming into the world with a tuft of violently red hair upon my brow, more bruises on my infantile body than seemed humanly possible, and a fire in my soul that smoldered, but didn’t burn. And of course, the undeniable truth that guaranteed a torturous existence: I was female, and my monsters equated that to being less than dirt. So begins our story.

Purpose- The testing of the durability of the Human Spirit under extreme duress.

Research Subject- 815165

Specifications- Species-Human

Type/Gender-Female

Hair/Eyes- Blnd., Hzl

Height-5'5" Wt.- 105lbs.

Life Stage- Pre-Adolescence

Dated: May 05 1986

Time: 1500 (MT)

Observer/Intuitive Perspective:

The subject is in a dark room. Neon red light begins to spiderweb all around her. The floor is splitting open below her. She does not know what to do. So she sits. The web encircles her, weaves into her mind, her thoughts, her psyche. Later, when she seeks comfort, she will re-enact the webs as best as she can, because this is what she knows. And familiarity breeds comfort. She has not stopped falling, but the webs lend her hope in the moments she brushes against them.

Observer/ Reality Perspective(as pertains to Humanoid Environment):

She is sitting on the love seat, her mother on the old cat clawed, raggedy fold out couch.

Next to the couch is the scarred up nightstand with the clock radio quietly blaring baseball stats.

Her mother's mouth stops moving and she snaps her mind to attention. She is supposed to say something here. "Uh-huh", she manages. Then too late, she realizes her mistake as her mother launches into (yet another) lecture on proper grammar that somehow sidewinds into a shaming session on what an ungrateful little slut she is.

This time, when the mouth stops moving, she is ready. Has dutifully paid attention to every single word. She is ready for the pop quiz.

She uses every ounce of willpower to control her facial muscles so the relief does not register anywhere in her expression, as she mercifully, eventually, scores high enough on the quiz to be granted dismissal.

She walks steadily to her bedroom, and carefully closes the door. Her mother values privacy. Another mystery unsolvable.

She lifts her hands to her face with a vengeance, then abruptly re-orients to grab at her hair instead. Mustn't leave marks. She yanks and pulls, grits her teeth, and screams inside her mouth.

She needs blood though, so she raises her shirt, and claws at her chest. Then she calms herself, shamed silent by her outburst.

She then looks fondly over at the pram with her baby dolls, and exclaims brightly, "Let's go for a walk!"

She is 10 and a half years old.

Session 2 concluded.

Observations recorded.

Awaiting analysis reports.

To be continued...

Born? I was born three months premature at the Mercy Hospital in Melbourne Australia.

My father and mother every birthday would tell me my father held me in his hand like me an incubus, small and impossible yet alive.

I was born on the cusp, on the edge, by pure chance and luck I the only son.

My mother for a time was a humidity crib being three months premature and dying twice, which became some sort of family myth.

Myths surrounded by family and the circumstances of my birth.

When my father saw me for the first time, cradling me like some God in a single hand, he and a mate of his decided to celebrate my birth, heading down to a pub in the city.

To wet the babies head, meaning to celebrate the birth of your child.

The pub was normal but upon leaving the pub was not and I have heard it and heard it a thousand times.

As my father and Doug his mate walked out of the pub in this city of Melbourne, the black steps shiny marble, trimmed with gold, a car pulled up and a man got out.

A fella beside my father was confronted by another out of the car and shot six times.

Now not to be morbid, but I was told the blood flowed, down the steps, as the fella died, and my father could not believe how much blood a human body could hold.

The assassin,task done, was a killer, a killer absolute, pointed the gun at my father and his mate, and said 'You didn't see a thing did you?.

Both said no. So many times my father has said I was raised in violence because of this, this act, and he may have been right but I am still working that out.

And so I was born and like a kaleidoscopic film I was told every year of my birth.

But I really think my life, my birth is commiserate with the violence in the world, like a juddering jack in the box played out every day.

Me? I went on to live, still living now, and do I believe the myths of my family carefully told every year?.

Answer is yes, yes I do, because I am still living it.

Chapter 1

Friday and Saturday nights were music nights at my house. No matter how many times we moved, my father found a room for his sanctuary and built a kick ass man cave. The walls always filled with posters of KISS, Black Sabbath, Alice Cooper, and a variety of other arena rock bands from the 70s and 80s.

For a while, he held a job on the railroad, which allowed him to have weekends off. I don’t know how long this lasted, but I remember it was during the time we lived on Brookside. At this time, my mother was working at Wal-Mart, which came to town around 2004 or 2005. After the promotion for different movies ended, she would take some of the cardboard cutouts and posters and bring them home. I’d fill my room with posters of Spiderman, The Matrix, Star Wars, and countless others, and the cardboard cutouts would hang on either side of the stairs descending into the basement. It was cool.

There was a giant Spiderman and Green Goblin from the 2002 movie with Tobey Maguire and Willem Dafoe going down the stairs. Then when you walked into the basement, there was a small TV, which my father would keep on mute with a hockey game or a movie on AMC, posters, DVDs, and VHS tapes surrounded you along with my father’s massive CD and record collection, which were towards the back wall. It truly was a sanctuary, and an escape from a world where your body and mind were expendable. A place where you could enjoy the fruits of your labor, if only for a little while.

It was a fun place to be, and I’d get into many arguments with my mother during the summer months when I’d rarely leave it. Though I played sports, and had friends, I’d often find myself for days on end just walking to the movie store on Roseberry to rent VHS’s and walking back to grab a snack and fade away into my old man’s sanctuary. I can see why she was angry, because as a parent now, I don’t always love when the kids plant themselves in front of the TV for the day. The outside world is important. There’s no denying that. But the world is hard, unfriendly and unforgiving. Who wouldn’t want to slip away for a while? Plus, the days of being in my head feeling something akin to a goddamn Eli Roth horror movie would occupy a lot of time during my 20s. Those days were some of the last, where being inside my head was a paradise. Two best pals eating snacks and watching Jackie Chan clumsily beat the ever living hell out of gangsters.

During the school years and summer, though, Friday and Saturday nights at 7 were always the apex of the week, and something that I’d carry with me throughout my university years and deep into fatherhood. The importance of those evenings is instrumental, and still to this day, when the three of us get together, we make sure to crack a few beers and get the tunes going.

I think they were important because they felt like the only hours during the week where our father belonged solely to us. The rest of the week, he had some kind of preoccupation. Whether he was working, or spending time with my mother, or even when we all spent time together, it was nice in a different way, but it wasn’t the same.

My mother understood that too, and also understood the importance of having a couple of hours of “me” time. She loved music, but not in the same way, and she certainly didn’t feel a need to sit in a basement and discuss the merits of each song played accompanied by one of my father’s stories of being young, and how different songs changed his life. She’d always roll her eyes and playfully tell him he was brainwashing me or and my brother. Maybe he was, but what the hell, there are worse things to be brainwashed into than kick ass music from the 70s and 80s. He wasn’t Jim Jones, and the basement wasn’t Jonestown.

There was also a happiness in his eyes on those evenings, a sense of peace. And as my brother and I got older, he relished the fact that we took an interest in his life before us. I wanted to know about working on the oil rigs. I wanted to know about his high school years and his fights. I asked about his girlfriends. I asked about my grandfather and sometimes felt saddened at their distant relationship, while simultaneously feeling grateful for ours. I could listen to him talk for hours. He never bored me with those stories, though I’m sure he felt he did.

He never seemed to sink into depression, but there was a certain darkness in his eyes when work demanded more than his body wanted to give. There was anger in them, too. And it didn’t happen often, but when he lost his temper, it was frightening. You stood there and did your best to not let a single tear escape your eye. But as quickly as the darkness overtook him, he could cast it away once again in the snap of a finger. Something that I’d inherit from him.

During the music nights, we’d pick two songs each. My father would start, and then we’d rotate. It was fun, and we mostly picked songs we knew my father would like, but every so often we’d pick something new we heard at school and hope he enjoyed it. You wanted something that kept the evening fun going along at a nice, steady pace. You didn’t want to drop the ball with something that no one liked, because you’d hear about it. In fact, my family always had a propensity for never letting things go. So, you’d probably hear about it a lot more than was really necessary. But if you could take it, you’d get your chance to give it at some point.

My father would also designate someone as the beer guy. Since we didn’t have a mini fridge in the basement, my brother or I would have to run upstairs and grab the old man a couple of beers from the fridge and run back down, trying not to miss too much of a song that we loved.

For as long as I can remember, I loved the taste of beer. Especially that first drink when the cap came off. Sometimes my father would let me take that first sip, and that carbonated burn as it slid down my throat made me feel like I was getting a teaser into his world. The world beyond the fog. I was drinking and talking about the good ole days. The days before, I was even a thought or a whisper.

It always felt like I was training to be a man from the time I was a young kid. I wanted to see him leave in the morning and study how he walked to work. I wanted to partake in the weekend evenings of beer drinking and rock and roll music. I wanted it all, because there would come a time when I’d be my father’s age, and I’d have young kids getting me beer from the fridge. It’s the circle of life, I think, or some variation of life. The songs would be different, but the spirit of it never changed. It was a time when I belonged to the kids, and it was my time to talk about old stories and brainwash them in the church of Bruce Springsteen.

But those years of growing up and listening to music were important. They were important because I was being introduced to albums and artists that were well before my time. I was building a deep understanding of rock and roll music that none of my peers had. Then, when I’d find myself in university surrounded by musicians and looking to take a stab at writing songs and performing, I’d be able to speak their language.

You wanted to debate about The Stone and The Beatles? Let’s do it. You wanted to talk about shock rock in the 70s, glam or thrash in the 80s, great. If you wanted to talk about grunge and alternative music, fine. It was all good, because I’d dipped my toes in all of those waters. I became a well rounded, and I think unbiased music lover and critic. Well, maybe not completely unbiased, but I was being introduced to albums that may have been considered uncool at the time of their release because of generational factors, but I wasn’t there. So, everything was fresh and new and exciting. I wasn’t chained down by the ideologies of music gatekeepers.

And this was all thanks to my old man. But for all the great music he introduced me to (and there was a lot), Springsteen wasn’t there. Of course, I was aware of who he was, but he was never played on those sanctuary evenings. Not once.

But when a friend of mine introduced me to The River, and I’d be out on my own, studying music that wasn’t my fathers, I’d understand why. Springsteen didn’t always offer the escape that my father was looking for after a hard earned work week. In the basement, we listened to KISS, watched Star Wars and talked about days gone by. I rarely, if ever, asked how his day was. He rarely, if ever, talked about building trains. Because if we did, then work would occupy every second of his existence, and he was hellbent on ensuring that his life was about more than work.

My father and my grandfather never had those moments of talking through their differences. Much like Springsteen and his father, my old man grew his hair long. My father got his ears pierced, and my grandfather asked him if he was a faggot now? They argued about the state of their relationship. My grandfather wanted him to play sports every second of his life, and my father wanted to listen to his albums.

My grandfather was a railroader and my father, like myself, tried to run away from that life. But he got my mom pregnant at 19 and went to work on the oil rigs. From there, he went to the railroad. Then when my grandfather died in 2008, I heard from my mother that he cried, but I never saw it, neither did my brother. We were there for him in our own way, but we never really talked about how badly it hurt. Or if there were things he wished he’d said before he passed. We just kind of stood there, offering quiet support while our minds ran amok, trying to figure out how to actually help.

Still, to this day, I don’t speak to my father much on that level. We still laugh and poke fun at anything and everything. We still listen to music and drink beers when we get together, but it can still feel hard to shed that skin. But I told him one day that I love Springsteen because his music reminds me of him. I don’t know if he thought much of that, but I wanted him to know that this was music that dealt with complicated people and complicated relationships. It said the things that we were often too scared to say in real life.

But one day last year, I called him. He lives in Ontario now, and I don’t see him much. Sometimes I listen to My Father’s House, The River, Independence Day, or all of Darkness on the Edge of Town and think how much will go unsaid on the day that he dies. Will I sit and cry, wishing desperately that I’d said what I needed to say? The truth is, probably.

I made the call in desperation. I was losing my wife. I was losing my whole life and I could see it happening. My head was fucked, and I needed help. So, I called and for a while we joked, but he knew that something was up, because these weren’t calls we had often. So, eventually I asked how he and mom did it. How did they survive through it all? Because I felt like I was losing it.

That afternoon, as my wife was away with the kids, we had a great conversation. He offered advice in the best way he could, and when he had to get back to work, he told me to call anytime I needed anything. When I hung up, I felt like I was going to collapse with the sheer weight of finally telling the strongest man I’d ever known that I was feeling weak. And that I was in serious trouble.

The call made me realize that in many ways we were the same, and also different. I loved Springsteen because it hit home truths I was running away from. Whereas he didn’t want to be reminded of those truths, because he knew them all too well.

I sometimes picture a fictional version of those music nights. I’m ten years old and already a huge Springsteen fan. I put on Darkness on the Edge of Town. For my two songs, I pick Something in the Night and the title track. Or any two songs from the album, really. He places the vinyl in his hands and reads the lyrics. What happens? Does he become a fan, or does he tell me to turn it off so he can play KISS? I don’t know, but I often think about it. I think he would have found some hard truths in there, but I also think he would have revered the anger in a young Springsteen’s voice. Because in which other profession can you let out a primal scream like Springsteen does in Adam Raised A Cain, or Streets of Fire? You can’t do that in real life, though many of us would like to.

I know my father’s work weeks were often torturous, especially in the winter. I remember my mom telling me how much it upset her to hear the winds blowing off the river, howling so viciously you could barely hear yourself think, and knowing that he was out there. Out there walking that line between the tracks, reading a switch list, and trying to do a complicated mental puzzle inside his head to lessen the amount of moves and time it took to complete his job.

I’d understand when I got older and walked that same line, if only for a little while. I’d think about my father and those music nights, and I’d think about his eyes. They were tired, and there was anger behind them, but he never substituted hard work outside of home for the hard work inside. He did both, always and to me he was a goliath of strength. An impenetrable force, and as I get older, I’d feel much weaker knowing that we were cut from the same cloth. Though, I don’t know what the inside of his head was like; he handled that life like only he could.

That’s why the man cave was a sanctuary. Because it was his direct link to his childhood, it was a direct link to good memories with his kids. It represented everything the outside world didn’t. He needed it to keep sane, and I’d find the same thing as an adult. Escape through music and writing. Finding those links to times that didn’t crush you and make you feel small and weak. An insurance that no matter how bad things got, there was always a place you could go where things felt good, and things felt right. And while my father would seek it with KISS, and other huge acts, I’d find it with Springsteen.

At the worst of times, there would be songs that fit my situation like a perfectly placed puzzle piece. When I’d find him, it would be the closest thing to a religious or spiritual experience I’d have. An alignment of the world. An answer to the world’s hardest riddle. It would save me, at least from making it through my 20s.

There would be times when my world was ending. And the kids would go to bed, and my wife would follow suit. Then I’d find myself walking down the stairs of my home, feeling so weak I could explode and heading to my record player, putting on Darkness, or Born to Run, Nebraska, or The River, and just sitting trying to keep it together. Trying to rationalize my situation and find an escape. Seeking the strength of my father. The man who’s back was never hunched. The man who walked through the early morning fog, not with a mentality of “the world is going to beat me into submission”, but one of “I’m going to beat it into submission.” I’d search for that strength, and search and sometimes feel so depleted at the notion that it just wasn’t there for me. That his strength just wasn’t in the cards for me.

The music would help me understand. It would help me understand my childhood, my relationship with my parents. It would allow me to think about my parents as kids, and how that generation must have felt with their parents. A generation that felt like their folks were 500 years older than them. The coldness of my father’s father, and how it was his goal to be a better father, and how he was raising me to be even better.

Then, with that, I’d write poetry set to some of my favorite songs. I’d pick up a guitar, learn some chords and sit with those for a while, then I’d put words to my songs, and play bars and cafes, closing my eyes and pretending I was Springsteen in his early days at the Cafe Wha, or another Greenwich Village cafe around the time he was getting ready to sit at CBS in front of Jon Hammond and play his heart out for a record deal.

I’d seek words as a form of understanding. Songs could answer questions that an argument with my wife just couldn’t solve. I’d write and write, and then my chances at stardom would crash and burn like so many before me. My father who could have gone pro in hockey. I, who could have possibly done something with music, would find it ripped out from under me, the fog of my childhood pulling me back to the place I’d wanted to leave. Or maybe that was another question that needed to be answered. Did I ever want to leave?

Then I’d have to seek those answers in another form of writing. So I’d write stories. I’d write stories about railroaders and small towns. Imagery of smoke stacks like a gun barrel, burning winds coming off the river and cutting like knives. I’d write about people deep in depression staring at the sun creeping through the window blinds and wanting a darkness so absolute, it must mean death?

I’d write about characters in Springsteen songs. I’d read Springsteen books, and buy all his records and hope that just because music and sports didn’t work out for me, I wouldn’t just work and die without a single piece of art ever completed.

But first, I’d have to learn to survive without living under the same roof as my mother and father. I’d have to navigate a world alone as they moved hours and hours away in the opposite direction. And I’d have to deal with almost watching my brother die at the same time.

03/11/23 (11:03-11:29pm)

What’s up Doc,

Listen, this is an odd one. I know both of us seem to struggle with a lot of the same things for different reasons. I thought this might be a good skill since I shut down when talking about emotions. If I can write them, then we can skip that part. So I thought I’d start this series and see what happens. Maybe it’ll work, maybe not, but either way maybe it’ll help one of us. I’ll give you some of my old writings, if that’ll help; this will definitely be the most casual I’ve ever written. I think you’d like my Science & Scripture piece a lot. Remind me to text it to you. Maybe this will help me fall asleep. All I know is my heart hurts and it’s not even a full panic attack.

I think a lot of it is because I get too understimulated before I fall asleep or my body is scared to fall asleep for a number of reasons (primitive, spiritual, introspective). There’s a list of reasons for all three of these; maybe the primitive is the easiest to tackle for now since the adrenaline is wearing off.  I was born premature, 24 week, pound and a half baby. They had to do caffeine, blood, and ventilators to the point there’s scarring on my lungs that triggers my bronchial asthma. I was in the hospital for 101 days and came home on a breathing machine because I would forget to breathe. This was seen in small ways throughout my life. I would forget to breathe during dance performances; I don’t breathe going up stairs. It makes me wonder if my body is just concentrating on breathing to the point it doesn’t want to sleep.

But that doesn’t account for a number of things. It’s deductive in the sense that I’ve always disliked. It doesn’t account for the productivity addiction, or the compulsions, or that voice in my head that knows if I could see myself from the outside I would hate myself. It doesn’t account for my accomplishments not being mine, getting lucky in what I do by being at the right place at the right time. Hell, I’m not supposed to be alive in the first place if it weren’t for the time I was born with modern medicine. And then there’s the guilt. How can someone feel so guilty for simply existing? I don’t want to be dead by any means but why…

I know my purpose. I know my potential and I can’t stand that I can’t live up to it. Other people know their purpose and go and do it. I’ve lost my sense of identity once trying to do everything I could; it didn’t work. Those weren’t limits, those were restraints. And if I could get around them, maybe I’d finally reach my potential. I’m stubborn. The only reason I lived is because I’m stubborn. The only reason I am still alive is because I’m stubborn. I’m alive so what do I do now? Maybe hating myself gives me more motivation in a way, to become someone or something I don’t hate. Someone I can look at in a mirror and not have to worry about. I forgot I have a piece on that too. Here:

“Another night of staring at my own reflection. Why do I always come here? What even am I anymore? This mortal shell of mine seems to trap me. These dark bags only emphasize my melancholy eye contact. I try to reach out to myself but only feel the distant chill of this wretched surface; if only I could destroy its mocking gleam that judges me so. My efforts would be futile. When I walk out of this bathroom I could avoid my reflection, but I must face my own existence. These abhorrent conceptualizations must occur from within my own psyche, yet what does it mean to truly be mortal? This cursed mirror offers no clarification. I will nevertheless contemplate on my pitiful state: how can it be true I am no more than a spec much like the abomination of condensed sand I stare into? My heavy sigh only fogs the mirror and my thoughts further. Perhaps reflecting on memories rather than my empty husk will heal these reckless emotions.

As my conscience molds to my comprehension of this world, I am introspecting to discover who I truly am unto this earth while that same conscience no longer dictates my preconceptions miniscule. Among man I am just another cog within their own creations yet what I truly am can be defined by my beliefs. Improvement is what means to be human, and steadfast will I travel among the planes of reflectivity to reconstruct my identity. Though I may be perceived as this outwardly form, I am distinct by design. The miry fog releases its toll on my thoughts as I snap back into my own reality. I no longer feel numb to the stool I am perched on and gaze into the eyes of one I knew long before my melancholy state. I have never forgotten yet how can I begin to rebuild what I have lost?  Lightheaded, I rise from my perch. The fire within rekindles as I turn the worn door handle and step into the land of opportunity before me.”

I’m not afraid of death, never have been. I’m not afraid of life, or nothingness, or myself. I’m afraid of living my life as if it was never mine to live, of wasting it as if I’ve never lived at all. I need something to keep me grounded and believe in who I am. I’ve tried everything I know how and I still feel numb.

I think that joker was from years ago, before I was diagnosed with anything. Have a field day with that one. This might be my solution to express my frustrations for a bit until I can cast them down. Hope you are doing well, man. I’m working on doing better; I promised myself I would and this is so much progress in such a short time. Thanks for always listening.

~TBA

Puddles.

Why not begin this account with a bit of philosophical rambling from the the ADHD author who penned it? One day I was walking across a North Dakota street to the store around the corner from my sister's house were I'd taken up residence when, all at once, I looked down at a puddle left over from a rain.

This got me to thinking: at what point in my life did I stop playing in puddles? At what time in all our lives does the nature of puddles change? I propose here that puddles may be used to mark the passage of time.

During the childhood years those little collections of mud infused rain water are a source of gaiety, of entertainment. We laugh and splash our siblings, friends, or other relations in innocent glee. I sure know I did. Then one day that all goes away. Puddles become a nuisance. They make us slide, they ruin our brand spanking new footwear, or they are splashed upon us by passing cars in a seemingly malevolent mockery of our own childhood splashes.

When in a person's life does this happen? That's hard to answer because it's such a gradual and organic process most of us don't notice. I noticed, for I fancy myself something of a philosopher. I wonder what happened to my childhood love of puddles.

I've died and come back( that when I was only a dopey toddler). I've been in and out doctors offices. I went to college. I've made friends that became brothers, brothers who became write offs, and seen at least one write off get his crap together.

As of the time I Penn or rather type these words I've escaped from a purgatory that almost ended my life via my own hand. I've been a paraeducator trying to help kids who didn't always want it. Only God who brought me back from the otherside knows what I'll be from there. You'll see a little of what I am. a little of what I'd rather not have been and perhaps we can solve that riddle of the relationship of puddles to the changing of life's fickle seasons.