remember to forget

in the house i grew up in (the sixth one, anyway) there were endless bookshelves filled with all sorts of things: Jane Austen, the Odyssey, and many classics like that, but also the biographies of local authors and musicians, self-bound books of college literary magazines, historical works about leaders of movements, of civil rights and of whistleblowers and dissonants. and tucked in every available crevice were childrens books of reflecting all the same things - 'On the Day You Were Born', 'The Snowy Day', 'Tango Makes Three'. My world was split so distinctly; time spent in this book lovers' paradise where nothing was off limits and all we had to do was ask was a stark contrast to the environment where all things, right down to the food we ate & shoes we wore each day, had to be approved of.

next to the overflowing shelf by the floor, leaning in the gap between the wood and the clay of an overflowing plant that lives in my mind to this day, there was a photo album. i used to love flipping through it - cream and lace, satin on the cover, with a thick binding and yellowed pages and a blue ink mark on the bottom left corner of the inside cover. i sat for hours, the ones i wasn't reading, running my fingers over the texture and flipping through the plastic-film covered photos. some, i was told, were from college - Mexico City, 1989. that girl just there - yes, her - she was the only one who didn't get sick on that first day from the adjustment to the water, new microbes in a new environment. they explored and climbed and met people and ate and laughed, and my mother returned with a beautiful Aztec calendar that never got hung but nonetheless lived on top of that same bookshelf, staring out at us as the years went by.

these pictures were fine, enjoyable - but what I really loved was the photos of the wedding. i'll never know why she still had them. maybe my fascination was morbid, maybe it was born of plain curiosity. it wasn't until i was 14 that it clicked for me that the wedding in the photos was hers. the bride - that was her. because it wasn't, really. she never talked about the wedding except to say that it happened on an old plantation, as so frequently does in the South, and that my father chose her dress. in other words, it was cursed from the very start.

for my mother, that's a big deal - not to talk about something. her adhd meant lots of things growing up. it meant i got left places, it meant i waited after school and practice and parties for hours at a time, and i waited in cars for hours-long searches to find keys and glasses and credit cards and a driver's license that never seemed to be where she'd left them. but mostly, it meant that she shared a lot - she could talk for hours, and frequently does. her wedding to my father is one thing she never discusses. i wonder if it's because, like me, she has a hard time recognizing the woman in those photos. they're both beautiful, but there are significant differences. that woman is happy, not just in laughing through the pain. her eyes smile. the two kids holding her hands, don't look like a burden. but most importantly, that woman has never been hit. she has never been punched around or controlled or degraded or abused. she has never put herself between her child and a man, the same child that existed in those photos, even if invisible still.

i wish i had gotten to know that woman. i wished it back then, flipping through that album, too. i'd take deep breaths as though it might be possible to inhale memories of happiness i never got to see. but always, it failed. i was mad, once, that she hadn't left earlier. she told me she almost did, when I was one, before the last three siblings. my father smashed a glass picture frame above my head. she hid money in a separate bank account, she almost put a down payment on a little brick house on the corner of a street, far enough away where he might not find her, find us. i asked her why she didn't. she told me that their couples counselor convinced her not to leave. i nodded silently. that night, i climbed out the basement window, the one from my bedroom connected to the well, and i ran to the trees, and i screamed. it was eleven o'clock and curfew was at twelve, and a cop drove past. years of experience stopping the tears. training your body to be okay and show no signs of weakness at the drop of a hat comes in handy.

i smiled waved and pointed at the house when he asked where home was. he'd seen me around the neighborhood before and let me walk back without knocking on the door. or maybe, i always told myself, he remembered any one of the calls made there. maybe it'd been him when my sibling knocked my mom (and her tooth) out cold with a tupperware at 6 years old, when one of them tried to climb out the attic window, when another tried to jump out of a moving car on the highway, when two of us ran away and hid for hours, when a fist met a head that was punched through the wall, when the school sent an officer to arrest my mom at my birthday party for bringing us late to school one too many times - when, when, when. maybe he just didn't want to deal with it. it preserved my role as "the good kid," anyway.

when i got back i did what i've always done - i pretended that none of it was real, just like i'll do when i finish this writing. and i wish i could say that i went to sleep and dreamt of a wedding that my parents existed in but the reality is that i can't tell you. i've forgotten most of the memories, now, and in my darkest moments i wish as hard as i can that i could forget more. but that photo album is still there. i can't visit that place - my now-adult siblings echo the actions of a father who did not know what love was. i cannot stand to see it. but every time i call my mom, i wonder if she ever opens the pages, just like i did, and wishes for her life to be as innocent and carefree as it once used to be.