I am seven. It is the year when I began to realize that something was not only very wrong, but very abnormal. It was also the year in which I discovered that abnormal was anything but acceptable. The fault line between normal and abnormal becomes shaky, just as shaky as the hands of my mother that cocoon my chest into the night. As shaky as the cracking voices of my 14 year old brother screaming at my father in the room across the hallways. Just as shaky as the floorboard that creak when I leave the house to lay in the backyard and watch the stars, confused and a little bit angry that they kept me from sleeping.
I am eight. I think that things are better now. I am wrong.
I am nine. It is the year when I discover that I am not only imprinted with the abnormality of the past, but that I cannot escape the abnormality that continues to follow my daily life. By the time my grandfather is lain into his casket, my grandmother is an empty wreck of the person she used to be, and my brothers don't want to talk to me anymore. My mother spends all of her time at the funeral home, while my father begins to always return home from work late and smelling of cigarettes and sweat and liquor. Hot alcohol reeking on his breath, he lays on the living room carpet, and my brother comes to get me and tells me to watch TV in his bedroom upstairs.
I am ten. My friends tell me that my father is funny. They come to my house to find him stumbling through the kitchen in his bathrobe. He falls to the ground a couple of times, swearing and inebriated. I agree, and laugh, and ask if we can hang out at their house next time. Next time, he tells me that he will drive me to their house, but he drinks too much and passes out on the floor. I tell my friends and they laugh, and come to pick me up, though I don't really want to hang out anymore. I don't want to do anything anymore.
I don't understand why he act this was, but I know that it's my fault, somehow. I know that my parents fight about money, and I cost money. I know that my oldest brother yells at my father for "putting us through this", and if I weren't there to be put through it there would be no problem. I knew that I was always the one to cry, and I still remember the hollow dissociation in my fathers eyes, as he yelled that he was sorry, barely able to form the words between his stained teeth. It is the first time I have ever wanted to die, before I was even able to comprehend that that was what I wanted.
I am twelve. I understand the why's and how's of my family, but not the full picture. I have been so sheltered, so pushed away. I go to my friend's house to eat dinner after working on a school project, and her mother lets me help cook, and they all eat together, at the table. They talk, about work, about school, about the food. It is too salty and hot on my lips, but I am confounded throughout the meal. I watch as my friend laughs with her father, and misery, not jealousy, fills my rib cage. I excuse myself to the bathroom to breathe and cry.
I am thirteen. My father walks out on us for the first time. My mother sits, spaced out and eerily calm, at the desk by the computer, as if she can't see what happened. As if she can't see that he has left. I shake her, and when she finally starts crying, I have already used up all of my tears. My head pangs with misery and my chest throbs with shaky sobs that wont quit. I can't stop hyperventilating, and I have my first panic attack. Upstairs, break down on the bathroom floor, scratching at my arms until they bleed, and then sit in the shower until the red washes out of the water and swirls into the drain. It helps me calm down, and so I keep it up.
I am fourteen. My father has come back, and he has stopped drinking, but his violent outbursts and loud tendencies cause me to shake at the sound of his voice. We visit my grandparents house, and on the drive back home, he takes too many painkillers and is too high to be driving. He drives 100 mph the whole way home, brushing against cars and nearly crashing at least 50 times. I scream, panicking and swearing and kicking and breaking in the backseat. He completely ignores me. When I get home, I throw myself at him, kicking and punching and swearing, foaming at the mouth. He could have killed my family, the only thing I have left; He could have killed me, not that I cared.
When I get into the house, he doesn't enter for a few more minutes. My brother hugs my frame, saying nothing, but drawing my pain out of me. I am weak, collapsed at the knees and in the lungs, breathing heavily but not taking in any oxygen. I peels the blade out of my pencil sharpener and dig it into my flesh while I am showering, and I watch myself bleed out, wishing that life could be so simple as the life blood that drips peacefully from my veins. They itch in the morning, but they calm me down.
I don't go to school for the next few days. I don't sleep through the night for the next few months.
I am fifteen. Everyone is always stressed, and always angry. I understand more than I should about everything that I don't need to know, and I understand nothing about what I need. My parents find my suicide note, and yell at me, and I can't help but to feel angry with them. I can't help but to love the fact that I can cause them anguish as they have caused me. I cut myself because it pulls my red hot anger out through the red hot veins, it calms me down and keeps me numb. I write suicide notes because they wont get me a therapist, burning them or ripping them up after a day. I start counting down the days until I graduate, I start counting down the days until I can get out, I start counting down the days until I die. My friends have begun to notice.
It is my best friend that is by my side more than anyone else. I love her more than I could ever love my family, and she falls down to cry when I tell her that I have cut myself. She runs her hands through my hair and holds me to her, begging me to stop. She writes me poems and notes and leaves them in locker, she texts me late at night on my suicide days for hours.
It is my best friend that holds me as I go limp, the day when I find a noose in the closet of my brothers room. We talk a little bit, but not about it and not more than a few sentences. I understand things a little bit more clearly, and I throw out my razor blades the next morning. It is the year that I stop cutting, and start writing, less suicide notes and more poems, stories, anything else.
I am sixteen. I learn to drive, but every time I get behind the wheel, I flash back to the day in which I almost died in the backseat of my father's car. Hyperventilating, I pull over, and have to tell the driving instructor that I can't do it. He fails me, and I retake segment one three times before I can be confident enough in myself to forget my uneasiness that my father passed onto me. I am able to drive by myself about ten months later, and I don't smile for the picture, because my father has taken me to the DMV and all I can feel is his cigarette smoke and his breath, my cheeks red and embarrassed when the woman behind the desk reminds me to listen to my parents jokingly.
I go to school, tired every day, desperately keeping up the facade and the super responsibility that I have come to demand of myself. Four AP classes, senior band, level 10 gymnastics, and NHS. I get about three hours of sleep every day, and bite the insides of my cheeks until they bleed. I get wary glances from my friends who know what is happening, but aren't sure if they'll be overstepping boundaries by talking to me. They walk on thin ice. I am unpredictable and moody. I am a time bomb.
But I promise them that I will keep going.
I am almost seventeen. My sleep has not improved but my self-esteem has. I feel nothing for my father, and I hate myself for hating him but it's better than hating myself for no reason. I am no longer religious, and my mother cries when I tell her I don't believe in god. I stop lying to myself, accept my past, and make it my life pride to not let it stop me. I will prove the whisky whisperings wrong, I will brush the toxicity from my hair and wash the blood off of my skin. My scars are fading and I no longer sad but determined. My anger fuels me, I am selfish and defensive and over protective. I am a mess of a human being and I don't know whether or not it's my fault or whether or not I'm even a good person.
I cannot be sure of anything. I have never experienced normalcy. I have never understood normalcy, or comfortability, but I know that I crave the impossible touch of each.
I am almost seventeen, and while I am coaching at gymnastics, I see a little girl walk into the gym crying, with messy hair and nail marks embedded into the flesh of her forearm. I do what I wish someone had done for me. I lift her onto my hip and I fix her hair, and disinfect her tiny scratches. I help her paint her nails and ask her how she is doing every day at practice. Slowly, she starts to smile. Slowly, she starts to make friends. When she starts to confide in me, I talk to her mother, and I convince her to listen to her daughter.
I pass it forward. I make sure that she's okay. Her mother writes me a very nice thank you note, and I put it on my dresser, careful to not let my father see it. I count down the days until I get to go to my dream college, I take pride in myself and my grades and my talents and my friends.
I take pride in myself, what I have done, what I have overcome, and what I will grow to be in the future.
I believe that, by this point, god damnit, someone needs to.
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