Blast from the Past

A few weeks ago, my step sister (my step mother's daughter) came down and dutifully sorted through her mother's belongings, seggregating out those items we could take to a local charity thrift shop. My step sister put those items that would not be accepted by thrift shop into three green plastic trash bags. My dad insisted that I sort through these bags and remove anything that we could burn in the incinerator in the back yard. I've put this off and put this off and put this off. I was hoping that he would just relent and let me put the whole kit and kaboodle out on the curb. But now. This weekend, he prevailed on me to hold to my agreeing to sort through it.

And so I did.

Mostly--to use the Scottish word--it was crep. Although I did find two Kennedy half dollars, and two looseleaf binders. And the looseleaf binders contained my journal (a sort of proto-Singletails, if you will) from high school.

What were they doing there?

Welllll... One of the seminal points in my development as a writer was when my step mother found and read my journals in high school. At that time, our relationship was not good. And I had a lot to say about her that wasn't particularly favorable. I came home from my summer Drivers Ed lesson (or something), and when my father picked me up, he told me to 'prepare myself.'

There was nothing I could have done to prepare myself for that. I can see it so clearly in my mind. The confrontation took place in the living room. I could hardly get in a word edgewise. At one point, we coolly told each other that we hated each other. From that point on, the gloves were off. She did whatever she could to torment me. I did whatever I could to torment her.

A few years later, as a sophomore in college, I wrote her a letter before I went home for Thanksgiving. I said that enough was enough. I respected her, and I apologized for everything I had done to her, which I acknowledged was wrong and unfair. I hoped that we could set off on new footing. The letter meant a lot to me, and we managed in the years that followed to build first a civil, and then a warm, relationship.

But there were those journals. I stopped my sorting, sat on the floor, and read them cover to cover.

The first thing that struck me was that I was a lot more balanced than the offense that she took warranted. A couple of nasty jibes here and there, but overall, it was just a one-sided argument, probably written because I lost all my arguments with her.

But the thing that really floored me was the Me that was in there. The voice. It hurt to read it, right down in my gut. I adopted the voice of an Agatha Christie protagonist. (Not a Poirot or Miss Marple mystery, but one of the stand-alone novels.) It was sort of plucky and long-suffering. Self-involved. And painfully precocious. Oh. My. God.

I was so self-conscious. And so miserable. Spilling Bic pen after Bic pen of ink trying to figure myself out, trying to determine what would make me happy, floating trial baloon after trial baloon, and shooting down every one. I wanted independence. I was able to achieve some modicum of popularity and self-confidence at school by aping the with-it and together adults I came in contact with at the restaurant in New Hope where I worked. But it was all false and forced. And I longed, at times, for a Lover. Although I tell myself I've never been lonely, I guess I was painfully lonely. Perhaps it was at that point when I stopped being lonely, when I shut off and shut down that part of myself that longed for Another.

And here's something interesting. A poem. Is this mine? Did I write this? Did I copy it from somewhere? Some of the language and the tropes are not too shabby. Could it have been me? It must have been plagiarism, but I can't for the life of me think what the source would be...


Suffering is my distant cousin
I have heard of him
I have met him
But never shared his house
Some may call this chance.
But I cry "Deprivation"! [SIC]
It is the experience I lack
The day
Through which I slept.
Should I start in life
I would be unprepared.
Life, the pedagogue, has
Missed a lesson.
My selfishness asks
For an exercise.
For a saving rope
In the pit
For a life jacket
On the swell
For a mountain
With a cleft
My being cries
For submergence in
Magma.
Biographer:
I pray you find
In my life
The chapter in red ink
Written on some prison wall
And if it be my final chapter
My death will leave me
Pure and Whole.

Whoa.

How about that, huh?

Probably there were more than a few men out there who would be willing to give sweet sixteen me a taste of some suffering, but the internet hadn't been invented then.

But I swear... "For a life jacket/On the swell/For a mountain/With a cleft," that's not too bad, is it? Alas, the poem is rife with what is known in poetics as the 'Pathetic Fallacy,' attributing human traits to non-human entities (E.g., the storm raged), and we try to avoid that. And that apostrophe (also from poetics, addressing someone or something not there) to my biographer. That's a little much.

Here's some more...

To be happy--
Stable place to live; stable job; good, stable friends; option to travel once in a while; a lover; independence, an extended womb, method of gaining release from here, it looks like this:
1.) I won't work at the same job for more than ten years at most.
2.) I want to live in other placess--Boston, New York, San Francisco, here, but not HERE, Europe. Although I will eventually meet someone and settle down, this won't be until I'm thirty or more.
3.) I've got to fre myself from being responsible to others for a while.

Rx: Forty Days in the Dessert!!!

that's it that's it that's it that's it!

Nothing permanent, just 40 days. Break all ties for 40 days. Depend on ME for 40 days. Be a complete independent adult for forty days.
How?
When?
Where?

As it turned out, that would be called 'college.' Kinda. I didn't realize it then.

Geez.

It's all there. It all comes flooding back.

Huh.

Thanks, Step Mother. What you did to me back then was purely abusive. Wrong wrong wrong. It still hurts. But in a strange way, you've given me this gift, this weird correspondence with a me that I had forgotten about.

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