Friday

A vague thought rises to the surface of my hazy dream, it’s a bit bright out, my alarm should be going off any minute now, or maybe it should have by now? I reach for my phone, but it’s not there. I grope blindly to find a plastic line, pull up my cell by its charging cord, and press the screen to see the alarm going off, on silent? It’s an hour later than it should be.

Fuck, I don’t have time for this. There is always too much to do.

I texted my mom that I’m running behind. She responds with K. So now I feel the weight of her waiting on me. Like I’ve done something wrong like I’m adding to her pain because I’m some awful inconsiderate daughter who cared too much about going out last night. Because I didn’t try to wake up earlier today. Or maybe I took too long in the shower. And it’s a situation where it’s better to just hold your breath and wait for it to be over, because Mom’s the one who carries the bulk of our family’s burden, taking care of grandma who can barely walk, barely make it to the bathroom, can’t do anything to take care of the house anymore, and my aunt Bonita who’s deteriorated to the point of being legally incompetent. She can’t manage basic things anymore, like making a phone call, her mind is so soft she can no longer keep track of numbers, they dissolve and disappear lost and forgotten like tissue full of snot and tears tossed in the river.

So now I feel guilty because sometimes I like to go out and have a drink after a really long day, at the end of my school week. And because I don’t like spending so many nights alone in my room. But I how can I complain? Mom spends her evenings alone after working full time as a busy underpaid receptionist, after spending her one afternoon off, and every weekend, taking care of Grandma and Bonita. She has to mow the yard for two houses.

And now I hate myself for lettering her down by holding her up. For doing something for myself. Being selfish.

And I hate myself again for always putting the happiness of others before my own.

Saturday 

Strange to be back at my mom's house in Dayton. Strange to be in my old bedroom. A place of storage now, the walls around me are closing in, caving in, with stacks and stacks of boxes and crates as full and problematic as my memories of this place. 

It looks different now. The bunk bed is gone. The bunk bed I had into my twenties where I slept up top and stored things beneath me trying to rise above it all. 

I never told my mother I liked the bunk bed because it kept me level with the window. Which was my escape plan for when my brother had a bad episode. Because I was always waiting for his next snap, always braced for it. I locked my bedroom door at night because I was afraid he was going to kill us in our sleep. Or sometimes I left my door open because I was afraid he was going to kill her, and maybe, thought somehow, I could stop that from happening. 

For a period of time, I slept with a baseball bat in my bed. 

Sunday

And so I’m thinking about the drive to and from my mom's house. Seems like no matter what I do I can never make it out farther than an hour away. Like a dog on a tether, I run in a wide arc, swing around, repeat the circle.

The last time I was driving to my mother's house I got a speeding ticket. This was by no means my first.

And so I’m thinking about when I finally moved out for good, when I started going to OSU to finish my bachelor's degree, how on the drive back home from Columbus my heart would start to pound in my chest, the pummeling thump, the taste of metal in my mouth. 

How sometimes I would sit in my car and try to catch my breath, before stepping outside, across the yard, into the house.

Out of all my siblings, I was the one to see the worst of Scotty. I was the only one there at the end.

My mother rents this house, we don’t own it, doesn’t that mean we could leave at any time?

Monday

Back in Oxford, graduate school, a full day ahead of me I am lying on my back staring up at the ceiling. There is little desire within me to get up and climb out of bed. It’s been so long now and yet it still feels surreal, like I am floating through my life in a perpetual state of limbo. I’m already knee-deep in year two, almost done, and yet I never did find footing here, never felt solid, safe, comfortable, or accepted. It doesn’t help that I arrived late, spent my summer crashing at a friend's house two hours north to avoid being homeless or worse, having to move back in with my mother. For year two I now live on the other side of campus. I’m still trying to get used to the new roommates, new neighbors, new roads, new windows.

Getting ready to catch the bus, to go to school, I’m thinking about how I always used to walk. In Elementary, middle, and high school, I mostly walked. It seemed right, natural.

To be honest, I’ve always felt safer outside than inside. Four walls feels like a cage, like a trap. 

I’ve always moved in such a hurry. Always covering ground as fast as my feet can carry me. And I push my own limits again and again. The tightness in my calf is a comforting pinch. 

And still, to this day I prefer to sit at the corner of a table, easy to get away, run away, if I should need to. And I haven’t for so long now. But that instinct is still there. I’m still tense. Still waiting for the next blow. Still braced for impact. Even when there’s nothing there anymore. Now that he's gone we like to look back and say it wasn’t really that bad. Scotty only hit me once, only locked me in the trunk of a car once, only elbowed me in the face during a struggle once. But his threats at times came often. And he broke things, and he mishandled my pets. And I’m sorry but I cannot forget the sound of him stomping down the hallway as I ran for my room terrified he’s beat me like he did his ex-wife, bad enough to do time. Bad enough to scare a child. Scotty was ten years older than me. 

 I think I will always proceed with caution, always feel the need to move fast, the need to run. Like every darkness could be his shadow. 

 Maybe it’s because whenever I see him in my dreams, I forget that he’s dead. Maybe I haven’t got any closure because it was a closed casket. Because I did not go to the hospital. Because I rarely saw him vulnerable. Because I saw him in a rage, eyes bulging, arms swinging, mouth screaming, too many times.

Right now I am outside straddling the line where green meets cement, the peak of the curb. No trees around so I am exposed, alone in the open air with my eyes closed, fists clenched, braced, some weak barricade. Thin wrists covered in scars raise up to hide my face so maybe it’s that I hope no one will recognize me. 

10:10am

As a child, I could never sit still. I have always been an object in motion. In the summertime, the mania flashes through my body like lightning. My feet kick off the ground. I jump out of my seat and bellow loudly. Wild energy fills me, a jet fuel my body learned to produce at a young age in order to run, hide, survive. It bursts out of me shouting out over my friends. I’m like thunder. People shudder and seek cover. 

I’m not always like this. Give it some time and you’ll see. When the cold comes I’ll frost over. I’ll disappear behind a wall of ice. My hot lava blood turns into a slow sleepy slush. A part of me hibernates. You cannot go outside so much in the winter, in Ohio, if it is bitter cold, it’s better to hide.

Spring and Fall fluctuate. The back and forth pull tears me apart on the inside. I get anxious. I am a warm front and cold front colliding. That’s what makes a tornado, that’s what makes a hurricane. 

As a kid I used to pace back and forth across the living room. Back and forth back and forth. And quickly. I have never been a slow walker. I need the ground to slap my feet, rumble. I need to feel the tension in the back of my legs. I need the tight burn of stretched muscle. 

I was probably seven years old. My mother and sisters were watching television. Some program I must found have boring, something I wasn’t interested in. I’d been pacing.

            “Will you stop?” My sister barked.

            “What are you doing?” My mother laughed.

            “I’m… thinking.” I said. The truth was I was imagining. I was having an adventure. Possibly, even that early, I knew it to be making a story. They all laughed at me.

            “You weirdo!” My sister said. “Why do you have to race around the house to think? What do you have to think about?” 

12:00pm

Every day is a new day. There will always be shadows, there will always be tempers and temperatures and everything will always keep changing, and there will always be so much to do. All I can do is my best, charge forward and try to navigate through all these various forces the push, pull, smother, smash, and raw pain of it all.

Can I take some small ounce of pride for having survived this life thus far?

I used to. 

But today I feel collapsed. Ready to be buried in the dirt and forgotten. I am beyond sore, beyond bruised, and broken. I am nothing but scraps dragged across the ground. If I am a stain and you are a shadow then which of us is more real?

Tuesday

I wake up before my alarm goes off. A minute or so that takes me a few seconds to process. Oh, I’m early. So, it feels like I somehow beat the clock across the finish line. And it’s like the universe has given me permission this day to drink my coffee slowly. To stay in bed a moment longer.

 It is a dark-overcast morning. But that is OK. I don’t have to dread the future right now. Completing graduate school, moving back, the inevitable return to restaurants.

No! Not right now! Just coffee good god. Be in the moment. This moment is calm and slow. It’s OK. 

Right now there is no reason to hurry. There is no reason to rush around the house and out the door. No reason to run to the bus stop, weave between students, dart between cars, dash across the street, fly to class as fast as I can. There is no need to run. Nobody to run from. Just stop and breathe. It’s OK.

I lift the coffee to my lips, take a sip, and focus on the warmth in my mouth. I close my eyes and listen to the liquid trickle of my cat's water fountain across the room. Will I meditate and do yoga today? No, probably not. It’s OK. Maybe tomorrow. Every day is a new day.

Wednesday

It’s my day off. I cook an egg for breakfast. And suddenly I am thinking of Scotty and how he would cook breakfast for me and Mom. Sometimes he’d use so much grease the food came out dripping. At the time we complained about it behind his back. But now I’m thinking about the fact that he learned how to cook on the grill at a dinner, in a restaurant, at work. Because his grandmother was a traditional woman who wouldn’t think to teach a boy how to cook, and my mother was always too busy. I’m thinking about how he’d get up extra early, make breakfast, set up it presentable on a tray, with a fork on a napkin, and a glass of orange juice. On Mother’s Day, he’d pick flowers from the neighbor’s yard, put them in a vase, set them on the tray too, and carry it ever so carefully down the hallway so that Mom could have breakfast in bed. 

He did handmade cards for every occasion. Scotty could draw, color, and letter very well. He made them personable, sometimes funny, often quite sweet. He’d tell me he loved me, he told me he was proud of me for going to college when nobody else did. 

When I moved back into my mom’s house after working in Walt Disney World for six months he made a big sign that said Welcome Home! and blew up balloons. And on our birthdays he’d cook us our favorite diners. He’d use his food stamps for the ingredients. And at the first of the month, when the social security money came in, sometimes, he’d order delivery.

All that started when Scotty was a teenager. As he saw Mom struggle to feed four children alone. He got a job as early as he could going straight for restaurants. He fed us from that dinner. Probably used so much oil because that’s how much it took on the big grill. My brother was like that always too big, too much. He felt things deeply. He cared. He wanted to make sure his little sisters never had to go hungry the same way he did growing up.

One Mother’s Day, Scotty made Mom breakfast at five in the morning, he’d been up all night drinking, but he still wanted to do something special for her. He woke Mom up with it, so early on one of her only days off work. The plate dripped onto her bedspread. Mom, half awake, made an offhand comment about the eggs being greasy. So Scotty threw the whole plate across the room making a mess and breaking the glass. And one time my sister refused to eat what he’d made for her birthday so he threw the whole pan out the back door, into the yard. She stopped coming to moms house for her birthday. For those last few years, the only time she ever stepped foot in our home was for Christmas. And our other sister lived in Florida. So mostly it was just me, Mom, and Scotty.

Thursday

The first thing I do is call Ohio Job and Family Services. They put me on hold. I’m trying to get back on food stamps. Because I wasn’t able to pick up as much work this Summer as I should have. Because the school pays me just enough to get by, not enough to live.

But I guess I didn’t wake up early enough, didn’t call them soon enough, because I’ve already been on hold for going on two hours. And now I wonder how long Scotty had to wait on hold for food stamps? How many times and for how many hours did he have to call? Money for food that he spent largely on us. Prepared with care, for us, for me. I have a hard time imagining him being patient, but he must have been, had to have been.

 And now I worry that I saw him, at times, in a false light. Did I let the bad episodes paint his image, in my mind, darker than it was? How could I think that of my brother? How could I imagine him capable of hurting our mother? He only raised his fists to me a few times and it was never that bad.

 But this time I will myself to remember another morning. And now I remember how scary he could be, was sometimes, how he hurt Jamie, the love of his life, black bruises like blooms upon her soft pink skin. I tell myself I was too young to help anyone at the time. The truth is I was too scared. I was in high school when Scotty and Jamie lived together in our house. But I was six years old when he locked me in the trunk of a car and left me there for hours. And even younger when he shot me in the back with a BB gun. But he also gave me candy bars. He took me fishing. 

 So maybe I never understood because nothing was ever explained. And maybe it’s hard because it’s so contradictory. A warm front and a cold front at odds will never bring peace. I’m still the youngest child pacing back and forth, trying to work my little brain into making sense of it, the instinct to keep in motion at all times like a moving target can’t get hit, like he’s still there, hair-pin trigger waiting to blow. And maybe it’s OK to just be how I am because maybe it’s not my fault. And maybe it's ok to feel confused because he said and did a lot of things. If motion feels good then it’s good. It’s OK. I don’t have to have a reason to walk fast. It’s OK. It doesn’t matter. Speed, destination, it’s all just an excuse for momentum. Rock me to sleep. Wake up, move with the sun up and over the curves of the earth, forever roaming like a vagabond, homeless. It doesn’t matter. It’s OK. No matter how fast I move, I’ll never really escape.

I breathe in the taste of dust, cat hair, feel static, familiar. Right now it is a warm morning. So I’ll forgive myself this time, leaning back in my bed, as the blue glow from the light outside edges into my room from behind a heavy curtain.