Her lips quivered, “All along…all along, I believed I would find you.” I laughed because she did. When no one else believed I existed, when I couldn’t be found, she knew she would find me. She never gave up. Many did, but not this Little One – not even for a second.
My step-mom, my two elder step-sisters and elder step-brother, all left in fell swoop. And then, one by one by one by one…my Grandma…my eldest brother…my biological father (although he was a good one to lose)…then the house we all had last been in together…then my elder middle…then the youngest other than me. Slowly stripped so that each remaining piece was depended on that much more than the other and each loss reducing me slowly of everything I knew. Until I desperately clung to the remainder until it too was gone.
Like a vampire, she had been immortalized at 30, frozen in time as a young woman shown in pictures I rarely got to see. Now, in this world in my head, she would age. Her hair would change with the decades, her face would develop laugh lines and eye crinkle indentations.
I wonder how many other people have squirmed in their doctor’s waiting room, feeling the heat of the past on the back of their neck, silently fighting to stay present in the discomfort of the company of strangers.
No longer could I contain my rage and pain for behind closed doors. It ravaged me in front of people – family friends, as well as professionals. My torture had a voice. Sometimes it would be the cries of a child, desperate for assurances and security. Others would be a tortured soul’s screams of anguish.
I described it as wearing an “Edgar suit” – from Men in Black. I wore this human skin to fool people into thinking I was one of them, but if you looked closer, you could see it was a costume. It hid the monster I felt I was. It helped me BE what people wanted in any given moment. It helped me to pretend to be one of them. But no, no I was never like everyone else.
