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goodluckclove · 9 months ago

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The Archivist no. 1 - Control

so fuck it i'm trying this anyway. here's a long-form, but ultimately singular piece i wrote trying to process the singular Terrible Event of my upbringing. if unaliving stuff is triggering for you now you shouldn't read this.

i'm not going to do this that often because it's nice to work things out in my head but holy shit this was weird to come back to. if someone finds it relatable in that oh hey your shit sucked too and you survived huh?? way i'll get into it again at a later time.

otherwise uh. yeah. enjoy? legit though read the tags before you do this i don't want anyone freaking out.

The Archivist no. 1 – Control

Mom wasn’t sleeping much in the nights before she killed herself. It wasn’t unusual given her rampant insomnia. Dad would pass out in the bedroom, and I would come out of my room at the end of the hall tin the middle of the night and find her watching bad crime dramas and reading the news on her iPad. I didn’t sleep much back then either, I guess.

Sometimes I would sit with her for a while, but the shows didn’t interest me much. Mostly I’d make a joke and continue to the kitchen to grab a snack before going back to my bedroom to keep on writing. I was almost sixteen years old and I had completed two novels that stood, unread, on an elephant’s graveyard of abandoned projects. So it goes.

Near the end of summer I came down with some sort of head cold. I woke up in the middle of the night, feverish and frustrated, and went out into the hall to see if Mom would be awake.

Time flickers and I’m lying on the couch with my head in her lap. She’s stroking my hair. She’s telling me that in the morning we’re going to go out in the mall and she’s going to buy me new pants. I don’t know why she told me that. I don’t know if it was a lie. She solved a lot of problems by shopping for clothes, so it sounded like something she would say. Mom even insisted in a voice that hung quiet in the dark that we would go to Macy’s, a rarity when she only ever bought my wardrobe from Goodwill.

I believed her then because I was a child and I loved my mother. I was sick and I loved my mother. I was looking forward to her buying me new pants.

Did she know then? I don’t know. She’s had two rounds of electroshock therapy since then, so the memory has been thoroughly wiped from her brain. It’s just gone. That moment exists solely in my own recollection, which is barely better than it never existing to begin with.

Later that morning she left saying she had some errands to run. I didn’t think much of it at the time. I had no way to, really, being that they had me on nine hundred milligrams of Seroquel at the time – one hundred more than the recommended dose for an adult man. The mornings left me in a sticky daze and I usually wasn’t able to gain any lucidity until a few hours after I woke up.

Once that happened I felt a little stirred by the circumstances. Mom had errands? What errands? She didn’t do the grocery shopping, she had my brother and I make that trip every week. She didn’t have a job or friends to meet. More than that, her agoraphobia crippled her at times and made leaving the house for anything a feat. But no, she just let for errands and told me that as if it was the most normal thing in the world.

I told myself it was fine.

When I texted her a few hours later she didn’t respond. I called her after that and she didn’t answer. I think I called her a few times.

She didn’t come home at all that day. I remember feeling the dread clinging tight to the top of my rib cage like something toxic just about to drip. It was a feeling I didn’t know how to communicate, and in retrospect I know now that it is a deeply-rooted instinct from my childhood. The warped insight that tells me that, when Mom leaves under mysterious circumstances, or when she leaves after you make her made – she’s going out to drink.

But that couldn’t be it. Mom was sober now and proud of it. She marked her sobriety date as Cino de Mayo and laughed every year at the irony. Mom was sober now. Things were different.

Dad came home from work and I was lingering in the living room, standing guard like an anxious animal. My older brothers were in their bedroom, on their laptops, no knowledge of the panic I was feeling.

Dad greeted me and asked where Mom was. In a voice that mimicked neutrality I said that she left to run errands. He took that with a nod and went to the backyard. I don’t know why he did that – he wasn’t smoking anymore, but by this point he might’ve been using e-cigarettes. Or maybe he was just enjoying the evening air. I just know I was sitting inside the house, very aware that the only other adult I knew was outside, and my mind was racing.

Do I tell him? Should I tell him?

Eventually I opened the sliding glass door and stood in the kitchen until I drew his attention. In my imagination he sees the look on my face and knows that something is wrong. I don’t know if this is true.

“You have to look for Mom,” I said.

He did. No questions asked. I didn’t linger over that at the moment, but thinking now I know that must mean that he understood what was happening. He wasn’t surprised.

Mom had no intention of taking me to Macy’s.

I don’t know what I did while he was driving around looking for her. I don’t really have a clear playback of finding out what happened. The extent of my trauma has severely limited what I am able to remember, and for this specific part of my life what I know happened now is influenced heavily by the many times my Dad recounted it to me.

A few years later he took me for ice cream and we sat in the parking lot to eat it, staring out at a night bathed in orange streetlamp haze. At one point he put his cup on the dashboard and pointed.

“You see that motel?” He said, drawing my attention to a nondescript line of buildings. “That’s where I found her.”

He recognized her car in the parking lot. The manager didn’t want to tell him what room she was in, (“I bet he was worried I’d catch her in an affair,” he’d remark darkly) but I imagine he explained the situation and got the help he needed. Apparently they found Mom after she took all of our medication. Well, I don’t know if it was all our medication. I just know that she had taken my psych drugs, as well as my dad’s and her own, and decided to mix them with a six pack of beer.

Did someone specify it was beer at some point after that? I don’t know why I would know that. I also don’t know why I would assume it was that over any other type of alcohol.

My Mom took my medication to end her life.

It didn’t work, though. Dad told me later that she died for a little over a minute.

I told them I was worried about taking more Seroquel than both of them put together and they promised me it was very hard to overdose on Seroquel.

Was she counting on that? Or did she forget?

I never liked anything at Macy’s.

At some point I found out that Mom was stable and in the hospital. She was in a coma. In my head I have a memory of standing at the kitchen counter and watching my father call Kaiser to get a new supply of all of our medication. He wrote them all down, every name and their proper dosage. I listen to him speak kindly to the pharmacist on the other end of the line.

“The thing is,” he explains, “we packed to come home from vacation, and our luggage got lost on the flight…”

Inside myself is a vacancy so haunted that ghosts are too afraid to dwell there.

Dad ends up sleeping on the couch. He does not want to sleep in an empty bed. He tells me that he will leave in the morning to go back to the hospital, but he just wants to get a little bit of rest. Once he closes his eyes I slide a quilt above his sleeping body and put on a Jim Gaffigan stand-up special that I only process every third word of.

I don’t know where my brothers are in this memory. I am not thinking about that when it is happening. I’m thinking of my father, and my mother, and how if I didn’t tell my father to look for her he might’ve waited and ended up too late.

Years later I will learn that my father never told my brothers, or my older sister who lived on her own, that Mom tried to kill herself. I can’t bring myself to say tried – she succeeded, and was only brought back by the marvels of medicine. While I am thinking of my mother’s death none of them have any idea what is happening.

I am the one that told my siblings how our mother died for a moment years prior. We learn at the same time that they had no idea. When I ask my father why I was the only one he told about her death and not them, he told me that I agreed they shouldn’t find out.

When did this happen? I was fifteen years old and I have no knowledge of this conversation. Was I there? Or was only my body present and he decided that was enough.

Mom wakes up after three days. My sister joins my brothers and myself and we drive to the hospital to visit her. I can’t imagine what I am feeling. Maybe everything, maybe nothing. I remember riding up the elevator and going down the hall, and then my brain skips again and I am standing at my mother’s hospital bed.

She looks sick and she looks the same. There are tubes. I think she’s probably sedated. She is my mother and I love her and she took all of my medication to try and kill herself.

“Why did you do it?” I ask her, voice soft. I am trying very hard not to cry.

Mom smiles. I don’t know if this is true. She smiles as if doesn’t realize that she didn’t stay dead. When she speaks her voice wavers, faint and weakened.

“I didn’t feel – like I had control,” she pauses to catch her breath. “So I did this...and now I do!”

She is pleased like a child presenting an interesting leaf. My mother is proud of what she was able to accomplish. In some part of my brain that hasn’t fully learned how to speak up enough to defend itself, I absorb the knowledge that she has told me something that will ruin me time and time again for the rest of my life.

All of that is gone now. Mom doesn’t remember, and Dad has decided that it is our job to make sure she never has to.

I wonder if he heard what she said to his child. If he is able to process the deep, permanent damage his wife has done in two simple statements. A sympathetic part of me says that I wouldn’t know what to do in his shoes either, but is that true? I’m not sure.

Pull the child aside in the hallway of the hospital. Take them by the shoulders and lean in close so you have a semblance of privacy.

She is sick, I would say. She is unwell and she is lying. When she is like this, you do not have a mother.

Most of the time I do not have a mother.

When I am in the psych ward after my own suicide attempt my parents are the only ones I allow to visit me. I love my parents and my mother sometimes offers to take me to Macy’s. My Dad crafts little notes like cootie catchers written in red ink. I peel tangerines from the bowl in the cafeteria while they tell me what the dog is doing. He does not treat me like I am sick. Perhaps he considers me more suitable for survival.

I wonder if Mom does what Dad did to me in the parking lot with the ice cream. Does she press her palms into the sheets of her bed and think this is where my child came and told me they tried to drown themselves.

She probably doesn’t. I don’t think she remembers anymore.

I don’t think about the night Mom killed herself as often as I used to, and when I do I don’t really feel anything anymore. As I heal I’ve been warned that things might emerge, and that time might actually make the memory more vivid instead of distant. I don’t know what to say to this. When the possibility emerges I just tell myself that all of that is gone now. It isn’t real.

By this time next year my parents will have no way to find me. I’ve taken control my own way – not through death, but by cutting them off entirely. Whether that is something they understand, or even remember, is not my problem anymore.

#writing #writeblr #writing community #writers on tumblr #queer writers #actually writing #creative writing #memoir #non fiction #tw sui attempt #tw sui vent #tw family trauma #tw family abuse #tw family death #tw family problems #tw childhood trauma #archivist

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