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survivorsupport · 7 years

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Gasoline&Harmonies

Ever bought something brand new from the store, only to arrive home and tear open the packaging like a salivating canine and find that your freshly acquired and carefully wrapped possession was already cracked, scuffed, shredded? I know that you have, and within that knowledge I am equally as aware (if not more so) of the fact that though your face may or may not have betrayed the holocaust of anger roiling around inside of your chest at your misfortune, the great fire was burning bright and hot.

But I wonder if you know what it is like to realize that the shiny cellophane paper printed with raving reviews of its supposedly phenomenal contents is you, your own body, mind, heart and soul? I wonder, dear one, if you could ever begin to understand what it feels like to have your life inside of a cardboard box sent in the post marked as FRAGILE: HANDLE CAREFULLY, and then crushed mercilessly under someone else’s foot.

Typing this now, my mouth fills with a faint sour taste, one akin to noxious chemical burn searing canker sores that would never fully heal to the roof of my mouth and destroying my esophagus completely. It is a taste that I know, a flavor my palette only encountered once yet never, ever forgot. Gasoline, in a metal cup that you served me in a ditch just far away enough from society that no one could hear me scream, no one could bear total witness to the inhumanity of your callous actions. An inhumanity that was brushed underneath the rug that we never moved when we vacuumed, underneath my bed where I hid my favorite toys, begged of the dust bunnies to watch over them (the way the man they sing the songs about, the reason we dye Easter eggs and eat chocolate bunnies was supposed to watch over me).

It is not an evil thing, gasoline. Rather it is an incredible accelerate, a catalyst to the inevitable demise of the stratosphere. I thought that my throat must feel exactly the way the ground does as a vehicle speeds over it at 90 miles per hour, burnt rubber. I think that day was when my vocal chords were forever altered in a way so that I no longer could sing beautiful hymns. Irreparable damage done to the tone of my melodies that did not make it so that I was never able to sing again, instead the defamation of my insides and my purity was mutated to a frequency only certain ears can hear.

Sadly, flammable chemicals were not the worst horror I would ultimately bear.

I will not go into detail about the things that took place under the blanket of darkness. An artificial darkness created by off-white walls that mother insisted were painted with actual top-coat and not just a thick layer of primer. A sheet of white color that remains sticky even after it has been drying for an impossible amount of time, an avalanche of snow so cold and lackluster, its ivory body streaked with dirt, caked with mud, and littered with debris. The walls were a color that somehow made even direct sunlight feel like cave darkness, like an eternal winter spent in Alaska.

A single window, above either my bed or yours, my mind’s lockbox has mostly blurred the memory of the iciest, most lonely and hopeless chrysalis my caterpillar alter ego would ever know, icier than any place meant for a creature meant to grow their wings out properly. I was forced into a morbid metamorphosis that irrevocably warped my ability to fly, and while almost the entirety of my essence had transformed into a new being completely, a tiny slice of my heart, mind, body and soul were cryogenically frozen.

There will always be a memory, a whisper of the frost that will never die, that I can never truly kill, no matter how many ways I try. In between my ears is quite a loud and busy place, often as I tell a story the words that I was so sure of a moment before dissipate completely into the foggy layer of my neurological stratosphere that hangs just above my temples, though only on the inside. This fog is not unlike the kind that plagues the Northern Pacific, even on Independence Day the brightest of any and all star rays cannot do any damage beyond faint and miniscule Swiss cheese holes in this pseudo-atmospheric reminder.

Through the fog, I once heard a child’s voice, a lullaby so sweet and delicate I dared not breathe. Faint at first, willfully reasoned away as the wind catching chimes on the front porch on a particularly stormy day. But the soft and supple nursery song then grew to a dull yet cutting roar that could not be drowned out and could never be mistaken. Notes lilting through the tunnels of my nasal cavity, the complete and all-encompassing harmony healing the raw, red, bloody trails that carried oxygen to my brain. I had not realized just how much time had passed since the last clean breath I inhaled had filled me with the human body’s least noticed and yet most sacred necessity. But we tend only to notice oxygen when we are deprived of it. And the way a song on the radio reminds you of a break-up or a road trip, this tune conjures up the feeling of suffocation, tearing in every way possible, skin or soul, or heart. I may be alive, but there is a part of me that knows the way it feels to truly suffocate.

Cracks are okay, they let the light in.

Darling I know your scars, as I’m the one who received them.

My tears fill bottomless wells, somehow you prefer dying of thirst.

I’m sorry you’re throbbing- but I felt the worst.

I know that you love to read, escape to Neverland

where you fight off pirates in your sleep,the floor hasn’t ever met Tinker’s feet

and you grew up nice and balanced

(although if that had happened we’d likely never meet)

Even still you love to scribe, your version of events was how you survived

you wrote infinite alternate endings where I stayed alive.

But please don’t disrespect me, my ashes deserve the memory

of recognizing our travesty, still you choose to live in the desert

sand every way that you can see.

And of course no one ever drowned in the desert, So you wonder how you cannot breathe?

Return with me, for once, though the theme of my lullaby is my pain.

The setting of our horror film, that primer coated bedroom,

filled with such a humid inhumanity-

stealing the last spark from my fading hopeful eyes-

summertime, or hurricane season, no one heard (or at least pretended not to)

the caterpillar’s final cries.

Instead you grew up to hide just like I did, in the folds of the dark blue curtains,

Pink insulation peeking out from behind them, killing the last shred of possibility,

That there could ever be light in this place.

You call that cave a chrysalis- there’s been fiction shelved with fact.

The cold prison where I died (and you grew) was a pupa.

Moths are drawn to the light, For Godsakes, a child would have gotten that right.

Most of my senses are dulled now, as I have worn away my nerves with all the ways I tried to numb wounds that were much too severe for my psyche to bear. The cruelest truth is that my blanket of chemical amnesia ended up taking my capacity for any feeling at all (especially joy) and leaving only the softest whisper of emptiness as my homeostasis. A sound so low that it is felt and not heard, the hiss of the horror haunts me no matter what time of year. I wonder if you know what I mean when I say that every part of who I am disappears in between those ivory lines or dissipates along with supple, serpentine trails of smoke. It is as if the world as I once knew it still exists all around me, present in body. Shades of red and pink muscles stretched across bones, covered in skin and adorned with scars I’ve never seen before and wavy lines on my fingertips that are unique to me, and only me. I know a certain secret that is written within the vices long since tucked in the box labeled “taboo” and hidden in the back of morality’s messy closet.

Visualize a time lapse, mental moving pictures of smoky garages, dried herbs and blown glass, red eyes and a cough so bad that I threw up several times. Then blue footballs and yellow submarines that carried me with velvet arms into a living purgatory, an absence of all memory. Fermented fruits that tasted worse than even the contents of that gas can did and burn just the same way all the way down my body. Ivory lines that numb my tongue and shake the world, then icy ones melted in the most unnatural and revolting igloos. Finally the taste of toasted marshmallows on my tongue, roasted by hand with no stick, instead foil underneath. Does this make you feel uncomfortable, the details of all the awful things I’ve done to because of the awful things you’ve done to me?

I grew into a creature who I wasn’t meant to be, somehow with your filthy hands you changed my very DNA. So, I became a moth instead of a butterfly- and all we seek is light. A moth is desperately pinging from streetlight to strobe-lights, looking for a source that will make up for all the darkness faced alone in that prison. I sought it through every facet I could find. I gave my body, and I gave my mind. I gave my money and I gave my pride. I gave the love I could have saved for myself and I loaded up the rig with it. I traded green papers in parks for bags of white, step into my teacup and spin around all night. That’s all I’ve ever done, is spin, and I don’t know how to stop, a carousel in Hades, attended by my flesh and blood. I can’t remember a time when I did not feel alien, empty.

I would not say you ruined me, as without you I would not exist. Instead you ruined who I might have been, how I might have lived and loved and lost. Certainly, you were the first person to teach me what it felt like to be lost, and I remain that way to this day.

Our family will not talk about it, Daddy even asked if I made it all up. They still bring you up at holidays, though they know if you’re attending I will not be. You called me on my birthday last year, and I wasn’t even disgusted. I was at a loss, and I still am. I do not know where the story ends of how I lost my innocence. What I do know that it’s my duty every day to live, not as if I have never tasted gasoline, but to use mouth wash every morning, look into my hazel eyes and remember that there is nothing but honor in being a survivor. Every day I remind myself that though my melodies are off-key, they are notes as beautiful as the ones Orpheus played on his lyre, and I feel the singing girl in my head float softly closer and closer to the light. One day soon she will be free, I will be free, and you will be damned to hell, or whatever horrid after-life that you deserve. I sleep well at night now, though I cover my windows with blinds.

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