So I had a sudden inspiration...
There will always be moments in time that you regret, that you wish you could have taken back, or that never really happened. Some of them you truly could have prevented…and others? Well…those moments are best closed shut in the box of trivialities that reside in the back of the human mind. True, inevitably they will come forward, but by then you’ll have the mental capacity to deal with the consequences of someone else’s actions.
I had been playing with my stuffed horse named Lightning, a crocheted farm animal with no real nose and yarn for hair. He’d been my favorite for as long as I could remember… soft to the touch and easily played with. He was the perfect example of the ideal friend…one who didn’t talk back and one who kept my secrets for me. The way I’d touch myself at five, wondering what the hell was going on inside my own head, knowing something was wrong. The way I’d make my best friend Jenny strip in my dormer while I watched, my hand always firmly planted between my legs. I was five, and all I knew was something had sparked my interest…
Though back to the moment at hand?
Lightning ran along the side of my bed, chasing down one of my other stuffed animals when I heard the light sound of my name being called. A rarity to be sure as my parents usually paid so little attention to me that to even hear the sound of my name on their lips was like a prayer you only say once a year. Like some sort of taboo chant that they whispered only when truly desperate. But I heard it, my mother calling for me from the bathroom, the sound of running water in the tub.
Hardly unusual, as I was often called to watch them bathe as a child, never realizing until later that it wasn’t exactly normal to watch your parents do things like take showers and go to the bathroom. But then…very little in my house had ever been normal. It was like a vacuum, like a black hole that sucked in all normalcies and left you feeling as though you’d never lived at all.
I learned to hate the feeling of being normal, knowing that I (in all my emotional instability) would never be able to attain it simply by bad luck and bad planning on my parent’s parts.
I walked down the upper hallway, the bathroom door open at the end…I’d been half praying to see my mother sitting in the bath, using the detachable hose to spray her long brown hair. It was to my supreme disappointment when I discovered that it was my father, leaning over towards the water with my mother washing his back, talking about some inane thing or another. Why the man couldn’t bath by himself was beyond me even as a five year old, being perfectly capable of bathing myself at that point (mostly by necessity) and not wanting the help of my admittedly askew mother.
She’d told me to sit on the toilet, to which I’d shaken my head, adamantly against staying in the bathroom any longer than I had to. I knew better than to think that this would end well…why in god’s name would your mother ask you to sit around and watch your father bathe? But again, things in my house…were never quite as perfect as we pretended to be. And my cracking mind was the least of their worries.
Conserving water she had said, trying to save money she had said. I didn’t want to be a bad daughter and make them go broke now did I? Of course not. But then…what choice did I have really? I sat on the cold toilet seat and stared at the rose colored curtains with a blank stare as my white and purple polka dot shirt was pulled off my body, the violet shorts following them in a heap on the floor. By the time I realized I was being pushed into the water, my vision snapping back to reality and out of the dreams that I forced on myself…well…my mother was long gone.
To be completely honest, I can hardly recall the things that went on when my mother shut the door behind me, leaving me alone with someone who’s only thought was to satisfy himself. I know that I hated having my head pushed beneath the water to muffle my screams, I know I hated crawling out of the pink tinted water, I know I hated looking at my mother who stood motionless at the bottom of the stairs.
I know I learned to hate the people who were supposed to protect me…I learned what ultimate abandonment felt like so early that every abandonment since is like a slap on the wrist, like nothing to me. There really is no feeling like looking into your mother’s eyes, knowing she was giving you up to sin…
But then…one man’s trash is another man’s treasure…
Cherry