I chipped my left front tooth on a metal water fountain at the Santee Drive-in when I was 16.

We were drinking tall cans of Steele Reserve. I can still taste the rusted piss. I would buy a gram of weed and a pack of cigarettes every week with the 20 dollars my mom would give me to buy lunch. They didn’t card at Eastridge Liquor. Instead the Middle Eastern…no, Indian? No…Persian clerk? Would give us whatever we wanted provided he could stuff said bottles of Popov down our shirts and underneath our bras. With his foreign hand he would gently pull the padding of our bras forward to make room for the vodka, and push down on the top of the bottle, wedging it slowly between both breasts.

I would walk out of the liquor store with a couple 5ths of rum and vodka protruding out of my oversized bra, looking like a deformed doll. It was cool though. If you told him you had a boyfriend or walked in with a guy he would leave you alone.

He got arrested eventually.

Before heading to the drive-in, we had to fish for our alcohol since we were fresh out of neighborhood pedophiles for the time being. No one wanted to do it, but someone had to buck up and ask one of the schizoid bums to liberate us.

Whenever we succeeded I felt invincible. Nothing could touch me. I can’t remember the name of the one bum who was always happy to buy liquor for us as long as we bought some for him. He was Rastafarian with matted dreads and clothes to match; he would ride around town on a razor scooter.

I hopped in the trunk with a friend two blocks before the Drive-in, I never had any money left over to pay for a ticket.

I liked sneaking in.

I liked seeing the red tail light shine through the cracks of the trunk, like laser beams out to get me. It was like I won something for once.

Authority didn’t matter. I decided to drink authority, all of it. To smoke it down to the roach. To consume it and make it mine. That’s was the only way I had learned to defeat it, by taking it upon myself. Instead of saying fuck you, I said fuck me and chipped my tooth by falling face first onto a water fountain trying to get to the bathroom.

I didn’t even notice till the next morning. I felt a rough patch on my tooth with my tongue. Sliding my tongue over it again and again until I finally looked at myself in the mirror, and forced a smiled.

My mom said I ruined my perfect teeth.

It is always this time of year where I begin to feel restless. Questioning everything as if nothing is concrete. No matter how certain I was yesterday, I feel curiosity come over me; teetering on the edge of sabotage or freedom….or both.

I guess I like to ruin things. Make things that are simple, complicated. Take others words and make them my own, turn them inside out and flip them around to turn their context into something else. What the something is, I don’t really know. It usually just leaves me feeling alone, like nobody knows me at all. I find it troublesome and entirely inefficient to try to explain your self to someone, especially to the ones who always need answers to justify their own thoughts about who you are.

Who the fuck cares.

Yeah, I hate wearing jeans with flip-flops. I think it’s cliché…

But guess what I did the other day? Yeah I fucking wore flip-flops with jeans.

Are you confused by that? Does that change your view of me? The fact that I say one thing and then do another? Is this trivial or is this bigger?

What do you think of people who do things that they say they don’t?

I use to smash snails with a baseball bat. Now I don’t. Would I do it again? Yes. Should I do it again?–well that’s debatable. But what I’m trying to say is that we all do things that we say we don’t or would never do. Every single person. And sometimes I just get sick of being criticized for it like I’m the only one who does it.

I’m so over it, that now I just do things to fuck with people that can’t lighten up. I love contradicting myself. I love it because I just don’t give a damn anymore.

“Nachos? Yeah I hate nachos. Horrible…So I think I will go with the nachos then.”

She threw herself onto the hardwood floor like a child.

The furniture shook when her body hit the ground.

Of course, he was already out the door by then.

This wasn’t the first time this has happened.

I am Veda in the way that I too can never have enough,
although it is not money, fame, or class that I crave.
It is love,
and I feel so weak because of it.
And you Mildred, you are weak too.

You knead your warm hands into brown pie crust instead of my heart.
You wash away the pesticides on vegetables instead of my hair.
You abandon me for Monty, and throw shiny, pretty things at me to buy my loyalty. Monty bought my loyalty as well. But when you went broke he disappeared, and so did you.

Too guilty to love me, too guilty to hate me. I mirror you, and you mirror me; it’s nobody’s fault.

All the girls in our family are doomed to have this fate tattooed on their foreheads.
Mothers who live for their daughters, daughters who live for their mothers; both hold on so tight they suffocate the other. Both live for her and not themselves.

The only thing deeper than love is pain.

There is no love between Mildred and Veda because love is not a strong enough word to define the bond between a mother and a daughter.

If love isn’t destructive and terrifying or filled with resentment, then there is no love.

We all lined up single file in two lines beside each other on the harbor dock. There was about forty of us. We were the chosen ones. Before we lined up at the dock, we were herded in by guards, there were so many of us dying inside to make the cut. As the guards counted forty heads, they shut an iron gate between the fortunate forty of us, and what was left of the half destroyed world. Hundreds of people stood behind the gate; watching. The guards told us not to look back, not to look them in the eye. But I did. Between the rusted iron rods that separated death from life, I saw a little girl. She was in her mother arms, her mother was staring off into the distance weeping, lost in thought, but the little girl was not lost at all, she stared directly at me. She stared so deep with her shaggy brown bangs half covering her iceberg eyes. I knew what she was thinking. She thought ‘why?’

‘Why had I made it to the other side of the dock and she had not?’ The little girl pleaded with life’s hunger to me, with her eyes, asking me to trade my life for hers. You could tell she had been wearing the same clothes for months, her big toes poked out of her shoes, dangling about while her mother held her; she looked about six. I wanted to trade places with her, but I’m a coward. The truth is, I am just as afraid as she is. I have seen things just as she has seen. I have ran, fought, and almost died to get here. Who are we to decide who gets to live or die? Is it by destiny or sacrifice? Either way, by living, by being on the other side of the dock, I knew I killed her. I killed that little girl. She knew it too, that is why she couldn’t take her eyes off me, nor could I take mine off hers–we both knew what we were doing. The guards told us to line up one by one at the edge of the dock to board the zodiacs that would take us to the ship. It was too dangerous for the ship to dock in the city’s harbor, so they had anchored it way out to sea past the breakers, we would leave in groups.

As the crowd started to push against me and everyone began wiggling their way into the lines as they were told, I took one last look at her and stared at death. It was beautiful and nauseating, I wanted to throw up. But what could I do? I was chosen and she was not. I was on the dock and she just happened to end up on the wrong side of the iron gate. It wasn’t my fault. Any one of these people could have offered to trade places with the girl, but the thought never occurred to them, they were so happy and anxious to escape. I guess the thought had only occurred to me. I guess I was the one that was supposed to save her. And I failed.

As we were grouped onto the large zodiacs that were to transport us to salvation, I stepped onto the wet seat of the boat and took in the salty air, it was misting out. The air stung my nose; I sat down. The engine revved and I promised myself, among these strangers, that I would not look back. I broke that promise about 100 yards out. The city grew smaller behind me and when I looked back the girl and her mother were gone, along with the rest of the hundreds of people behind that iron gate. All that was left in their place was fire and smoke with large plumes of blue and orange rising toward the sky. The guards had bombed them. We were too far away from the harbor now to hear their screams but I heard one. Hers. I lived and she died. I started crying and all the others around me wondered why. Because they knew, and secretly I knew, that death by fire bomb was probably the most humane way to go in these dire times. Thousands of people who had perished due to the event would have wished death by fire every time over the alternatives.

A moment later, cold winter seawater splashed the side of my face, it was so cold it felt like tiny knife cuts. I wiped my face off with the sleeve of my sweatshirt and looked ahead. In the distance I could see the ship. I was the happiest and the saddest I have ever been in my life. Before boarding the ship I made a promise to myself. I would fight to live. I had to. I needed to make sure that little girl didn’t die for nothing. Boarding the ship was the first step of that journey. I inhaled deeply, trying to set my mind clear, I stared at the water underneath us. We were going through a kelp bed but all I could see were her eyes in the water.

Diane Arbus

He targeted us. We were so blind. So vulnerable.

My mom needed so much help, she didn’t know what to do.

She had post-partum depression. She admitted to throwing me in my crib while I endlessly screamed and cried. I’m not mad about it.

I know why he did it. He secretly hoped that the light would touch his stained hands and ease the pain.

It worked for a while. But it wasn’t long until he needed more. Until he needed to posses innocent life in his own right. To mold it for his pleasure. To raise it and teach it how to love, to punish it; to teach it soccer and fishing.

She needed him too. Damn did she needed him.

He thought he found bliss with us. But his sickness swelled up like a boil full of puss, pulsating and throbbing, begging for release. He tricked us, made us love him, depend on him, fight for him.

He turned on us.

I know she left me alone with him.

I remember sitting in the dark playing his piano. I remember the sound of mismatched keys and tiny fingers mashing the foreign instrument. I tried to make a harmony that I could understand but it only sounded like a cry for help. I played so hard hoping my heart could force a song and all of it would make sense. I never played the piano before. I wasn’t old enough for lessons yet.

Huddled in the corner of a couch wrapped too tight with a blanket

I look like an old women

I feel like I have the mind of one at least.

It is exhausted to the bone

nothing gets resolved, just the same,

same screams, same anger, same screams.

I’m so tired of this song.

The T.V. is on a static loop and I see his shadow mirroring me.

I am afraid he is going to lock me up in the adolescent psych unit where he works.

It is his word against mine and his always wins.

image via tabihenson

Memories are a funny thing. In the moment you take for granted the memory. Because a memory is not a thing in its own right, it is a manifestation of the present and the past. We remember what we want to remember. We forget what we want to forget and then sometimes we can’t forget at all. Sometimes memories are etched into the mind so hard that we cringe or smile when we think about them. Sometimes memories are only remembered through another’s story. Sometimes memories are not remembered until years later…when it’s too late.

Growing up I learned to block a lot of things out from an early age. I found that the best way to cope with something was to simply push all feelings to the inside, internalize it privately, and pretend not to care. Childhood nihilism if you will. My logic was this: “If I did not care about something, then that something couldn’t hurt me.” As a result of this habitual numbing and avoidance, I quickly figured out how to remove myself from any situation I felt threatened in, and for a while, it helped. I was able to escape any situation by simply checking myself out completely from immediate reality; only focused on an internal world of day dreaming where situations were always under my control, and where I could conquer any challenge set forth. Unfortunately, the down side to this defense mechanism is that when it came to executing the fantasies I created for myself in my head, I was very sorely disappointed when things did not go the way I’d imagined. My determined visions would completely fail to satisfy my reality; no matter how hard I tried to make my dreams real.

It’s funny…the things we learn and pick up when we’re young. I can’t remember anything before 7-years-old. I wonder if that is normal? I have refined the craft of selective memory so well that I have a really hard time remembering parts of my life that I should remember. My memory protects me so well now that I rarely ever remember what I say or have said to people, when I listen I have to ask questions multiple times—and when I do communicate with people, I always distort what they said unintentionally. You know the saying, “you only hear what you want to hear”? That is kind of what I’m talking about. There is just one thing that is different. I hear what I don’t want to hear. Yeah, fucked up right? However, I think I have finally figured out how this happens (after years of therapy mind you). It’s like this: my mind subconsciously is on the defensive from the get-go, it trusts no one. Only me. Therefore to protect itself from pain, it takes statements totally out of context and distorts them to fit into ideas I’ve already create for myself. Essentially, my “mind” commits suicide to protect itself from murder.

What disturbs me more than that realization, is to think about why a child younger than seven, develops these habits in the first place.

That was it. I reached Nirvana. Just for a second. Sitting outside in the backyard. Under a tree. The smoke rolling of my lips danced outwardly into the wind. I watched it like a wave, come and go. The air was chilly but the sun warmed my face. I noticed my skin was unusually pale. I rolled up my pants and let my skin absorb the weakened winter rays. I closed my eyes to see the red and yellows vessels pulse blood through my eyelids. I open them and everything seems brighter. I forget what pain feels likes. I forget what happiness feels like. All I feel is what it is like to be alive. A living, breathing, organism. I feel so close to everything, I forget what it feels like to be lonely. The second lasts for hours. My rolled cigarette goes out. Time to go inside.

Image via Obsidian Kingdom

It just hits.

Comes out of nowhere.

It doesn’t happen that often now because of the medication.

But it still comes.

A sickness that will never leave me.

A mind that won’t stop thinking until it destroys itself.

I will never truly know what it feels like to be lonely because of it.

It has me and I have it.

I can’t trade it for anything, there are no barters.

It is my enemy, it is my best friend.

It is my lover and cheater.

Sometimes I miss it when it’s gone.

But when it’s back I want it to leave.

It comforts me, it weakens me.

I only cry in my dreams now.

Maybe that is the problem. You can’t medicate sadness. You have to release it, set it free.

But then why do I feel empty when it’s gone?