My bff and I decided to take a road trip today. Our road trips have no real destination. We just randomly drive around the area. Eventually she brought me home, but it took several hours for us to get there. We always have a lot of fun on these trips, because we mostly just shoot the shit and sing as loudly and as obnoxiously as we can.
However, today we ended up in the direction of the area where I lived as a child. The music was still playing and we were still talking, but I could feel this tension gnawing at me.
"I just wish I could be happy here," I told her. "I grew up here and this is a part of me. I should be happy here, but I just can't." She told me she knew and she does. She knows how the place of my childhood just brings up bad memories for me. I don't think it will ever do anything but that.
Of all the bad stuff that happened to me there, the thing that I've been thinking about since I got home happened when I was a Freshman in high school. I'd finally had enough of my mother's crazy and her shitty husbands. We were fighting about the latest one and she kicked me out/I moved out. Thankfully, and I'm serious about this, THANKFULLY, I had my grandparents to move in with.
Thing is, we went to church in the same community where my mom lived. We had to pass her house to get to said church. Every Sunday, I would crawl into the backseat of their car and feel this tremor of fear. Intellectually, I knew we were just going to church. That didn't stop me from panicking about having to move back home.
The trip from our house in town to the church was about fifteen minutes. I was usually fine the first five. I could stay calm, carry on conversation, laugh with them. After that, I would start to get quiet. My brain would feel fuzzy and I could feel the fear working its way through me like some kind of poison.
The first several months after I moved in with them, whenever we would pass by my mother's house, I would hide. I would bend down to where I couldn't be seen from the window and I would stay there until I was sure the house was out of sight. Then, only then, would I start to calm down. I didn't calm down completely, because the church was still very close to her house. Less than a mile. For many weeks, I worried that she would show up and try to force me to go back home.
After a while, I stopped worrying about this. It wasn't so much about me becoming less fearful as it was about me becoming more realistic. I would never go back home with her because she didn't want me. I'd drawn the line in the sand between me and her husband. She chose. The fact that I was gone probably made things easier on them . . . or so she assumed.
Once I accepted this, I stopped hiding when we would drive by the house. Instead, I just refused to look at it. I would avert my eyes as we came down the hill towards it and then turn my head away as we drove by. I wanted to block it from my memory, from my reality. I didn't want any of that madness and pain to exist.
I only started looking at the house again after my mother left the area. She and my brother disappeared when I was a sophomore and stayed gone for a year or so. During that time, the house caught on fire . . . like all of my mother's houses always do. It didn't burn completely, though. So when I looked at it, I saw this burned out shell of what it had been. I found this to be fitting.
I hated the fact that I hated the house as much as I hated what happened there, but it couldn't be helped. That house had never, ever, even once offered me any kind of protection or peace. This was, after all, the house the Evil Doll came from.
When my mom finally came back, semi-sobered up, semi-saned up, and tried to rebuild her life, it took her a while to go back to the land. She finally paid to have the rest of the shell of the house burned down and started trying to make it into something livable again. I went to see her a time or two. It never felt like home though. It never felt like it was mine. My mom never got to see herself living in a real house there ever again. She died there, alone, in her sleep.
After she died, I told my brother that I didn't want any part of the land. I told him to just take it for himself and do whatever with it. It's not mine and it never will be. I don't want it to be. All I have there is bad memories. It's a place where I was beaten, tortured, emotionally savaged, shot at, ripped apart in, and, finally, driven from. If part of that was mine, I sure as hell didn't want it.
So now when I drive by the place, or even, like today, near it, I still get all this negative stuff. I know that will never change. I'm almost 40 years old and if I was going to get past it, I would have by now. Instead, I think it's best if I just live my life with the land out of my thoughts, out of my sight, and best of all, out of my reality.
No comments:
Post a Comment