Somethings you don’t want to look back on.  But the thoughts I’ve had in the past occasionally haunt me, and remind me of how much happier I am.  How much luckier I am now.  How much more wonderfully beautiful and clearer life is after adolescence and teen-hood.  Not that it’s all that clear to me right now…

It’s not that I am or ever have been masochistic, but more of too much of a coward to completely take my own life.  I don’t really think I could outright kill anything, let alone anyone, let alone myself.  I’m too selfish and considerate of other to take my own life.  There’s too many things I want to do and want to have for myself in the world to cause my own premature death.  And I don’t want the people I love to have to deal with it.  Not just any mess I could make in the process, the body, my stuff, etc.  But I wouldn’t want them to have to deal with the question: why did she do it?

The answer has never been that clear to me.  So I don’t know what it could ever look like to anyone else.  No point in people pondering what you’re not around to answer.  I guess that’s why so many people leave notes – but I have horrible handwriting.

I remember one night in particular, the night I probably came the closest to bloodshed.  I was about maybe fourteen, the early high school years get kind of muddled in my memories. Hell, this might have even been before high school when I was twelve or thirteen.  But the age doesn’t matter, because the visualizations of actions I couldn’t complete are what’s imprinted in me, ever since they arrived that night, in whatever year.

My dad was drunk.  Again.  And during this time period he almost always was.  My dad had the brilliance to happen to go through his worse bout of depression and drinking during my adolescence.  The time frames are almost exact when it comes to those two periods in our lives.  I feel so bad for my mom to have dealt with the both of us – and yet amazed that she’s still alive after standing between those two hurricanes of misunderstanding and emotions.  I don’t remember the events, the specific actions and words, leading up to it, but I’m sitting on the carpet of my room.  The door barricaded by my desk chair, because his sloppy shoving has broken the lock.

I’ve had enough.  I find solace the not-so-great rock of Papa Roach, their songs, so aptly named “Broken Home” and lyrics like “Cut my life into pieces, this is my last resort…” are hymns speaking to my soul, saying to me that there are people out there who have been there, they have turned this pain in the beauty with scream-singing and electric guitars.  I turn it up to drown out any pounding.  Maybe even in hopes that neighbors will come over to complain – they will notice.  Or even better, do what I can’t do and call the cops.  I put it on repeat so I don’t have to get up later.  The music illustrates the feelings that have always been in my head, the pain in my heart.

I take a Swiss army pocket knife out of my pocket and off of my keychain.  When I was even younger, my crazy Uncle Bob gave my dad a white one, my mom a blue one, and me a red one.  How fucking patriotic that it is the only weapon I conceal in my room.  It’s dull as shit and I know it.

I won’t know what it’s like to be drunk until only a couple years later, but in this moment, like a rush of poisoned blood to my brain the childhood memories of chopping random backyard garden bits for playing “witches brew” with my best friend get washed ashore for the deep, pulsing idea of the window and the vast, open, freedom it presents.

But this night, I’m not thinking about running away, as I have though of and acted on before and after this night.  I see the possibilities in the window.  I see the possibilities of the window.  I see the emergency room and all the people who will have to notice – the people who can’t ignore – that I’m in pain.  The professionals asking the questions – to my face.  All the answers I can give them…  No, I don’t want to die.  The whole point is that I want to live.  And I just can’t live with the situation breaking down at my bedroom door.  And I don’t really know what else to do about it.  But maybe medical professional will…I just have to get to them.  I just have to make people see, make them notice what’s going on.

I open the blue curtains my mom made for me the match the blue paint I picked out for the walls.  A second, darker blue is on the ceiling.  I stare at the window, I stare through the window, and I stare back at the window, and my reflection in it.  I visualize red – it’s such a bold, strong color.  Strong, unlike me at the time.  It’s such a beautiful color and I want to see it in truth.  I want to see it as truth.  I want to hold it.  My right fist is so much stronger, but my left hand is useless and better suited for sacrifice.  I want to dress it up in a custom fitted red glove, sequenced with precious glass stones, embedded everywhere.  Beautiful, bold, ready for a fight.

I want the red to reflect the pain.  Doctors and nurses come up with all kinds of “measurements” for pain, but when it’s internal how can they ever tell the drug addict pining for drugs against heartbreak, or undetected tumor?  Some people have higher and lower tolerances to paper cuts vs broken arms vs child birth.  How do you know how much it hurts if you haven’t had it to compare it?  But the red is visual.  The red you could see.  The stitches you could count.  The pain would be measurable if I poured it from my heart and placed it in my palm, let it drip off of my fingertips to everything I would be alive to point out that hurt me, and drip down my arms, reaching back towards the source.  The red would be triumph in still being alive.  The red would be my father’s warning.

I press my fingertips on the glass and feel that it’s cold outside.  I would still need to tell my friends and classmates what happened when I went back to school the next day, all stitched up.  I see my mom’s face, crying and screaming, scared, and more hurt than the pain I could cause my self – and I know it would hurt me all the more to see her like that.  Not just because her baby girl was crying, but because no matter how many times she could scream “Why did you do this?!” I would be horrified at the fact that I know she already knows.  And she, baring the biggest heart I’ve ever encountered, would tragically blame herself, for being married to such a man who could drink his way into a monster, to the point he scares his own daughter towards death.  She would clean the pieces of glass, drive me to the hospital if we didn’t call for an ambulance – and if the neighbors hadn’t already.  She would tend to my mounds, and I would have to reassure her that it wasn’t her fault, and I would have to avoid that it is his, because he is married to him.  And she stays married to him because she doesn’t want him to drink himself to death in a gutter on the street, because somewhere in there is a good man.  He’s just scared of the red, too.

The swirls of thoughts and visions and possibilities crowd my mind.  I press my forehead to the window to slow them down and cool them.  Tears hit the glass in patters reflective of stormier weather than the clear darkness outside.

If I broke the glass with my fist, it would be more holes to fill.  I would have to sleep in the cold.  In the dark.  In the loneliness I crave, I create, and I hate so much.  I defeat myself more than I let anyone else.  Not even my dad can fail me as much as I fail myself.  I almost tear the curtains in rushing them closed.  I turn the music off.  I turn the lights off and curl up in the softness and safety of blankets and pillows.

- – - – -

I later learn that my father has also has craved the red.  I find him another night, too drunk to finish putting his handgun back in it’s case.  Too red under the skin of his face to compel his fingers to close the simple padlock.  His syllables are beyond slurs.  He calls my mom by an ex-wife’s name, from over 30 years ago.  He calls out for his mother, who’s been dead for over 50 years, when he sleeps that night.

He doesn’t remember anything the next day.  Or he denies it.

I don’t ask questions.  I don’t pry or prod in fear of accidentally pushing.

Like anyone close to me would have thought in the aftermath that never happened for me, I don’t think I really want to know the real answers anyway.