Chin Up Child: Part One of Three
August 29, 2006
There’s a girl in a blue with white polka dots dress serving tea and coffee behind you. She looks slightly uncomfortable, so determined to stay facing the wall, greeting, shaking hands, smiling.
It’s grim. The dress is polyester, fought over and finally selected with a simple sentence.
“Your mother would want this.”
The fight left then, wandered down the street to the bar.
Keep busy keep busy keep busy.
She won’t venture to the front of the room. She can’t. She feels the gaping void she’s about to collapse into, struggles to avoid it, sidestep, pull an Indy. Nurse shoed feet teeter…
She can feel the eyes upon her back. She can feel the down glance, the pity slithering out, tentacles reaching for her. It’s a trap. There is no freedom in those eyes.
She avoids those too.
She spends the afternoon pouring coffee
“cream”?
greeting friends/not friends, who know not what to say, where to stand; sent by mothers of obligation, they twitch awkwardly in their church clothes, tugging at ties and scuffed shoes.
” We’ll miss her. She was always nice to me”
She moves around the room, avoiding arms, hands, moist tissue. She doesn’t, she can’t see her father or her brother. As of this moment, they don’t exist. She feels her own orb, nothing else.
That void presses on her, begins to seduce. She feels eyes guiding her forward, towards the box before the windows.
She glances in, and her world ends. _____
She can’t hear a thing. There’s a din in her head that prevents it.
One solitary emotion prevails, a numbness covers her, safely. It holds a wall up that no one dares broach.
It’s a cold hallway covered in plastic tile, brown, beige. Beige, plodding safety. Beige stillness. No doors open. Someone says the door is always open.
Maybe it is. Maybe she just can’t see them open. She can see eyes. Eyes that judge. Eyes that tell her “buck up, it’s not that bad”
It’s that fucking bad. It’s so bad she can feel the sucking open sore of her life in her chest, wheezing every time she moves. It’s so bad that she can’t stop herself from stepping back from those she claims to love. It’s so fucking bad that she spends her nights lost in fog, throwing her body at men and traffic. It’s so bad that she wants to feel anything other than what she must.
Her feet echo against the tile. Duck voices don’t echo. She learned something today after all.
Doors open.
They can’t understand. They look warily in her direction, and back away. Like wolves, they can smell a defect. Like men, they can smell desperation. Like children, they can’t prevent it.
Chin up child. The bar isn’t set so high.
She hasn’t the strength left to pull. _____
That morning, the gross morning when they took her away and everything turned stark winter white and soundproofed and everyone forgot and left alone one not as stupid as they thought-little girl a knock came at the door.
How is she? they gasped, hands wrung they knew what those lights meant sure as she knew that someone was never coming home again.
A mantra repeated at the open door
“Fine. Everything is fine.”
Like china, like fuck you nothing will ever be the same ever again, you sit like a bull on my doorstop pleading eyes begging to feel something. Just fine.
Fine slams the door to keep away from those eyes. Fine folds into herself like origami yet not so delicate, becomes smaller, keeps repeating “everything is fucking fine” until for the first time in her life, she collapses into nothing. Fine draws her knees up, and never lets them down again.
She takes herself to school like nothing is wrong. She makes jokes through spelling. She knows all the words already. It’s the bigger ones that weigh her down now. Recess pulls her away. She knows.
No one sends a priest to fetch you unless your world is ending.
~ Thordora
Part One of Three
Reprinted with permission
September 8th, 2006 at 7:35 am
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October 4th, 2006 at 10:06 pm
[...] Please see Part One and Part Two. [...]