If you've read some of the things I've written you may have noticed that I tend to write on more serious topics. I used to turn in my short stories to my teacher and she would tell me after reading them she just needed a big piece of cake to cheer her up, because a lot of the times my stories weren't the most upbeat.
I never gave her a cake; I gave her my stories. And on my last one I drew a picture of a cake for her. I am so thankful for her - for everything she taught me and that she read work that tended to fall on the somber side.
The title of this blog post echoes back to that, because below I am posting some of my writing that would have made my teacher very much want cake after reading. These are the other three entries I submitted to the Arrowhead that did not get in, but I thought I would share them, too.
The first is a short story. One is a non-fiction essay. And one is a poem. They include serious topics, but I hope, as is my goal with everything I write, that they leave traces of hope in their wake. And truth. So here we go.
____________
As Sure as Day Follows Night
I'm gangly like a deer. Elbows and
knees, with not much in between.
Like most of the females in my
generation, my hair is scraped up onto the tip-top of my head, knotted in a
messy, haphazard bun. It hasn’t been brushed in three days, minimum.
I'm also reading War and Peace, a hard copy with pages that smell old, like when
writers used typewriters instead of Macbooks. It's heavy, especially after five
miles. My arms complain about it. I’m not quite sure when I stopped reading,
but it happened. The book’s still open, my fingers pressing against the soft
pages, but I’m not reading it.
So when the car honks at me, and I hear
a male's voice catcall at me in what I am almost positive is Spanish, I stop
walking. All he knows about me is that I unkempt hair, the body of a12 year
old, and that I can read and walk at the same time. The first two aren't
exactly the definition of allure, so I’m banking on the fact that he noticed me
because of the book. At least, I hope so, because that, at least, is a bit
redemptive. He respects and recognizes me for the only reason left I have left
to recognize myself.
Worn tires crunch over the red, dirt-like
gravel as the car creeps up beside me. The car itself has been ravaged by time
and its front bumper looks like it was attacked by a group of toddlers equipped
with tiny hammers. It hovers next to me
like a hummingbird, ready to dart off at the first sign of trouble. The red
dust I've been kicking up since I first stepped outside floats back down to the
ground, settling.
The window has been rolled down
halfway. Through the space, I meet a pair of brown eyes. They’re dark, the
color my mother likes her coffee to be: black, no cream, three sugars. They
meet mine and for a moment we stare at each other like an animal and a person
at a zoo, separated by a plane of thin, clear glass.
Am I the person or the animal behind
the glass? Certainty, I’m not human. Not anymore. Probably a normal human girl
would be afraid right now. They would not get in a car with a strange boy. Don’t
get in the car with strangers. I repeat: do not, because, generally, it doesn’t
end well. It’s one of the first lessons I learned in kindergarten, before I
learned my ABCs or how to count past twenty. Other girls would probably, most
likely, be angry, or ignore the catcall, or maybe be scared. While I am
probably all of those things, really, at this moment I feel absolutely nothing.
Well, I feel cold. But I am perpetually
that way, no matter how much heat radiates off the California pavement baking
beneath my catcaller’s car.
I open the back door, which meows
pitifully from age, and climb into the car. The temperature drops twenty
degrees and I'm hit by the smell of tobacco, sunflower seeds, and
chlorine.
Smoothly, I boost myself over the
center console and slide into the passenger seat. The fabric’s worn and soft
against my legs, which sigh in relief. The seats are tattered. The, apparently
broken, radio has numerous red and blue wires protruding from it like tentacles,
and there’s what I’m almost positive is a Ziploc bag full of cat food on the
floor. And then, of course, him. He’s Hispanic with eyes that I now see, up
close, are light brown, almost hazel, messy dark hair, and skin the color of
caramel. A tiny white scar squiggles its way from the top of his lip to the
bottom of his nose.
“What’s your name?” I ask.
These are the first words I have spoken
in 119 days.
“Alex,” he tells me in a soft voice,
one that doesn’t fit the voice that probably just yelled something vulgar at
me. “And you?” he asks, the Spanish
falling from his lips like snow out of a December sky. At least, from my old December
sky. He’s probably never seen snow before.
“You can call me Fee,” I tell him, adjusting
the vents in front of me so the cold air blowing from flows at him instead of
me. Goosebumps rise on my bare legs. He glances at them with me and,
wordlessly, flips on the heat. I find my voice, and it sounds foreign to me.
“Thank you.”
He nods, once, and wordlessly
presses the accelerator. The car lurches forward, but putters along, somewhat
confirming my suspicion that it runs on hope and cheap gasoline. Through the
passenger window, I watch ramshackle terra cotta homes flash by. The streets
are empty and dusty, with heat waves wafting up from the pavement. Trash and
weeds cling to the curbs, and a stray dog rifles in what I tell myself is a
pile of feathers from pillow that met an unfortunate end. This is California,
but not the part you come to see.
Besides
the cacophony of sounds coming from the engine, which are both alarming and
impressive, the car is silent. I watch Alex as he drives. He is a careful
driver, with eyes that flicker to the rearview mirror every three seconds or so
and hands that stay at ten and two, just like my father taught me two years
ago. I’m not sure what he expects of me or where we are going. He most defiantly
expected something from me when he called at me. His words, while foreign to
me, clearly showed his intention for me to join him in a car that’s older than
our ages combined and probably doubled. He can’t be more than eighteen, which
is a year older than me, so maybe tripled.
I should probably ask where we are going, or care, but I
can’t. It seems like my words, for now, have dried up again in me. As for the
caring part, that should probably scare me. I shiver, flicking up the heat.
Alex ever-so-gently turns the wheel of his car, which
growls, threatening to stall. His brown eyes meet mine over the console, which
is littered with split sunflower seeds. “We are going to my Abuela’s. My
Grandmother’s,” he translates.
I nod and learn back into my seat. “Okay.”
Less than fifteen minutes later, we are standing in front of
what could potentially be the most dilapidated home I’ve seen since I came to
California. Granted, I’ve only been here 37 days, but still - it wins.
It probably used to be yellow, or maybe brown, but now it’s
color is a mixture of dirty browns, with stone sides riddled with cracks, white
lines that shoot up to the terra cotta roof that is more tarp than stone.
Boards cover two of the windows. One is tagged with red spray paint that didn’t
dry properly, making the smeary lines look like blood.
The air is so dry and brittle I feel like I could snap the
air with my bare hands. I can hear the air humming with heat, the buzz of angry
insects, and a faraway dog barking. Somewhere music plays, but its in Spanish
and keeps breaking off into static like code talk. I look at the house, with
its peeling walls and unmowed lawn, and turn to Alex.
I say nothing. It’s a trick I learned in therapy. When
someone starts talking, especially someone who doesn’t talk much, or at all, as
was my case, you wait them out, because, hopefully, they might speak. That was
the only thing therapy taught me. Maybe it would have taught me more if I had
spoken. I didn’t though, not for days, then weeks, then months. That is, until
today, until I got into Alex’s car and asked him his name. And now I talk more
than he does. “You’re a good driver,” I tell him, because I really don’t know
what else to say. I want to ask him about the house, about so much, but this is
all I can manage. I am rewarded by his smile, which seems brighter than the hot
sunshine.
He cocks an eyebrow at me, slightly amused.
Before I can say anything, the house’s front screen door
creeks open. The confusion slips off Alex’s face and, for the first time, I see
him smile. It’s delicate and gentle, like the way he drove his crappy car, and
it seems impossible that the rough, Spanish voice that catcalled me could come
from such a person.
I turn and, following his gaze, see a woman who can only be
his Abuela. She’s old, but I can’t really tell how old exactly, with literally
a mountain of white and gray streaked hair piled perilously atop her head.
She’s wearing a thin, almost translucent nightgown that is white, and yellow
flowers on it. Daisies, maybe. Her hand rests on the rotting wood of her porch.
But what I really notice, honestly,
are her eyes. They are milky white. She’s blind. They roam across the yard,
unable to see the weeds that make it look like a dead jungle and the empty beer
cans lining her curb. But, somehow, they land on us, and I hear her voice,
strong despite her age, call out, “Eres tu, mi vida?”
I may not know Spanish, but I know
enough to hear what she calls the boy standing next to me.
Mi
vida. My life.
“Sí,
Abuela,” Alex answers her respectfully, taking a few familiar steps away
from me, navigating the glass and trash in the dead jungle yard. I stay rooted
in place, staring at her falling down house that if I had driven by I would
have thought was condemned, feeling, strangely, like I’ve intruded on something
I can’t possibly understand.
He really did bring me to his
grandmother’s house. There’s a plot twist for you, Parents. Not kidnapped. She
actually lives here. Maybe Alex does too. I don’t know, but I do know that we
drove through an entire neighborhood of homes like this one, some even worse,
with holes where windows should have been, or roofs patched with black trash
bags. A whole neighborhood. Like I said: I’ve only been here 37 days. But not
once, in that time, have I heard anyone mention this neighborhood or the
condition of it – not my aunt or my uncle or any of my cousins, who pretend
that everything is fine and normal and that Fee is just visiting California for
pleasure. Pleasure. The word, and the idea that people like Alex and his
grandmother live in homes with tarps for ceilings and patchwork wood walls,
makes me sick to my stomach.
Alex waits patiently for me, telling me
calmly, “Come.” So I do, following at his heels as he leads the way through the
weeds. He pads without looking; avoiding glass and what I pray to God are
chicken bones expertly.
We get to the porch steps and Alex
takes his grandmother’s hand. She bats him away, smiling, and starts to say
something to him, but stops. I don’t know how, but she suddenly becomes aware
of me. Up close I see her eyes aren’t actually white, but merely covered in a
thick layer of scar tissue. Underneath it, I can see the outlines of eyes the
same color as her grandson’s. She tilts her head at me, and I, nervously, say
hi. In Spanish. Even to me, the “hola”
sounds very pitiful.
Regardless of my accent or the fact
that her grandson has brought a girl home, she smiles beautifully, not looking
the least bit perturbed that he has invited me to her home. Does he, I wonder,
do this often? Pick up strange white girls and bring them to his grandmothers?
I get the feeling probably not, mainly because not many even remotely
intelligent girls would get in cars with strange boys. Unless, of course,
California is the place to send all girls like me. All the broken ones, with
mute voices and hands that shake.
“Fee no habla Español,” Alex tells his
grandmother. My name, pronounced by Alex, sounds like Feah. Leah, with an F.
His grandmother’s delicate, wrinkled hands
search and find mine. She squeezes my cold ones. For a moment, my hands are
warm.
“Sea bienvenido, mi niña.”
Alex, at my side, whisper-translates,
saying, “Welcome, my girl.”
My heart tightens in my chest, but I
wordlessly step through the doorway. It takes a moment for my eyes to adjust,
but slowly her home comes into focus.
Pictures, pictures everywhere. In frames, in scrapbooks piled precariously high on the table, wedged under the layer of glass on the TV display, literally covering the face of her refrigerator. Hundreds of photographs, some in color, some in black and white, polaroid and ones clipped from newspapers or invitations.
Pictures, pictures everywhere. In frames, in scrapbooks piled precariously high on the table, wedged under the layer of glass on the TV display, literally covering the face of her refrigerator. Hundreds of photographs, some in color, some in black and white, polaroid and ones clipped from newspapers or invitations.
Alex says something to her in their language
and disappears back out the front door, which shuts behind him with a gentle
sigh. Before he goes, I feel his fingers brush my elbow. I’m coming back, it
tells me, and I shiver. I hate being touched, even if it’s by accident.
Regardless, even if I know the person isn’t going to hurt me. I know that, but
my body and my mind apparently don’t. So I look at a picture close to me, in a
frame made of seashells, which happens to be a younger version of Abeula, with
hair the color of dark chocolate, holding a little boy that looks a bit like
Alex, but isn’t. He’s got the same skin and eyes, but a wild look in his eyes.
“You have a beautiful home,” I tell Abeula,
who is at my side, and am rewarded with a lovely, white-toothed smile. Alex
comes through the screen door, which creeks with age. He holds the baggie of
cat food in his right hand, looking at me and his grandmother with an
unmistakable softness in his brown eyes. He loves her a lot.
“Gracias, mi hija,” she tells me, and
squeeze my arm. Her words jog my memory, and Alex and I make eye contact. Mi hija.
Those were two of the words, I realize now, that Alex catcalled at me. Abuela
says something more in Spanish waddles away from us, disappearing down a
hallway, nightgown swaying behind her. Apparently, whatever we are going to do,
she’s not going to do it with us.
We are alone. His home around us is
still and hot. The sunlight breaking through the thin layer of plastic tarp
above us casts golden light on the pictures of his people around us. Alex holds
the bag of cat food patiently, an expectant look in his eye.
“What does that mean?” I ask him, and
he frowns slightly, looking down at the cat food. I mean, I would like to know
why he has that, but, right now, I am asking about something else. Something
more. “Mi hija,” I clarify in my poor Spanish.
The light above us brings out the gold
in his dark eyes. “It means ‘my daughter,’” he tells me quietly, and I hear the
clocks ticking on the walls.
I don’t know what to say, or think of
this, so I just ask: “What did you call at me?”
“La tierra llora por ti, my hija,” he
says fluidly, in a voice that, while much softer, almost at a whisper, echoes
the memory I have from only minutes ago of the same voice calling out at me
through a half-down car window. Before I can ask him what that means, Alex
tells me, fingering the Ziploc baggy with his gentle, calloused fingertips.
“The earths weeps for you, my daughter.”
I say nothing. Alex surveys me, brown
eyes watching. I knew. All this time, I knew that something was desperately
wrong inside me. People began to see it too, and hear it, eventually. They
heard the silence, potent and choking, coming from me. They saw it as the
weight practically fell off me, because I stopped eating normally. They saw,
but they didn’t tell me about it. They tried to help me in their own small ways.
Parents sending daughters away to uncles with doctorates in mental health, and
aunts who love to make food and talk and throw parties and clean.
I haven’t cried since it happened. My
mom did, my aunt did, friends did. But, according to Alex, the whole world also
did. After what feels like a lifetime, but is probably only a few of my
stuttering heart beats, Alex speaks again, raising the bag of cat food into the
shaft of sunlight between us. He shakes it, once. “We,” he tells me, “are going
to clean some pools.”
Of course, we are.
Pools,
it turns out, means 11. Eleven pools, Alex informs me from his spot behind the
wheel of a truck that’s potentially older than Alex’s car, me, and his
grandmother combined. It used to be red, maybe, or brown, but now it’s
literally rusted away to dented, warped metal. There are ropes instead of seat
belts, a trunk full of what I can only describe as pool-cleaning instruments,
and empty baggies of what I’m almost certain used to be full of cat food
littering the floor. Alex sits behind
the wheel, and I watch as the houses transform from lean-to shanties to, well,
my aunt and uncle’s neighborhood. They, thankfully, don’t have a pool. Eleven
houses.
Luckily, they’re all in a line. On the
same block. As Alex wordlessly cleans the first pool, I watch, perched on the
edge of the concrete. He is using a net to scoop out dead bugs and leaves. “How
long have you done this for?” I ask him as he expertly hits the net against the
concrete. A glop of leaves falls onto the pavement, dead and brown.
His brown eyes flicker to me. “Nine
years.”
I take him in, calculating. “How old
were you when you started?”
“Eight.”
I look at the pool, which can only be
described as Olympic. It’s huge and probably needs to be cleaned numerous times
a week. I picture a little boy version of Alex before me doing it, and I just
can’t. I open my mouth to say what I’m not sure, but Alex beats me to it. “It
wasn’t always me.”
“Who else did it with you?” I take a
lone palm leaf out of the cool water and set it on my goospebumps. A wet
blanket for them.
Alex frowns at the water, and the net
breaks up the smooth water making up his shadow, sending ripples across the
entire surface of the pool. “My brother,” he tells me, and I can hear it in his
voice. Something he doesn’t want to be, but is.
The truth claws at your heart, always,
but when you try to use words it becomes impossible. It chokes you. It’s been
choking me.
Before either of us have a chance to
say anything else, there’s this soft jingle-jangling sound. A bell. Alex’s eyes
focus on something behind me and soften. Turning, I find myself face to face
with a skinny Persian cat. It’s fur is as pure and white as freshly fallen
snow, and it’s huge black are inches from mine, watchful. It’s tail, puffy,
flickers at me, almost as a greeting. It’s a beautiful cat. An expensive cat,
that’s obviously well groomed. But the collar on its neck, bell and all, hangs
loosely, and I can count its ribs. It’s starving.
The
cat watches Alex expectantly, tail folded over its front paws.
From out of nowhere, Alex appears
beside me with his Ziploc baggie, dumping it onto the polished concrete. The
cat food hits the pavement like chunks of hail, peppering across the stone. Almost
at once, the cat begins to scarf it down like it hasn’t seen food in weeks. My
eyes find Alex’s, where he squats with his elbows on his knees, watching the
white cat eat. “It’s theirs,” he explains, nodding at the house behind us, “but
they never feed it.”
The cat apparently, like me, is
starving. But unlike me, when given the opportunity, it eats. It wants to live,
I guess. Alex glances down at my wrists, which sometimes look so thin I think
they are transparent. The skin is brittle and always cold, sometimes blue. Not
eating does that to you. Alex crouches next to me, brown eyes meeting mine, and
he knows better than to touch me this time.
I don’t know what he’s thinking. I
don't know what he thinks or dreams about or if he even has anything to say. I
don’t know Alex at all, but then, maybe I do. Because I've seen a glimpse of
his actions. Some, like catcalling me, I still don't quite understand, but I've
seen the quiet way he exists, the gentle way he spoke to Abuela, and the back
breaking work he's done in the hot, inhaling chlorine, for the past 9 years. How
he has befriend a rich family’s cat, that they don’t even care enough to feed
but have a pool the size of a school bus.
Finally,
Alex speaks softly, as the cat continues to eat hurriedly beside us. His hand
reaches out and rests gently on the top of its head, but he looks right at me.
“You deserve to eat too, Fee,” he tells me simply. “That’s why I called out to
you.”
“Because I’m skinny?” I ask flatly, in
a voice that sounds meaner than I thought could come from me.
Alex’s eyes refuse to go away from me.
He nods, once, slightly, and acknowledges, “You look like you’re starving.
Almost dizzy, too. Like a drunk person,” he muses, but we both know it’s not
funny. I say nothing, and, for a while, neither does he. Finally, finally, he
speaks quietly, “I know what it means to be sad, Fee. I could see it, starving
you,” he nods at my bones, which feel too heavy for me, “but I also see, in
your eyes, in that book, that you’re hungry.”
Wordlessly, I get up and start cleaning
up the mess his net leaves behind.
We are on our 11th pool,
when I tell Alex, “You don't really say much.”
He glances at me, his brown hair
falling into his eyes. Behind him, the sky is the color of a mandarin orange. We’re
both covered in sweat, and he lasted about 26 seconds in his shirt before
stripping it and tying it around his waist. I, unfortunately, do not have that
luxury. I mean, maybe I do, but it’s slightly frowned upon. Plus, I’m me, so I
wouldn’t. Couldn’t take my shirt off. It stays firmly on me, drenched in sweat.
I am actually warm, finally.
Alex pauses what he’s currently doing,
which he described to me as “sucking up the gunk from the hatch” with what I
think is the pool version of a vacuum cleaner, and leans against the metal
pole. He squints at me in the bright sunlight. “I used to do this work with my brother.” He
shades his eyes with one hand, surveying the Caribbean-colored water. “It was
Abeula’s business, but once she lost her eyes, we took over.”
We meaning him and his brother. “We
would clean the pools after school. Sometimes until dark. This pool - it's
nothing. 11 pools: easy.”
My throat is dry, but I make myself
ask. “Why did he stop helping?”
Alex looks at me. “He got shot.”
Inside my chest, my heart seems to
stutter. Dear God. I say nothing. Nothing. You cannot say anything.
Alex nods, and goes on for me, “I was 11, he was 14.”
“What . . . what happened?” My voice sounds tight, too
tight.
“The Tardes,” he tells me simply, and I feel like I’m not in
my body anymore, even though I very much am. I have heard my aunt and uncle
mention them. The Tardes. It's a gang. Mostly Hispanic, originating from the
streets of LA. Most known for bloody violence.
"They just killed him?" I can’t breathe.
Alex slowly shakes his head. "No. He was a member.” His
voice is matter-of-fact, and sad.
The pool filter gurgles, choking on blood.
Alex continues, staring down at the pool vacuum, brown eyes
far away from me. “He died in a street fight over a strip of land between two
warehouses."
14 years old, dead before life began. He should have been in
Biology class, or learning how to fail in Algebra, but instead he was bleeding
out in a gutter. When I was 14, I got grounded for getting a Facebook account without
my parent’s permission.
Slowly, Alex sets down the vacuum and makes his way over to
me, where I stand at the edge of the pool, clutching my net. I watch his shadow move over the skin colored
pavement: padding up to me, gently prying the stupid net from my hands, which
are shaking. He pulls me down onto the pavement, which burns my bare legs. I
welcome the pain. The sun is hot yellow, burning a hole in the center of the
pool, ready to slip under the cusp of the sky.
“What did you do,
after?” My voice sounds millions of light-years away.
“They asked me to
join them,” Alex says. He sees my confused look and elaborates, “The Tardes.” I
stare at him, unable to speak of fathom it. His brother died.
“Threatened,
actually,” Alex admits, shaking his head at the memory. “But I said no.”
“Weren’t you afraid? That they would kill you?”
He stares at the sky for a moment. I see the sunset reflected
in the irises of his eyes, clouds laid over and on and against each other,
smeared and seeping into the sky. Becoming night. “There’s a saying, a Spanish
proverb,” he says finally, glancing sideways at me. “Prefiero morir de pie que
vivir siempre arrodillado.”
“Translation?” I whisper, barely audible.
He translates for me quietly, “I’d rather die standing than
live forever on my knees.”
“How?” I manage to get out. My heart is twisting inside my
chest and my hands shaking. Desperately, I search his eyes, needing an answer.
How? “How could you even stand?”
Alex’s eyes flicker to me, and I know that he sees me. Truly
sees. His eyes are full of pain, but firm. Strong even as he tells me in the
softest, most gentle voice I have heard, “That kind of sorrow, it does not
fade. It stabs you and you always bleed. But you survive through it, sometimes
bitterly, sometimes numbly, because it’s all you can do to stand. And you
hope.”
I can’t speak. My lips are locked together and my throat has
closed. Tears, thick and hot, fall down my face. How do you endure something
like that? I want to scream at him, but not because I want an answer. Because I
don’t understand. How are children, anyone, supposed to be able to endure
things like this? How am I supposed to endure this? Tell me how, I want to beg,
but I can’t. I need to know.
“How?” I demand, but
my voice is weak. I’m so weak and tired and broken. It matches me, my voice. “How
can you have hope after something like that? How can life ever be hopeful
again?”
“La esperanza le pertenece a la vida, es la vida misma defeiéndose.”
“What does that mean?” I practically snarl.
A ghost of a smile, “Hope is essential to life, it is life
itself defending itself. Life is full of things we cannot control, bad things,
but life itself – it is not bad. It is living and it is good, regardless of the
things that come our way. It was no one’s fault, not even Pedro’s – my brother.
It happened, it cannot ever unhappen. But life moves forward. It can be a
curse, but it’s also a blessing. Because you can learn how to live with what
happened. You can be bitter, and then grow. To forgive, to hope, to find
strength, to promise yourself you’ll never let yourself be in that way.”
I
say nothing.
He wipes a tear off my cheek, and his brown eyes are clear. He
waits for me to speak and, finally, I do. He knows my trick, too.
“I was walking. It was late.” I don’t let myself think. I
don’t need to think. I will never forget. How could I? I relive it every day,
every moment.
Except for the past few hours, I note. The past few hours I
talked. I cleaned pools. I met a woman with white eyes and a boy who is kind
where life wasn’t, even to cats.
But I will tell Alex. I stick to the facts, which is what
the police told my parents, after, when I had stopped talking. “It happened
quickly. He, a man – I didn’t know him - jumped from bushes and pulled me down, or
maybe hit me, but, either way, I was on the ground. There was a struggle, but
he won. A neighbor heard me scream, though. She was pregnant, so she stayed
inside and called the police. It took 17 minutes for a patrol car to get there,
to get to me. To us. To stop him doing what he did to me.”
I am quiet. Everything is still: the pool, the boy next to
me, my mind. Me.
I look at Alex. “A lot can happen in 17 minutes.”
Alex says nothing, eyes locked on mine.
“I feel like I’ll never be okay again,” I tell him honestly.
I’m honest. For the first time in 119 days, I am going to actually say what I
am thinking and feeling instead of not. Because what I’ve been doing, or trying
to do, hasn’t been working. The not speaking. The not eating. The recklessness,
almost like I want to get hurt again. For example: getting in strange boy’s
cars.
But I tell Alex the truth. “I feel like there’s no hope for me, or for
life. I just – I just want it to be over. That’s why I got in your car, I think.
That’s why I stopped eating, after. I stopped talking, too, but I don’t really
remember doing that. My parents sent me out here. They thought it would help.
But I don’t think anything can help me, Alex. That’s why, when you tell me about
your brother, I just don’t understand how you are able to do this.” I motion
behind him at the pool, at the stupid cat, at the warmth in his eyes when he
sees his grandmother. At Alex talking and breathing and living and working and
hoping. I cannot understand it or fathom it or even hope in it.
“Please,” I ask him simply, “tell me how you do it.”
Alex speaks quietly, “Time helps.”
I wish I was capable of being angry, but I’m just tired. I’m
so tired. Alex goes on. “Life helps, in small ways. Abuela helped me, after.
That stupid cat. The way the sunset looks on the surface of the pool. It won’t
even be fixed, but there’s always hope, mi niña. As sure as day follows night.”
I look at the sky, which is now the color of a bruise. Mine
have faded, but sometimes I think I still see them. I think of what Alex is
saying to me. These words about hope and time and finding ways to survive,
instead of dying on your knees. I think of his brother, dying in a street. I
know what it’s like to be lying on a street, bleeding and terrified and not
quite sure how you got there. But I lived.
It’s not a luxury everyone gets. I’m still sad. I’m still
broken and tired and scared and weary. My skin still crawls and I can’t
breathe, most of the time. But cleaning pools with a boy who feeds rich
people’s cats and drives cars that run on prayers has helped me, for a few
moments, remember what life has the potential to be.
I wipe the tears off my cheeks. “Can I come with you, next
time you have to clean pools?”
Alex grins widely. In the fading twilight, his skin is a
deep, rich brown, the polar opposite of mine. Inches from mine, his eyes are
clear. I see myself reflected in them, small and red-eyed, but alive. With a
heart that beats, albeit stutteringly, and a little, growing hope based on a
boy perpetually smelling of chlorine and sunflower seeds, of cats making
friends, and warmth from a woman wearing daisies. Those things may seem random,
but they are little bits of life, and, right now, I need reminders, hope of
what it can be.
“Tan seguro como que el día sigue a la noche,” Alex tells
me, taking his keys from his pockets, like it was a silly question. He offers
me his hand, which I take, and he pulls me up.
“English,” I say, getting the
feeling that eventually I’ll know his language just as good as my own.
He lets go of my hand, but his eyes
are light. Smiling, he translates: “As sure as day follows night.” And we walk
out the gate we came, just as the first stars begin to reflect on the smooth,
blue surface of the pool.
_____________
The Realities of an Eating Disorder
Late
in the summer of my seventeenth year of living, I came to the conclusion that I
was fat.
I was not.
The second conclusion that I almost
immediately came to, after I came to believe this fact, was that I had to
change that.
I’ve
grown up hearing the statistic that it takes 28 days to form a habit. That
number changes depending on who is reciting the fact to you, but I’ve seen that
happen. I’ve seen it when I started reading my bible every day. I saw it as an
athlete growing up: how by the end of your first month of practice, the drill
that left you breathless didn’t feel like you had just dragged yourself through
the nine circles of hell. I haven’t, though, heard how many days it takes to
break a habit. I know that once I skipped a day reading my bible I was more
likely to skip again, to let that time slip away until it became a string of
lights that were days of not reading God’s word. I know that the five glorious
days for Christmas when we didn’t have practice during basketball season felt
the opposite of glorious the first day back, when your muscles screamed at you,
the muscle built over weeks and months of practice seeming to have slipped away
easier than smoke through your fingers.
But
I do know this: for me, 28 days after I decided that I was fat my mind was
changed in such a way that it would never be the same. Unlike the muscle that
wasted away seemingly effortlessly in my years as a high school athlete, the
thought process that came to have dominion in my mind was not something that
would slip away unbeknownst to me. Let me assure you of that. Even now, over
900 days later, with a good bit of them admitting and trying to fight what has
been defined as an eating disorder – even after strings of 28 days, of wanting
to change, of weight lost and weight gained, the fight for my mind isn’t one
that’s easily lost or gained. It will be won one day. If not in this life, by
me, it’ll be won the day I exist in a place where sin and death and the brokenness
found in humanity can’t because Jesus does – heaven, the only place where our
souls will finally be met and overwhelmed with everything we are yearning for
and run after in our lives here on earth.
Assuming
I’ve got some time to kill before then, I want to write honestly about the
realities of eating disorders. Some. Some of the realities as I’ve battle an
eating disorder the past three years, because, really, I’ve only met the tip of
the iceberg that is called by most people, including myself, a monster.
That
leads us to reality number 1: eating disorders consume you.
They
steal from you in so many more ways than anything to do with weight. Food
becomes your life. Every single thought in your mind all the time has to do
with food. Before I had an eating disorder, I never would have been able to
understand this reality. How can every thought be about food? How can every
single moment be consumed by an obsession with food? But that’s the truth. When
food became the single most important part of my life, when my weight became
the definition and foundation of my life, every single thing, no matter what I
was saying or doing on the outside, was no match for the thing that had
precedence and dominance in my mind.
It’s
one of the saddest things about my eating disorder for me, personally. How much
has been stolen from me. I’ll give you a few examples. There are many, more
than space (or time) will allow me to write. But it stole me.
It
stole me from my family and the people I loved, it stole me from doing what I
love. It stole joy. The ability to eat or exist normally around food. The
ability to enjoy exercise without it being used as an unhealthy tool. It stole
from me mentally. I cannot remember most of my senior year of high school. It stole
my concentration, my ability to remember and perform well, thoughts, hours. It
stole me feeling emotions. I stopped feeling anything at all. It stole my hopes
and dreams from me.
Because
when you’re not eating healthily the reality is that your brain and your body
are starving. But more so, you, however or whatever you define as you – maybe
it’s the idea of a soul, or a heart, or a mind – that you are being stolen from.
Reality
number two: there is no winning with an eating disorder. You will never be
“enough” of what you want.
In
the beginning, I really thought that there would come a time when I would be
thin enough. When I would be “skinny” or love what I saw in the mirror. Let me
tell you what I’ve found with my journey: I will never be thin enough. With an
eating disorder, every weight goal you set isn’t a goal you can just meet and
be satisfied with. You will never be skinny enough, no matter how many inches
you lose off your waist. No matter how far the numbers on a scale go down. No
matter what ridiculous calculations or measurements you come up with to use as
your judgment scales.
With
an eating disorder, enough is never enough, so the reality is that the only enough
you’ll ever get is this: if you are successful at being anorexic you die.
Because you’ll keep going and working, working toward zero, working toward
weightlessness, to becoming nonexistence, less than nothing.
The
reality is that when you don’t feed your body, it still feeds. If you’re not
putting food into it, it consumes fat, first, which is stored energy your body
has to keep you alive. And then? It feeds on muscle. You lose muscle mass. The
muscle in your legs, arms, stomach, and thighs. You have muscles in your eyes.
Your
heart. Your heart is a muscle.
Your
body needs sustenance to survive. It cannibalizes itself to survive. Until, of
course, there’s not enough left. That’s when anorexia wins and you die, because
your body fought its hardest to keep you alive.
The
reality is that your body wants you to live. It fights against you as you
starve it.
That
leads me to another reality, similar to a previous one, but still: the costs of
an eating disorder are higher than you have the ability to pay for. As I wrote
a few sentences ago: your body is going to fight to keep you alive. You need
nutrients to stay alive; they have to come from somewhere. So as you lose the
muscle around your heart, other things start to happen to the body you’re
starving to try to obtain a certain weight through unhealthy, unsafe means.
Your
hair falls out. It falls out softly, like snow on Christmas. Like pine needles
off the Christmas tree, revealing bare spots underneath.
You
lose the ability to be warm. You are always cold, even in the summertime, even
in the sunshine. Even as you wear layers of underarm and layers of clothes.
Due
to muscle loss, your muscles become weak, but I’ll add a bit more onto that for
you. Your bladder is a muscle. That’s not fun, is it? Not being able to control
that, or your hands, isn’t fun. Feeling your heart hesitate in your chest isn’t
fun. It’s terrifying.
But
the terrifying thing is that all of it is worth it when you have an eating
disorder. Even as you are dizzy and sick and cold. Even when you are tired and
numb and starving: emotionally, mentally, physically, relationally,
spiritually, actually – the you you
know and love is sick, and sometimes its so sick that it can’t ever be fixed
enough. Even after recovery, many people with eating disorders face the
consequences of what they’ve undergone for the rest of their life. Osteoporosis.
Deficiencies galore. Bad teeth, skin, hair and nails. A ravaged, damaged
reproductive system. Unbalanced hormones.
But
also how much damage you’ve done not only to your life but to the ones of all
the people you love. Because you can’t love people enough, the way they deserve
to be loved, when you’re a slave to an eating disorder. As you starve, you
starve all the people in your life. And that sucks.
You
starve yourself of life. You starve yourself of love. Of serving others, of
being what you like to be: whether that’s a writer, or a lover, or a runner.
Whether that’s a mother or a father or a brother. A daughter. A granddaughter,
a friend, a boyfriend. You can’t be what you need to be when you’re consumed
with destroying yourself.
Before
I close, I have to give you some of the realities that have been the hardest
for me to find. The ones above were always real, regardless of how long it took
me to acknowledge them. Regardless of how many years it took me to admit to
myself or another human being that I had a problem.
Here
are some of the realities I know now that have always been true, but that I
fight to believe every single day. That I still tell myself after numerous
multiples of 28 days and I’m still struggling to believe and use as I
teeter-totter haltingly down a thing called recovery.
If
you’re struggling with an eating disorder know that there is hope. I know. I
know. Life without an eating disorder seems like an impossible dream. I
couldn’t imagine it. Most days I still don’t, but I see glimpses of it more and
more, sometimes infrequently, sometimes hope lasts for days at a time.
There
is hope for you.
Because
the reality is that you are not your eating disorder.
I
defined myself by it. I thought it was all of me. That I had been consumed by
it. I mourned over the person I used to be, who used to be able to eat
normally. I thought that I would never see her again. And in most ways, I won’t.
Because I can’t go back to her. I started down a road that was rough and dark
and full of twists and turns, designed in such a way that I could never turn
and go back to the girl I used to be.
The
reality I base this on is one, because I’m a Christian, is lovely for me. Being
a Christian who not only developed an eating disorder but still very much has
to battle one has been probably the hardest thing for me. It’s still hard. But
the reality is that my identity is not me. I am not anorexic. I’m not even me.
When I asked Christ into my life, he stepped into my place and took from my sin
from me. He became my identity. And he won. He beats sin every single time. He
loves me even as I struggle with sin and sickness and living in a world full of
brokenness. Because really, we are all broken sinners, but the beautiful
reality is that we have a God who sent his son to rescue and redeem us.
I
think that’s beautiful.
Here’s
another reality: you have to fight. For me, as a Christian, that’s part of the
whole thing. I can call myself whatever I want, have tons of ideology in my
back pocket, go to church, but faith without action is dead. I can’t continue
in this. I can’t be content with living with an eating disorder. Living in sin
and saying it’s okay, that I’m forgiven, doesn’t cut it. Not for me. So for me,
that means that I do the hard work of recovery every day.
It’s
the hardest thing I’ve ever done. But it has to be. It has to be done.
Regardless of your faith. Whatever religious affiliation or not that you define
yourself as or of: don’t live in an eating disorder. Fight for freedom. Fight
to live. To do more than exist. To be more than a shell, a ghost with a heartbeat.
Fight to be more than a number on a scale or calories or an unattainable idea
of “skinny.” Because you’re more than that. You’re a daughter, you’re your
favorite ice cream flavor, you are your hopes and dreams, you’re what makes you
laugh and the person you love most in this world. You are so much more than a
disorder.
My
reality is that I have an eating disorder. But that’s not all of me. It doesn’t
define me anymore. Because my reality, I know, is bigger than all of that. And,
for me, my reality is hinged on Jesus. Really, I think everyone’s is. Because
what he’s done for me he did for all mankind. You either accept it or you
don’t, but either way: it’s done. My reality is that I was created to glorify
the God of the universe and to enjoy Him forever. Both at the same time. To
become more like Christ every day, and to one day, be with Him, free from sin
and pain, sadness and shame.
My
reality is that I am pursuing recovering from my eating disorder because I
believe that I am meant to be free. I believe that by taking back and
recovering from what anorexia nervosa has stolen from me, I believe that by
fighting back, that by trying to get better, I am taking back the freedom that
is waiting for me, given through Christ on a cross. That freedom is there for
me. And it’s free because the cost has been paid by the only One who can.
Whether
it takes 28 days or years, whether it’s the time between heartbeats or a
journey millions of miles long and wide, every day I fight to be free from
something that entangles me. Whether that is my sin, whether it’s depression or
a mental disorder, or my personal eating disorder, every day I fight against
myself, against lies, to see the beauty of what I have been given, and to enjoy
the freedom that waits patiently for me, that’s with me with every footfall I
take on this journey.
Fire crackled in
its place
smoke rose up
the chimney effortlessly
more transparent
than a ghost
Uno cards
splayed in my hands
the colorful
stack scattered on our worn, wooden floor
Best friend beside me,
laughter halved in two
when you told me
to shuffle and I said “I can’t”
Immediately
silenced by your hand
As I failed,
once again, to meet your demand
In the
heartbeats after you hit me
the fire
crackled
snapping on
I got up shakily
trying to reign
in all the parts of me
I rose fluidly
just as you’d
trained me
Turning quickly,
hiding the tears that ran
hot and fast out
of me
The bathroom
shower was the only place for me
Five steps away
Shutting, not
locking, the door right behind me
it’s one of the
first lessons you taught me
when I was five
and you wanted to be the one to pull my first tooth
because somehow
it was your right
it wasn’t loose
I remember
standing with my back
pressed against
the far tiled wall
the flashing of
the sliver of your knife
between the door
and the wall
sliding the lock
up and free
our house was so
silent
you heard each
of my frantic heart beats
I took the tooth
home to my mom
in an old report
card package
a gap in my
smile
one less of my
baby teeth
I never locked
the door again
our very first
lesson:
locks are for
doors that can’t be opened
So I showered,
too hot, door unlocked
choking on steam
water loud
enough so I could sob brokenly
Embarrassment
shame anger pain
Gather yourself
quickly together
because, as
always, time stutters out
and the door
opened slowly
telling myself
quietly not to freak out
Watching my best
friend move through the frosted glass
snow dumped from
overhead
hit me a bit too
hard, too fast,
hissing as it
melted instantly with the steam
My best friend’s
pearls of laughter were not as forced as mine
But the message
was clear: I was out of time
Getting dressed
quickly, before the laughter faded
Rejoining,
folding my legs
onto the wooden
floor criss cross apple sauce
to have my dad
wordlessly hand me the deck of cards
apparently I
knew how to shuffle
he watched and
he laughed
my hair dried
slowly
dripping down my
back
the heat from
the wood burning
smoke up the
stack
after this
memory
I have
passionately hated snow
I moved to the
south, running from
the cold, but
ultimately
running from my
reality
and a father who
adored to hurt me
but what if now
after he hit me
instead of
sitting there obediently
hurting,
pretending, letting
I got up and
walked out and never let him hit me again
what if the snow
that slipped over the shower
and hit me a
little too hard
the peals of
laughter that followed
the rules,
unspoken, that came with it
what if the snow
when I walked out our front door
was something
altogether more
I imagine me
stepping into that snow
it breaking,
softly crunching under first one foot
followed closely
by another
childhood raw
hands snowmen
sledding
Christmastime snow days
ice skating on
ponds
cold that steals
your breath away
white stretching
out unbroken
as far as the
eye can see
nature’s purest
form of beauty
untainted by
fathers and cruel memories
I know with
certainty
after what I had
just stepped out of
for me stepping
into that snow would be
the definition
of freedom
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