***Note: This is my book edit to date. I was putting in snippets, but it could get confusing if you missed a day. I can also link back to this in future posts.
Chapter 1
“Each and every one of us plays a completely unique role in the main act of life. The bumblebee pollinates the flowers, the judge decides morality, and you struggle to find who you are.”
Me: I can’t escape it. I have to go. I want to run away from my life and never look back.
Therapist: When listening to you, it sounds like something is terribly wrong. What would leaving solve?
Me: The brokenness and failed ball steadily growing inside is blocking out any hope or next steps.
Therapist: What are you thinking of doing?
Me: I’d pack my car with the basics, quit my job at the casino, rent my house out, and go.
Therapist: Tell me more.
Me: I’d explore and wake up with the sunrise; it’d be heaven. Seeing Mount Rushmore, sitting on a park bench, and swimming. Doing whatever I wanted.
Therapist: Escaping like this, what worries you the most?
Me: I won’t know who I am when it’s all said and done. Or that I’ll become somebody else entirely. Or go crazy. Like, turn into one of those mumbling shuffling people in a psych ward, locked away in their own mind.
I started writing in Virginia, at Pat’s, in a neighborhood where youngish trust fund families renovated homes in oversaturated ways: five feet from the line, not a hair less, and up, up in stories. I imagined calendar makers drooled over the various front door colors in Alexandria’s downtown. And although Pat’s house wasn’t right downtown, we’d sidewind past the enchanting bloated-bellied homes on sidewalks until we did. Often with a heavy canvas bag over her shoulder, Pat, thirty years my senior, would go toe to toe with me on our strolls. It was here, rather there, that lessons came, that history is right now, and to appreciate communication that hits you right in the solar plexus.
My tires had traveled sixty thousand one hundred and twenty-six of Tom Brady’s most gusto football throws to land me at Pat’s. That’s not exactly true. You’ll get a 2,776-mile readout on Google or Apple Maps if you plug in Tukwila, Washington, to Alexandria, Virginia, but my route there was as senseless as a tortoise tracker. So Pat wasn’t in the plan. Heck, I didn’t even know Pat. But when you know someone who tells you you should know someone, often the person who knows you is right.
Days prior, upon seeing a Facebook post of me pushing a cannon at Gettysburg, my friend in Washington, Peg, messaged, “If you need a soft place to fall,” along with her nearby sister’s location. I did need a soft place to fall. Badly. The free-spirited, free-wheeling adventure I’d been on developed a hitch; time’s forever expanse started ticking. And no part of me wanted to go home.
Home. That was a problem. The home I’d known felt blurred like a professor’s absentminded black slacks brushing against a chalkboard. How it got that way haunted my thoughts. With my nose inches from my life on TV, I’d sit pausing, then playing, rewinding, and then pausing again, trying to solve a case even Matlock’s best hour couldn’t touch.
I’m 10 years old and in my room. Like clockwork, the hingeless and gravity-fed garage door swings and slams to a close. It’s 6:30 PM on the dot. Dad’s home from work. I want to open my closed door and run to him. To wrap my arms around his neck, to smell his aftershave face, and to feel his day’s worth of stubble. There’s still time to play catch. I wish I were smaller; those fresh out-of-the-bath airplane rides were the best.
Usually, when Daddy comes home, I sit in the front room, watching headlights and counting them. It’s a game to soothe the agitation of waiting. I am, no doubt, Daddy’s girl. Today, however, none of those aspects are within reach. I am seated on my room’s floor behind a closed door, powerless to move.
A week before leaving on the road, I bought twenty (or was it forty) 10 mg Vicodin from Gator in the parking lot at work. I’d haggled him down to $5 a pill and was proud of my savings. Thinking back now, pleading for more from the 6’4” dreadlocked African American drug dealer did not increase my desire to give; it actually had the opposite effect. If he stayed in the business, not that I’m in the position to give financial advice to a drug dealer, but he would benefit from reading “Never Split the Difference,” my go-to book for solutions that work. That it’s written by the former lead hostage negotiator for the FBI means the author knows what they’re doing.
I pluck one of the uncorralled pills from my car’s cup holder, with a swig of warm bottled water. Warm because nothing stayed cool sitting in my car in Wyoming in August.
The tension in my chest is the first to calm, and a sparkly feeling flushes my cheeks. My thoughts warm and stretch out like gooey chewing gum. Then giddiness ushers in. Holy stromboli, do I ever love the giddiness. It’s the just-through-the-turnstile-at-Disney feeling; the skip-a-doo-da-day thoughts that swirl and dance like a flower child in a post-war sultry sundress. I scooch back, melting into the seat, propping up a barefoot onto the dash, click on the cruise, and enjoy the new perspective of the highway.
Alcohol and drugs were a safe haven, a portal to sanity, and an escape from the fallout of life’s messiest problems. My first blackout was at a high school party at sixteen. A hit of marijuana taken with my cousins at nineteen led to the tastiest Taco Bell ever. And lines of cocaine at 21 with a college friend who said it was no big deal. I crossed lines I thought I’d never cross. Then again, it’s the ability to anesthetize the beast within I wanted, if only temporarily.
I’m staring at my brown carpet, listening with the ear of a mouse. Dad stopped short of the eight-foot brick entryway, and my mom met him there. “Did you know what your son did TODAY?!” It’s a shrill greeting that makes my body recoil. There’s that single fiber on my carpet; its bend is not in line with the others, and I’m dazzled by how interesting a fiber of carpeting can be. A stored-up blasphemous laundry list spews like venom from her; the account is damning. Still entranced, I see her pursed lips, blackened eyes, and coiled body posture. It’s this hysteria that lights the fuse.
Then, like a rubber band being pulled too far, he breaks.“Kyyyy-llllle!” My Dad’s voice booms down the hall, and in his business suit, tie, and black-shined loafers, he thuds past the 11” 17” professionally posed school photos of my brother and me. Some days, my brother presses his featherweight body against the door; others, he lodges his wiry body under the bed. I silently pray he doesn’t do either, as hiding only worsens the grabbing for him and the resulting screams.
Looking back now, I can’t tell you what was worse: hearing my brother’s powerless bleats of “No, Daddy. No!” or the sound of the leather being stripped from its guides before whipping his soft, cocoa-colored skin.
The first time I typed out the above scene, I cried. I couldn’t believe I’d actually written it. Not unlike being released from a windowless basement, putting it to page made me feel lighter. Then, just this past weekend, knowing I wanted to share it on my blog, I texted, “I have something important to talk about. Can we get together, just you and I?” to my Dad.
We caught up on house updates and other events over burgers at noon at Red Robin next to the not-so-super Supermall. And then, at a pause, I took a deep breath, and our eyes met with a slight head tilt, like “Well?” And I spoke. Sometimes calmly, sometimes shakily, about what I’d written, and about my feeling it was important to share, and also my desire to not hurt our relationship. He seemed genuinely confused. “I don’t remember doing that.” He remembered spankings—Kyle was a handful, after all—but nothing that left marks and never a belt.
It was odd that such a crisp memory to me was lost to him. “I’m not violent; I don’t have it in my personality,” he told me as I glanced yet another time at the napkin being rubbed lightly between his thumbs and fingers. “I know you’re not, now,” I inflected.
He’s not. He’s the most gentle person I know besides my husband, Dave. And now I’m lost and doubting whether my choice to talk to him, let alone my desire to write about it was a mistake.
Going On 40 