Sunday, December 20, 2015

Memories (an excerpt from the book that crashed and burned with my hard drive)

"..There are so many memories that I have yet to remember. It's been almost forty years and I figured something would have surfaced by now. Why can't I remember? Will I ever be able to remember? Maybe things are better off where they are now, maybe it's better they stay hidden. Memories locked away. Then there are the nightmares, these being a whole other story. There are a few things I do remember with the help of my dreams... A red headed man, a hallway going upstairs to a room...the door leading to the hallway looked like the rest of the wall so people didn't know it was there unless they saw it open.  I see a camera often, no idea why. He is in my dreams a lot, normally chasing me until I wake up in tears. I remember things here and there, things my grandparents said I was too young to remember. There was no way I could know these things, but I do. And honestly, I want to remember, so that maybe, just maybe, I can move on...maybe.

  Finally, someone caught on to the things that my mother was doing and we were removed from her. I was so ill that they laid me in a dark room for what seemed like forever. Chickenpox. The doctor said it was one of the worst cases he had seen. They were behind my eyelids and up inside of me. I remember that all I wanted to do was scratch and I felt like I was on fire. The pain worsened when trying to use the bathroom. I screamed and cried the entire time I was trying to relieve myself. I slept a lot, was else was there to do laying in a pitch black room. I know they talked about how the doctors were scared that I would be blind. I didn't want to live. I was six. What six year old wants to die?...I can answer that.

  My grandparents took all three of us, the state was threatening to separate us and put us into different homes. My brother was so sick and starved that at three months, he didn't know how to drink out of a bottle and they thought he was going to die. Now thinking about it, I don't remember ever seeing him drink out of a bottle, they started him on spoon feeding right away. I remember that right before they took us, he would cry for hours on end, and there was nothing I could do for him. I tried feeding him pepsi and candy. Of course, he wouldn't take it. He wasn't as easy to appease as my little sister. She was more than content with anything I gave her. He would just cry himself to sleep. What else could I do?

  After going to live with my grandparents, things got better for a little while. However, it didn't last long. I could hear all the adults talking about me. I was damaged goods. I was angry, opinionated, and loud. I really didn't like them telling us what to do. I was their protector, that's all I knew how to be. Others scolding them caused rage in me. I could handle any punishments dealt to me as they weren't even close to being as bad as the ones my mother doled out in her drugged up stupor. And I was punished quite a bit for doing bad things to myself, things that no child should know about, much less be doing them themselves."

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