But Why Do We Sleep? #1

I am six years old when a game of hide-and-seek with my cousins becomes the first thing I learn to fear. Closets and zippers aren’t to be trusted either. I am six years old when my mother reprimands me for behaving rudely to the boy who forced his penis into my small hands. He is my cousin, after all. I am six years old when I watch the big rig trucks barreling down Highway 95. The busy road lines right up with the edge of my grandparents’ property. It would be so easy to run in front of one of those, I think. 

I was six years old when I understood for the first time that grown-ups are shifty motherfuckers. Rules were imposed arbitrarily; lies were forbidden to children, though I caught my mother telling one at least once a week. Sundays, Wednesdays, Thursdays, and Fridays were set aside for church and its related activities. I was not allowed to associate with anyone outside of our small rural congregation and when we were at church, our clothes were expected to be wrinkle-free and our smiles bright enough so others don’t notice that our stretched out grins don’t quite light up our eyes. If last night’s beating with the wooden paddle left bruises, I knew to wear a long-sleeved dress. Spare the rod, spoil the child--the paddle sometimes left an imprint of that Proverb in my fair skin. I was not a spoiled girl.

I had a gifted memory. I won prizes at AWANA and summer camp for memorizing more Bible verses than even the pastors’ kids. I cataloged my grievances: my mother never hugged me. My father never stopped the beatings she gave me. My parents kept inviting my cousins over. My mother sold my favorite house and moved us into a trailer in the country. It took me two hours to walk to school. As I trudged through the winter-hardened mud, I held the complaints inside me like a heartbeat. Ba-boom, I was so lonely. Ba-boom, I was tortured at school for wearing long skirts when every other girl was into leggings. Ba-boom, when a boy says he loves you, he really means he loves that you’ll give him blowjobs because no one told you that you didn’t always have to say yes when they asked for one.

Ba-boom, I took so many pills, but the hospital pumped them out of me.

I have one recurring dream during the seventeen years I live in my parents’ home:  I’m a passenger in a white, windowless van and we are crossing over one of the bridges in Portland. A grey car flies over the median and T-bones us; the driver can’t control the careening wheels and we smash through the guardrail. The van sails face down into the murky Willamette. The windshield cracks and I shrug as the water pours in. There are worse things—I could keep being alive, for instance. I always wake up right before I drown.

Portland. The place I lived in as a young adult and never quite appreciated. I ran off to be in this city with a boy after rehab. I ran off to rehab to get away from my parents and my husband. I ran off to blackout drunkenness and six-day coke binges to get away from my dead baby. I ran off to the husband to get away from the mother who called me a whore when I told her I was pregnant. I ran off to Aberdeen to get away from a town full of people who had just graduated high school with me. I ran back to my boyfriend when I couldn’t hide my rounding belly or keep my cereal down anymore. 

The five years I lived in Portland felt like a long slow pull out of REM sleep—all vague images, bizarre story-lines, characters that looked familiar but acted strangely, and me, but the hazy unconscious version. Without anything to dull my senses, being awake hurt like a sunburn. The weight of each pain I couldn’t forget pulled at my shoulders and my heart. 

I ran from a lot and after a while, I got tired.

#52essays2017