moms hand

December 14th, 1998

“This is awful. This is so hopeless. We're all lost in different ways, so how do we even help each other find our way out? We won't. We can't. We'll just stay lost forever.”

I can smell the deceit, the sad torn sex of the place, rotten cheese, old beer, cigarette butts and yeast infections. A crumpled dollar bill lay next to a pile of pennies on top of milk curdled vomit. What did we take yesterday? Horse tranquilizers? LSD? Crank? Smack? Speed?

I want to call my mom everyday but I would tell her I’m not coming home. I wouldn’t say much, maybe tell her I missed her, loved her. I’d rather live here in this chaos, in this place.

She used to rock me when I was an infant, softly humming lullabies. A single tear rolls down my left cheek. Sometimes when I was alone, I’d cry at dumb love songs on the radio, at odd moments too, I’d start to cry just a little in the shower, before I’d fall asleep. I never get to the real cry that deep down inside of my aching black soul. I can’t go there. I can’t for now.

And mom says she wants to trust me, looking deep into my blue eyes. Don’t trust me. I think as the lies continue to roll off my tongue. I can’t control this, I speak of nothing that I think. I’d only say things, fabricate events and stories, everything that she’d want to hear.

I stopped coming down to breakfast in the mornings, stayed in my room, running out the door in my pajamas, hours late for school. And I try to remember why? Why was I so angry? My temper would flare and my outbursts would be uncontrollable. So hateful towards my mom, yet why? She would try to calm me down and talk to me about it like a civil human being, take me shopping just her and I. And for a split second I’d forget about how I was a disappointment to her. Guilt. Pain. 

I wonder how she felt? Like when she found the bottles of hard liquor stashed in the back of my closet. She found cigarettes, packs of cloves, the whip-its, or when she discovered the blue pipe… or when she found the little bag of what I said was crushed aspirin… She never did tell me, that is how she felt. We never talked about that. We never confronted each other. Maybe because she knew. She knew I was like her. 8th grade, my best friend Stephanie and I would sneak out of our Spanish class and crush little blue pills on the bathroom sink, snort them through a milk straw. Ritalin. Back to Spanish, focused, alert and high, this routine became a habit.

I often saw the pain in my mother’s eyes, after I’d yell unforgiving comments at her as she cooked the family dinner. Her back was to me standing in front of the kitchen sink, peeling carrots. I’d be screaming enraged with anger and it hurt her. She stopped peeling the carrots for a second look up to peer outside the window and back down at the limp carrot. I was angry at her. I was scornful. Furious.

I couldn’t remember how I had been anymore, sweet little baby Elmer. And each rule she relinquished brought me closer to some unimaginable abyss. The open chasm. But where it begins in all this darkness I can’t see. I feel my way following a shadow in the darkness. I run so quickly and confidently out the door calling back lies to her over my shoulder.

Please don’t follow me. It will hurt, disappoint. Devastate. Not where I say I am, not what you want me to be, not what I want to be. But what do you want me to be, proud of me? The harder I try, the harder it fails, further the lies and I trail off in the abyss.

We drive somewhere, the grocery store, maybe. I stare at her, Look , I just want to be free okay. Stop controlling me. I’m my own person. Someday I’m just going to go. I’ll just leave. You’ll see, Mom.