Disclaimer: this blog post contains possible mind fucks. Read only after carefully and lovingly considering the state of your mind. If you don't know what I'm talking about, then this doesn't apply - read on!
In the fall of my 15th year I was a sophomore in high school. The Superbowl Sunday incident with that drunk guy had not yet happened. One day I had to check in late to school because…well, I don’t remember, but for some reason. I checked in, went to my locker, and got to class right before the bell rang. I sat down in my usual seat and looked at the people around me.
My friend Amie whispered, “What are you doing?” Then I guess the bell rang, because I do not remember responding to that question or even really thinking about it.
The people around me were familiar, the classroom familiar, the teacher familiar, really nothing out of the ordinary. But then the teacher called me up to the front of the room. He asked me very softly, “Rebecca, aren’t you in my 2nd period class? This is the beginning of 3rd period.”
I didn’t know what was going on. I got really scared. I didn’t know if what was happening was real or not. I remember distinctly the teacher’s voice when he asked me that question – he was a really big guy, very tall, very wide, and I was surprised at how soft and not scary his voice sounded when he spoke to me up there in front of everyone.
I looked back at the other students and saw that they were not the people who were in that class with me, though some of them were my friends, and most of them were familiar. I didn’t know what to do, I was just suddenly aware that I was not supposed to be there at that time.
I blindly went back to my seat - at the back of the room, of course - and gathered my stuff and bolted. Someone asked me if I was all right, but I don’t remember who, or what I said, or if I responded at all.
I tried to think of the class I was supposed to be in, and everything was very muddy in my head, and I just knew I could not be there anymore. I went to the office. I was crying by then, not really knowing why, just feeling scared and like a big freak. I was allowed to use the phone to call home.
My dad answered. This was not right, not the way it was supposed to happen, my mom was the one who was there when I needed to be picked up from somewhere. But my dad answered the phone.
I asked if my mom was there. He said yes, but he wouldn’t let me talk to her. I told him I had to leave – I couldn’t stay at school. He asked me why.
It was a good question – why? What the fuck was going on? I didn’t know, just that I couldn’t stay there.
He came to pick me up. He pulled up to the curb in front of the school. Then I was in the car parked in front of the school and crying and he was telling me I could not go home and that I had to go to school.
After awhile I comprehended that I was not going home, that I was going to have to stay at school. A big cylindrical force came down on me, enclosing me inside of it where I would be safe and I was able to stop feeling scared. I was able to feel nothing.
My dad hugged me and said he loved me, and I hugged him and said I loved him, too. I don’t remember what exactly he had told me in the car, but it felt as though it was some sort of pep rally to get me motivated to fight against the world.
He had always told me how to be strong and fight the world, because the world would hate us and make things hard for us because we were special, better, smarter than anyone else. And I completely believed that. Why wouldn’t I? I had been told nothing different for my entire life by everyone – weird, freak, special, unique – I had been hearing it from all sides since birth.
After that, my dad checked me in and the only other thing I remember about that day was that after being in school and around other people for a couple of hours, I felt much better.
I think I would have lost that entire day to the unfamiliar and dark rooms of my vacuous mind, but something made it stick. I didn’t remember the days before or after that day until 16 years later, but that day always remained on the conscious timeline of my past.
Sometimes when I am trying so hard to grasp what has happened to me, to get some sort of concrete evidence that what my memories are telling me is true, I actually get the concrete evidence. It does not happen often.
Since I first began remembering things a few years ago, I have spent hours and hours searching and searching my mom’s house – the house I grew up in. I have tirelessly spent hours looking in closets and cabinets and desks and drawers and inside the walls and in the attic and in every inch of that fucking house looking for some sort of proof that what was in my head was real.
Sometimes I found things there, but it was when I was cleaning out a closet in my own house that I found, at the bottom of a tiny plastic basket, a folded up piece of pink paper. I don’t know how it got there or how it made it all the way to where I was right there at that time. But it was there. It was the check-in slip my dad signed on that day in the 10th grade when I freaked out.
Concrete. Right there in my hand, in front of my eyes. The fucking check-in slip. A tiny tissue of paper, in my house. MY house, not my mom’s house.
Although I think I have accepted what has happened to me on a very fundamental level, that process has not been easy or quick. When I first started remembering things, I would forget that I had remembered. My mind would slip back to where it had been before. I would try so hard to figure out if I was just crazy, because I would have preferred to be bat shit looney tunes than to have really experienced all of those horrendous things my dad did to me.
Even though I knew it was real, I kept looking for a way for it not to be. But then there is the concrete evidence – the tiny little bits and pieces of my past that have physically survived along with me.
When I find those bits of evidence, the chance that it could have all been a really bad, really fucked up dream is snuffed out. I feel vindicated and devastated at the same time. The balance of the negative and positive emotions is so consistent, so steady – I have never experienced such consistency in my life before than in this balance of the negative and positive feelings about what has happened to me in the past and who I am today.
The balance feels like REALITY. It feels like acceptance. It is terrible and liberating at the same time. The duality is really very mind-boggling, and I have had to learn to just stop thinking about it so much so that I don’t get lost in that concept.
I have a headache. I’m going to watch TV on the internet.
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