Why I Write

It must have something to do with the moments on the stairs or in the closet or under the bed, among dusty things we said we had put away, or on the safer side of a slammed door. Little me, hidden and silent (I could always hold in fear), accessing what I was told was none of my business but that I felt deeply was in every way my business. Even then, a seasoned girl of five, morality was vague. It was not that I failed to grasp why Lying is Wrong, but that I disagreed – at times and according to my discretion—that Lying is Wrong.

For instance, my older sister is having a break down during the early trials and errors of anti-anxiety medication. This particular one proves catastrophic. There I am crouching in another room while she shatters the house with her banshee screams and threatens to slice off an ample portion of her hair, that is, the remaining hair that her defiant little fingers have not already plucked.

My mother, unable to calm her, loses situation control. Her sighs say, “I’m impotent.”

Mother unsure, I sure, of my place of my goal, now unsure, now unsafe, sister’s guns point anywhere.

As I said, I could bottle fear, to a point, which once reached imposed on my young mind, much like my childish mastery of urination, an urgent need to release that, if ignored, could be quite damaging. Infections, bad dreams, spillage.

Something ticks, is detonated. She cuts impressively close to the root, revealing a sunless bald spot on the side of her head. No styling will remedy this, but later we tell her it isn’t that bad. (She, on the other hand, believes firmly that Lying is Wrong, and somehow to this day takes for granted that when she says, “You’re not lying are you?” and I say, “no,” that in fact I may be lying.) 

Her crying is interfering with her breathing, those sharp gasps, and she is frustrated with having to pause the episode and take a breath in order to continue.

My channel for expressing terror must have been mal-wired. For before I thought “funny” and before I could refrain, I roared, laughter cancelling the sloppy entrails of that serotonin tantrum. Of course she misinterpreted, shouted at and banished me. Get away, I hate you.

I did not believe that she hated me, but that's beside the point. It was clear then that my voice exposed me, obstructed me. And because I so fetishized other people’s secrets, the performances they put on while alone, their inner itches that they feared expelled them but that I knew wedded us in some disturbed union, a fundamental humiliation, because of this I shut up and was henceforth a quiet kid.

But all pipes leak, and if not through speaking, then…