As the light seeps in

A set of blinds in our house broke near the beginning of the summer.  The position they were in when this happened means all of the airflow and everything but the smallest bit of light are blocked.  A quick call to those responsible for their repair would solve the problem, yet rather than picking up the phone to contact them, I instead often find myself sitting in the darkness and stillness of the room, letting the minutes stretch into eternity, contemplating events past, and watching the patterns made upon the wall as the light seeps in.

My parent's divorce was finalized when I was about eighteen months old, and as soon as the paperwork was signed, my mother moved the two of us from the East Coast to California, the place where she met my father.  The next three years were chaotic and marked by a great deal of instability.  Despite having a PhD in a STEM field, she struggled to find (or perhaps to keep) stable employment. We moved frequently, and though the exact number of people who entered and exited our lives in rapid succession is lost to time, my guess is the number was significant because I quickly learned that no matter how desperately I wanted someone to stay, the fact that they would leave was the only inevitability I knew.

It is, for many reasons, likely that I will never know what those years were like for her but based on the circumstances and her behaviors at the time, my guess is that they were terrifying and extraordinarily painful.  Not only was she largely alone, save the young child she needed to care for, but her choice of location also meant she was surrounded by reminders of the man who left—a man she would never really get over, a man who, a few years later, would further wound her when, from her perspective, he chose me over her as a sexual partner.  Even before she discovered this though, the grief and pain from her loss spilled into all areas of our existence, and it seems the only methods she had to manage them were drinking and sleeping, both of which she engaged in frequently.  In an unfortunate twist of fate, the child to whom she had given birth rarely slept, was absolutely relentless in her pursuit of life, and was one which neither she nor anyone else really knew how to handle or what to do with. I often wonder if I had just been…the opposite of me, whether things would have turned out differently. But I wasn’t, and they didn’t.

During the weeks that she worked, I went to daycare, preschool, or a babysitter depending on whatever the arrangement was at the time.  At nights and on the weekends, if she wasn’t out with a man, we stayed, for the most part, at home where she drank and slept on the couch, and I played alone in the small backyard of our condo.  On one of these days, for reasons still unknown to me, I was wearing very little in the way of clothing and she slept longer than usual.  As the hours passed, the sun took its toll on my skin. When she retrieved me, badly burned, from the yard around dusk, she brought me inside, took off the little I was wearing, and put me to bed without saying anything.  In an atypical turn of events, I fell asleep quickly and slept, I think without waking, until the next morning when the blackness of the night was giving way to increasingly paler hues of blue.

Unable to move without excruciating pain, I called for her to come help me repeatedly, but she never did.  Although it may have happened before, this was the first of many times that I remember calling for her, begging her to help me because I was sick or hurt, only for my pleas to go both unanswered and unacknowledged. Fourteen years later, I would call for her for the last time as I lay on a ten-thousand-dollar Turkish rug, vomit seeping into the fibers, acid burning my cheek, too weak to push myself up, using the little strength I had to call for my mother, only to be left alone once again.   I wonder, sometimes, if all of the times, over all of the years that I called and she didn’t come may have been because if she had, she would have had to concede that not everything wrong with me was due to some inherent defect in my character, but instead the expected outcomes of the events occurring in my life. Events in which she played, at the very least, a supporting role.

Over the next day or so, the color of the burn deepened and began to look more purple than red.  Blisters formed and I felt feverish.  Blisters broke and I woke up wet, but cooler.  Once she saw they had broken, she poured liquid antiseptic all over me.  I screamed because of the pain, and she yelled, probably out of anger, and possibly out of fear.  She was working then, and I think she knew it was likely she wasn’t going to be able to drop me off at daycare/preschool/a babysitter looking like this without someone asking questions.

Her solution, while perhaps not the safest, may have been her only option at the time.  In the morning, before she left for work, she poured more antiseptic over my skin, left me in bed and shut the door behind her, telling me to stay there on her way out.  She came back periodically, checking to make sure I had stayed in my room and to douse me in antiseptic.  This worked for the first several days because it still hurt too much to move, but soon my skin had healed enough that I could get around more easily and I started to get restless lying in bed all day.  I began to venture out, at first just to the bathroom, making my way back to my bed quickly but when I was comfortable with that trip, I started going further and spending more time out of my room.   

Most of the time I went to the kitchen to play with the alphabet magnets on the refrigerator.  By then, like most children, I had figured out that letters corresponded to sounds and I practiced this concept on some basic words—milk, eggs, cheese, bread, beer, and wine were my first.  I would pull out an item from the refrigerator, set it on the floor, close the door, look at the label, and arrange the magnet letters in the same order as they were on the label. When I was done, I would put the first item back, choose the next, and repeat the process.  

Usually I was careful to scramble the letters once I had finished a word—instinctively I knew this was an activity of which she should remain unaware, but one day I heard her car pull into the driveway when I was still downstairs, and I didn’t have time to mix the letters before I needed to go upstairs.  I got to my room before she came inside, but she found the word, “milk” spelled out on the door of the refrigerator a little later.  She asked me if I had been downstairs and because I had not yet learned to lie, I told her I had. Unusually calm, she told me not to do it again and left for work. I stayed in my room the rest of the afternoon and later that night she returned with some black cloth and what I think was a dog crate.  She pinned the cloth to the wall over the window, creating what was essentially a permanent curtain that blocked the airflow and filtered out most, but not quite all, of the light, making the room dark and still.  The crate was placed in the corner, just to the left of the closet, facing the door. 

In the morning, she left a cup of water and a sandwich in the crate and, again, made a decision that, while difficult for many of us to understand, may truly represent the only solution she could come up with.  I had already figured out baby gates—it was the early 1980s, they were exceedingly easy to manipulate at that point, and I was then, like I am now, exceedingly determined when I decide I want something—and she either did not think of or could not find a way to simply lock the door from the outside.  I fought her as she put me in there, but as one would expect, before long, she prevailed. I heard the click on the lock of the metal grate, saw her close my bedroom door, and heard her car leave the driveway shortly after. 

When I realized she was really gone, I panicked and tried everything I could think of to get out, but nothing worked—I couldn’t quite reach the lock through the grate to try and open the lock, and despite my efforts, the plastic was too thick to scratch, tear, or chew through at the row of small holes along the side of the top.  She came back to me later that afternoon, my hands and mouth bloodied from trying to escape and my little body so full of rage that I actually fought her again as she tried to take me out.  She was the one to give up first, and when I was done screaming and she was done yelling, the silence settled in for the evening, its weight too heavy for either of us to lift. Once she was gone, I climbed out and got into bed on my own. 

In the morning, she cleaned the crate, put in fresh water and food, and bandaged my hands, displaying a strange mix of cruelty and kindness, her unique signature that she would ultimately leave on my body in scar tissue, rather than ink.  This time, though I still fought when she put me in, I panicked less while I was there. I spent most of my time in the dark, still room, the minutes stretching into eternity, watching the patterns made upon the wall as the light seeped in.

We did this until my skin healed enough that I could return to wherever it was she was going to drop me off for the day, and though I understand why she did what she did during that time, I understand a bit less why she continued with it on and off until we moved in with the man who would become my stepfather.  The easiest of these times were the ones during which she would put me in there and leave for long periods of time.  I adjusted to being alone, kept myself occupied with my thoughts and the patterns of light, and learned how to not anticipate her return, but simply accept it when it happened.  The hardest of these times were the days I was in the crate but she stayed in the house, often right outside my room.  I knew she was there, yet she remained just out of reach. On those days, I didn’t watch the light—I just stared at the door desperately waiting for her to come back to me, a little more frantic with each minute that passed that she didn’t appear. 

About a year or year and a half later we moved into the house I would live in, or at least near, until I left home a few days after high school graduation. One of them, although I don’t know which, got rid of the crate, and my new room had a large, uncovered window that looked out at the mountains and the pear tree that grew in the backyard.  My mother married my stepfather a few months later, and with that came some much-needed stability. I still spent most of my time alone, my mother still drank and slept, and in my other life, my biological father was slowly turning up the heat in his sphere of abuse, but the yard was bigger, the tree provided enough shade that I did not get a burn like that again for over a decade, and some of the people around me at that point ended up staying in my life quite a while.  In those ways my existence truly improved, yet I would be lying if I said the days in the crate didn't leave a mark still visible today when the light hits it just right.

The blinds have been broken for so long now that fall is approaching, and with that I need to begin to prepare for a series of annual events that hold a certain significance to me—Orion will rise, the new school year will begin, and the High Holidays will arrive. The pace of my life will pick back up, my days will get busier, and I will call about getting the blinds fixed because I will not have time to sit in a dark, still room watching the light.

But for now, as summer lingers just a bit longer, I will spend at least some of my time in the darkness and stillness of the room, letting the minutes stretch into eternity, contemplating events past, and watching the patterns made upon the wall as the light seeps in.