What I need is a clean break. A clean break, and the ability to believe with my whole heart, that I can make one.
Your mother used to say that we were joined together at the hip. I'd always laugh - god, I miss Esme - but lately, it's all that I can think about. Two stark white bones, illustrious beneath the scrutiny of a sonographic eye. The knit is seamless, undetectable; it was, at least, until fight by fight we tore one another apart. My recollection of this is vivid, in fact I can still feel the splinters of bone. They pulse through my body tearing holes in every skerrick of vermillion flesh, until I'm certain nothing remains but bloodied shreds. The break itself is mangled. At times, I'm sure I feel the poker-edged porcelain grating against the pallid surface of my skin. I have not healed well. But I'm sure you know that much already.
You and I pillaged those pamphlets from the travel centre in town. We fancied ourselves on some secret sort of mission...an escape from the ceaseless monotony. We were tired of this life. In truth, I think you were lying...you loved it here. But you could see what it was doing to me, and being the romantic fool that you have always been, you hoisted yourself up onto a white horse that was really a flimsy basket of good intentions, and rode in to save me.
We never did get around to leaving. I was worried about the boys...about doing to them what our own mother did to us, and I couldn't do it. I never stop wondering what might have been different if we had just fucking gone.
I think that's why I saved them at first. They were my choose-your-own-ending reminder of the way things could have been. The way things should have been. The way things are never going to be.
Just lately, I began to realise that it isn't just this house that ties me to you...it's my every thought. My every breath. And with this knowledge in mind, I experienced, quite suddenly, an inexplicable desire to run...to run as far away from here as I possibly can.
I glance at my suitcase, packed and ready. The boys will be home soon. I won't deny that I seriously contemplated slipping away into the night. It would be easy...too easy. But I could never do that to them. I love them too much.
And so instead, I sit down on my bed. And I wait.
Monday, January 5, 2009
Saturday, January 3, 2009
# 8. Apron Strings and the Cutting of Them.
Summer storms are so fantastic. You can forget everything in the midst of something so much bigger than yourself. I stand on the wide veranda, making trails with my toes in the ancient dust, letting the smell of the rain wash over me. With each flash of light more rains spills onto the hard ground. More and more rain. Heavier and heavier. The solid gray light hides everything. I can no longer make out the familiar shape of the beaten-up ute, the towering stringy-barks or the collection of slap-dash sheds that litter our property.
I close my eyes. It feels different already. I have to let you go. No forward motion can be made while I continue to cling to these glossy-magazine memories I have of you.
The sudden urge to walk out into the rain overwhelms me. Why not? The sticky heat presses in on me as I dance out into the rain. I take the three stone steps quickly, sticking my dry tonuge out as I go. The rain flattens my fly-away hair and makes my clothes heavy- but I suddenly feel lighter than I have in months.
How could life have ever been so complicated? It's just me, twirling in the rain a thousand miles, a thousand years away from everything.
I suddenly remember my mother, yelling as the first clap of thunder broke through the air. Slippers flapping she would run to whisk the laundry off the line. We'd watch awestruck as the rain bucketed down on her and still she'd stubbornly wrench the clothes, pegs and all, away from the sopping clothes-line. She was a sucker for a lost cause once upon a time.
But it doesn't matter. This is a memory that no longer belongs to me.
I think of the papers, pamphlets and brochures hidden beneath my matress. A pointless precaution I take to humour myself, no one would enter my room these days. Clear evidence of a lifetime of wishful thinking. Still, I must have known all along that these papers would be my saving grace. Papers so creased with wear, they are barely legible. Times, routes, fares. Maps and maps. Black and white information that will get me out of here. I think it is finally time. I have money, mind-numbing work at the local post office proved to pay off. No, money was never the issue. I am simply too sentimental for my own good. But it's time. Evan will survive, the boys will survive. It's time to make sure I will survive too.
And with the first of this years summer rain, I finally have a plan.
I close my eyes. It feels different already. I have to let you go. No forward motion can be made while I continue to cling to these glossy-magazine memories I have of you.
The sudden urge to walk out into the rain overwhelms me. Why not? The sticky heat presses in on me as I dance out into the rain. I take the three stone steps quickly, sticking my dry tonuge out as I go. The rain flattens my fly-away hair and makes my clothes heavy- but I suddenly feel lighter than I have in months.
How could life have ever been so complicated? It's just me, twirling in the rain a thousand miles, a thousand years away from everything.
I suddenly remember my mother, yelling as the first clap of thunder broke through the air. Slippers flapping she would run to whisk the laundry off the line. We'd watch awestruck as the rain bucketed down on her and still she'd stubbornly wrench the clothes, pegs and all, away from the sopping clothes-line. She was a sucker for a lost cause once upon a time.
But it doesn't matter. This is a memory that no longer belongs to me.
I think of the papers, pamphlets and brochures hidden beneath my matress. A pointless precaution I take to humour myself, no one would enter my room these days. Clear evidence of a lifetime of wishful thinking. Still, I must have known all along that these papers would be my saving grace. Papers so creased with wear, they are barely legible. Times, routes, fares. Maps and maps. Black and white information that will get me out of here. I think it is finally time. I have money, mind-numbing work at the local post office proved to pay off. No, money was never the issue. I am simply too sentimental for my own good. But it's time. Evan will survive, the boys will survive. It's time to make sure I will survive too.
And with the first of this years summer rain, I finally have a plan.
# 7. To The Bone.
I hear the strum of Jack's guitar and grit my teeth so tightly that it hurts. A, E, B fucking flat, over and over and over again without pause. It's going to be a long night.
No one bothers to scream at him anymore. Those first few weeks after Norah left, Evan would pound mercilessly against the flimsy chipboard wall that forced a line between their two small kingdoms. The tremors shimmied across the shabby boards and buried themselves beneath the woodwork until the entire house shook with them. My bedroom rattled with the zest of a runaway caravan, shifting the blanket of red dust that coats every surface of this god damn town, until the air swam with it.
I did not interfere at first. I left things to Evan - Evan and his incessant booming, the colourful threats growled at the space beneath the door that would have made our mother faint, if she had heard. If she wasn't globetrotting with Dad on the opposite side of the world, being everything to everybody but her own flesh and blood.
I was content to take shelter here with you...was desperate to have you distract me from Jack's tactless masochism, and even more, from my own internal carnage. You were brilliant. I didn't want to stop Jack from strumming. I was in favour of anything that promised to hold him together. The will to remain in one piece is so ridiculously fickle. Sometimes I would find him in deep sleep, his arms wrapped tightly around himself. I entertained notions of finding him something...anything to help him hang onto himself. A length of nylon rope looped three times, and tied securely at the small of his back...the tatty persian rug he claimed as his own swathed about him like a kevlar cocoon. Anything to substitute Norah's embrace. Though I know it better now, even then, I realised that there could be no stand-in. I left him be.
But the night that the arguments rocked my grubby chrome banker's lamp onto the hardwood floor; the night that I looked down to find myself in just as many pieces as the shattered jade glass, I made an exception. The boys almost met you that night. I remember bellowing as I tore myself out of your arms, half-crazed with fury. The guitar strumming stopped abruptly, but I could still hear the pounding. Poor Evan. I wasn't to know at the time that he had stopped just as dutifully as Jack, and that it was in fact the pounding of blood in my ears that I heard as I stomped bloodied footprints down the hall. It wouldn't have stopped me from busting his lip...nothing could have stopped me that night. Norah gave me that stupid lamp back when we were kids. It occured to me as you coaxed the glass shards from the sole of my left foot, that there was irony in crying over her again.
At least it stopped Evan from causing trouble. I must have frightened him on some level, because he never once bothered Jack again.
In a way, I miss the pounding. Now I have nothing to distract myself from those same three chords. They haunt my dreams. Worse still, you aren't here to help the wounds heal over...and now there's nothing holding me together. Nothing at all.
No one bothers to scream at him anymore. Those first few weeks after Norah left, Evan would pound mercilessly against the flimsy chipboard wall that forced a line between their two small kingdoms. The tremors shimmied across the shabby boards and buried themselves beneath the woodwork until the entire house shook with them. My bedroom rattled with the zest of a runaway caravan, shifting the blanket of red dust that coats every surface of this god damn town, until the air swam with it.
I did not interfere at first. I left things to Evan - Evan and his incessant booming, the colourful threats growled at the space beneath the door that would have made our mother faint, if she had heard. If she wasn't globetrotting with Dad on the opposite side of the world, being everything to everybody but her own flesh and blood.
I was content to take shelter here with you...was desperate to have you distract me from Jack's tactless masochism, and even more, from my own internal carnage. You were brilliant. I didn't want to stop Jack from strumming. I was in favour of anything that promised to hold him together. The will to remain in one piece is so ridiculously fickle. Sometimes I would find him in deep sleep, his arms wrapped tightly around himself. I entertained notions of finding him something...anything to help him hang onto himself. A length of nylon rope looped three times, and tied securely at the small of his back...the tatty persian rug he claimed as his own swathed about him like a kevlar cocoon. Anything to substitute Norah's embrace. Though I know it better now, even then, I realised that there could be no stand-in. I left him be.
But the night that the arguments rocked my grubby chrome banker's lamp onto the hardwood floor; the night that I looked down to find myself in just as many pieces as the shattered jade glass, I made an exception. The boys almost met you that night. I remember bellowing as I tore myself out of your arms, half-crazed with fury. The guitar strumming stopped abruptly, but I could still hear the pounding. Poor Evan. I wasn't to know at the time that he had stopped just as dutifully as Jack, and that it was in fact the pounding of blood in my ears that I heard as I stomped bloodied footprints down the hall. It wouldn't have stopped me from busting his lip...nothing could have stopped me that night. Norah gave me that stupid lamp back when we were kids. It occured to me as you coaxed the glass shards from the sole of my left foot, that there was irony in crying over her again.
At least it stopped Evan from causing trouble. I must have frightened him on some level, because he never once bothered Jack again.
In a way, I miss the pounding. Now I have nothing to distract myself from those same three chords. They haunt my dreams. Worse still, you aren't here to help the wounds heal over...and now there's nothing holding me together. Nothing at all.
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