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No lie ever reaches old age. —Sophocles
“We do what we do to help. That’s all. You look further than that and you’ll drive yourself insane.”
I’d always marveled at how soundly others slumbered. Their minds could shut down and leave them be for hours at a time, while mine always seemed to be in third gear, just waiting to drop the clutch and burn rubber the moment I surfaced.
The difference is some people get handed life jackets while others are told they should’ve learned how to swim better.
Those huge blocky letters scrawled in black paint across the walls. All those words our father hated so much he kept them inside until they curdled and festered and rotted him from the center out. Before he’d taken his rifle up to the roof of the building he worked in, he lanced some of the infection by writing out those secret thoughts. Things like WE AREN’T REAL, and, THEIR LAUGHTER IS LIKE BREATHING SMOKE, and one in particular I think about a lot—NONE OF THIS IS HAPPENING.
We’re all to blame. Someone once said we don’t have a justice system, we have a legal system. I think about that. I think about that a lot.
Surfing. I’d taken it up almost a decade ago in my midtwenties. The openness of the ocean and the solitary nature of the sport called to me. It was a private affair between you and the waves. Like a lone parishioner at church.
“Doing nothing is always doing something.”
We become passengers sometimes. We like to think we’re in control and the electrically charged tissue in our heads is the captain steering the ship. But sometimes an iceberg comes out of the fog, and evasive measures are taken. We’re suddenly the people holding on for dear life, hoping whoever’s driving knows what the fuck they’re doing.
Foster children share a lot in common with convicts. They’ve both been taken in and processed by the state. Both placed in environments and situations not of their choosing. And both have “rap sheets” in that their crimes, or someone else’s, have been listed, recorded. A life whittled down to misdeeds and subjections. These rap sheets also include family, friends, and known associates.
We forget how young some people are when they start carrying weight beyond their years, then wonder why they struggle.
They ask the parents about their own childhoods, about drinking, about current drug use, about watching porn. They ask about certain household routines, try to establish a pattern or back trail from their pasts that might lead to the abuse that’s potentially going on now. Because humans are learning machines. We learn by what’s done to us, not just what we’re taught. We learn to injure and touch and wound what we shouldn’t. We learn to abuse and abandon if we’re hurt and lost. The past imprints on the future like a typewriter slowly running out of ink.
There comes a time in everyone’s life where they begin wondering what the point is. If they’re making a difference or just treading water.
If purpose became a perk not a prerequisite, what the hell were we even doing?
I wish . . . I wish I was with them.” She faded for a beat, then came back, eyes opening to slits and finding me. “I wish I was dead too.”
There are studies suggesting one in a hundred people are sociopaths. Really when you think about it, it’s not hard to believe.
“I want to pilot a steampunk dirigible with a talking monkey sidekick and twenty gallons of rum.” His eyes crinkled. “Who the hell doesn’t?”
“The only thing we really have to give, and it’s special. Time’s just another word for love.”
Obsession is caustic. It strips all reason away.
On the flip side those attributes could become burdens. How many brilliant people had fallen under the weight of unattainable desires? When you didn’t have opportunity, hope could become chains.
Sleep’s a funny thing. It’s amorphous as steam, seeming to come and go at a whim of its own. It favors some and shuns others. It comes in technicolor dreams and deathlike comas. Sleep is fickle and undeniable.
Those night sounds. The clicks and pops—innocuous 99.9 percent of the time—caused a disproportionate amount of panic. They stirred something in our lizard brains dating back to when we feared the night and what it brought to our cave doors. Now they were plastic bags uncrinkling beneath the sink or the pressure in a pipe equalizing. Even a little mammal traipsing across our porch.
The trick is finding a place so quiet, so full of solitude, you don’t have to think over the din—the noise other minds create. Your own creates enough by itself. Everyone should have a place to retreat to, somewhere unique that doesn’t belong to anyone, not even you. When there are no distractions, you can get down to business. Let the terrible things out of their cages you keep inside. Face them as fully as you can, let them hurt you. Bones are the strongest at a break site while they’re mending. Scar tissue is fibrous so it’s tougher than skin.
We’re told a life without pain is ideal. To avoid suffering as much as possible. But pain is where you grow. We cry with our first breaths because it hurts to expel amniotic fluid and take in air. No transition occurs without pain.
People can get used to anything given enough time. You make as much peace as you can and try to go forward.
That was what all fists and the bruises they left behind really were—reminders as to who called the shots.
“Sometimes good things don’t need to be understood.”
‘Just leave.’ Like it’s as simple as that.” She laughed, and it sounded like the wine was doing its job. “Leave. I’ve got a mortgage, a job. No car. Sam has school. How are we supposed to just leave? She’s never lived paycheck to paycheck. Never took a punch from someone she loved. But, you know . . . just leave.” She whispered the last two words.
A loosening in my middle almost froze me in place. The deep, real fear that tears through your stomach and leaves you feeling like your insides aren’t inside anymore. It pins you down, tries to override fight or flight.
Sometimes trauma is a knife, sometimes it’s stitches.
Tragedy should mean something, but mostly it doesn’t. Some people were broken, and they broke others. The ones left behind picked up the pieces and carried on. If they could. There was heartache and damage, but we carried on.
Those branches in time. The decisions that change the trajectory of life. I let myself wonder sometimes when I wasn’t on guard, when the drawbridge of emotions hadn’t been raised. I wondered and pinpointed where the junctures were, where each turning point could’ve made a difference.
Voices that seemed to come from everywhere at once, but when I surfaced the house was quiet. They were only in my head.
The subconscious is a serious person with a clipboard and a list. It observes and checks boxes, scribbles little notes in the margins of our thoughts. It watches and catalogs and hopes the person in which it resides can’t possibly be as dense as they seem. And yet it is unsurprised as we stumble through mistake after mistake, oblivious to its cues.
The truth is only as good as the proof backing it up. Without that, it’s soft. Flexible. Malleable. You can bend it into shapes unrecognizable if there is nothing to hold it steady.
There are no words for what we do to each other. No words for what we are. Human beings are the strongest and weakest part of the world. And when they break, they shatter everything around them.
