Meanwhile I feel like they have something to do with my not being able to talk. I think, This is ridiculous, I can’t even make sense of my own feelings.
Then He jumps in, and says: Just keep writing the lines. I’ll piece them together. I’ll take care of it.
Between the two of us, the Ghost was always the capable one, the fearless one. He would see what had to be done, and he’d just do it -- regardless of the consequences, the trauma, the self destructiveness.
I was the one who wanted, and he was the one who acquired. He had handled the mustang, so he could handle anything, in the same way. I wanted freedom.
He was the one who got the job at fourteen -- a hundred hour weeks of hard labor. He was the one who got me through it saying, This is the price of what you want, this is how much it costs; I can take care of it.
The money from that job, despite most of it being stolen by Mom and R__, led to a car, the next step toward escaping the house. I wanted a high school diploma, then college. He was the one who gladly, ni_evely studied late into the night after the twelve and sixteen hour work days of my teenage years.
He was the one got me up in the morning, despite the exhaustion and pain I felt -- pain at never knowing a high school, or kids my own age, pain of having no one to talk to, so that I felt more beast than human.
When I turned eighteen and the law finally allowed me my freedom, we began to get in each other’s way.
Like when it came time to get a legitimate high school diploma, instead of the forged one I carried in order to get jobs.
By His insistence I had taught myself geometry, trigonometry, and the beginnings of calculus, not to mention Shakespeare, history, and social studies. When I arrived at the place the woman showed me how a legitimate high school diploma was gotten -- you start with the outdated high school text books on the walls of her classroom. You get so many credits per book. But really all you had to do is take each test -- which are all open book.
I saw how low and elementary the standards were for getting a legitimate high school diploma. I realized that the legitimate one was the actually more illegitimate than the one I’d been carrying around all these years.
Plus, by law, I wasn’t allowed to fill out financial aid papers until I was twenty four, unless I had parents, so what did it matter.
I could hear him in my mind: The age thing doesn’t’ matter. Just apply to a private school like H___ did, where they pay most of the financial aid themselves. All she had to do was write an essay. Yeah, I thought, An essay that got them to pity her. I’m not doing that either.
The Roaring had increased in pitch as I was nearing nineteen and I still needed Him and his ways. I needed him to get me up in the morning for another sixteen hour day despite the long nights of nightmares.
I had a lot to learn about life and I could only do it while he was keeping the Roaring at bay. I could deal with the Roaring even less than I could real, adult life because I knew so little about Extreme Abuse, Sexual Abuse, or its aftermaths on the individual -- despite that it was the life I was living.
He was the one who forced me to write, even though I knew nothing of writing and wrote embarrassingly. He didn’t care. He was the one who was inhumanely strong, inhumanely courageous, inhumanely enduring, inhumanly criminal, and I feel like he wants to die now.
My chest cringes up whenever I acknowledge it.
Why did the most human thing in the world -- freedom -- require so much inhumanity from me? I wondered. Why does he have to die, like some sacrifice?
He was bad, but not wrong. Same as I am good -- goodness I can feel in my heartbeat, love I can feel on the other side of my skin -- but not right.
I feel ashamed of him. What he took, what he accepted in that house and rolled with.
An old medic told me once that regardless of the spirit, the body will always struggle to its death, will always fight, will always do anything to live.
Tolle says that He is my body, and that I am my Soul. He says that all religions teach that in order to be truly alive, you must be the soul and not the body -- you must die before dying.
But I don’t think Tolle is relevant here, because there is something beautiful about that boy. A boy who would do anything to survive.
His ways, and the bad he did seem dishonorable now, as a young man. But I was a boy then, and a teenager. There’s something beautiful about him, about his actions, and the great pain underneath it all -- the pain I felt.
I can let him go when I see him this way. Because it’s not like I’m killing him off. It’s more like I’m letting him rest. Like I’m saying to him: You don’t have to be Him superficially anymore, you’re not a little boy anymore; I’m here now.
_____________
After the house, I had feeling for a little while, for about six months, then the Roaring seemed to wash everything away. For those few months I was Real, and had the potential of staying Real.
Meanwhile there was a tidal wave building, rearing toward me. After that I was numb again. I had sexuality for those months, then it was gone, and all I could feel of it was its absence.
It was like when it came to sex and sexuality I was always on the outside, looking in. I taught myself intellectually how to be an adult, instead of feeling what it was like to be an adult.
How to grocery shop, how to handle relationships, how to have sex even, how to live. Without feeling, it was like I was that boy again, in God‘s Country, pretending to be five years older than I really was, and having to pay attention, and think quick, to not be caught, and fit in.
I think it is emotion that moves the person forward, that develops the person. As a child the emotions are unsophisticated compared to the adult’s, and it takes a lot of intellect to get the individual to the point where he can decipher the Truth in himself.
In the end, the individual has come to the point where the only way he can know the Truth is to listen to himself -- not his intellect, but his heart.
I feel things I feel like I shouldn’t be feeling. One is how I don’t like it when people I don’t like, like me. It seems to stem from the boy. Or how I’m always on defense, as if everyone’s bigger than me, when in reality I tend to be bigger than them.
I listened to a radio show once where three academics discussed a film about the man who wrote Peter Pan. They discussed why the story resonated so much with Westerners. They called it the Peter Pan syndrome. Where wealthy Western cultures -- due to a lack of difficulties -- made it unnecessary for its individuals to ever grow up, so much so that most stayed in a kind of child-like, sheltered, existence, lacking the substance and deep emotions of adults.
Not long after the House, I would religiously watch a television show about a kind of rehab facility and its charges. Many there had long histories of child abuse. Their life coaches and psychiatrists would talk about how kids from such horrors never got to grow up. They were simply instantly grown; _psudogrown._ They had to face the world just as they were, whether five or six or eight years old. And they stayed stuck there, in a state of being grown-enough-to-survive, while not developing much past that.
The last time I felt on the verge of this, it was during a military conference. An example of Him sat directly in front of me and one seat to the left in an auditorium. As we were lectured for five days, I couldn’t keep my eyes off him. I took unnecessary notes on the lectures, trying to concentrate.
During that week, I had dreams about him, ones in which we’d be alone in a bed room and he would accuse me of wanting him.
He asked me why I wanted him and not myself. In one dream he pulled me into a bathroom stall, and as he was undressing and undressing me, he kept telling me how good-looking I was, how muscular and smooth, and asking me slyly why I wanted him, instead of myself.
Halfway through the week I figured out that none of this had anything to do with that guy, and everything to do with Him -- me. Wanting to be realized and acknowledged.
I had thought His qualities were not for me. I told myself, and wrote down in my notes: _the dreams won’t stop until you become Him._ Not the guy, who sat behind me in one class, and in front of me in the next, but Him, what I see in the guy.
Once, I stood outside trying to get signal on my cell phone and he stepped out also, talking on his. As I listened to him I realized that he was ordinary, and in real life I probably wouldn‘t have liked him much.
I wrote notes, in my usual way, during those days. As I drove away from the Institution that had hosted the lectures, in a painful, refreshing moment of clarity, the inevitable price was paid, and these qualities of His, that had always been a part of me, were suddenly realized, and were suddenly Mine.
I pulled on the side of the road and wrote these notes: He’s not cheap and I am .. How did this happen? Because, because -- and that’s what I can’t take -- the truth of my value. I did it, I’m the one who lied about my value, who dumbed myself down so I wouldn’t notice, so I wouldn’t have to feel those years and here it is now always waiting for me .. The pain .. How can I be so Cheap-acting, so goofy at times, when I paid for this breath in my lungs and all my limbs still attached and it was not cheap .. Why is it that the people who paid the most, the costliest prices, why do we act the cheapest? .. When I feel my value I feel the raw angry wrongness of it .. When I’m not numb I’m raw. And it’s a good raw. It’s that underlying anger, that Realness. It’s that raw underlying anger that insists self-value ..The Rawness lasted awhile, and I felt alive awhile, but I didn’t understand it, so after a few days, it went away, as if inexplicably.
I’ve known few people in my life. Back in the states, when I was off work, I could go whole weekends without speaking to a soul.
I didn’t feel the pain because I stayed busy and kept the radio on, listening to the weekend shows: CarTalk, The Splendid Table, Prairie Home Companion, and This American Life.
Having these voices in my house, I didn’t feel lonely I even could be happy. The pain of not having people had been trumped, by slight of hand, by trickery.
The pain always seemed like such a waste of time, because there was nothing I could do about it. I still wasn’t my self. I was still drowning in trauma and consequences. So I had to dumb myself down.
I am where the pain is. I always was. All that pain from unremembered sources. I looked for Him -- in body, in mind, even emotion. But never the pain.
Him -- I -- was there all along. It didn’t make sense. That the worst part of the house would be the most valuable. I have everything, and had everything, in order to be Him. Except I didn’t feel right. Like I was stuck in some moment deep in those years in the House.
My body moved on and I didn’t. It’s like I refused to grow up. Refused to accept and move on. Maybe it was impossible for a little boy to feel that kind of pain, that kind of injustice, that kind of crime against his Value.
In the show _Dexter,_ it’s when he accidentally feels, and can feel again, that he suddenly has sexuality, and he cheats on his girlfriend, whom he has never been able to have sex with.
In the show, feeling and sexuality go hand in hand, and I know the same is true here, even if I can’t articulate it. The sexual abuse, the insisted numbness. The boy, (the Ghost) refusing to become Him, because the pain got in the way, and there were still things that had to be done.
I look back on my handful of memories now, and see them differently, because I see the pain now. When I feel I’m not Being True, I tell myself to remember the pain, the reality of it, and the rawness is there, the emotion.
Afterward I know who I am again. It’s not like I’m just now learning my true value, it’s more like I’m realizing it was there all along -- hence the pain that was there all along.
_______________
Last night, as we sat outside in the dark, drinking vodka tonics, K___ mentioned to Mace__ an old gym he and his friends would break into and play basketball in on Wednesday nights.
After Mace__ finished his cigarette and went back into the tent, K___ told more stories of his teenage years. The pain settled into my bones, but I still listened, though I didn’t say much.
K___ comes from the same place I come from, only he lived the humane experience, and I lived the other one. We didn’t literally pass each other on the streets, but we might as well have.
I mentioned to him the old abandoned gym down from the House, where I would play basketball in.
He said, jokingly, _Did you grow up in B__?_ and laughed.
I didn’t tell him about what the place meant to me, my only safe place. I told him about the three story abandoned school the gym was attached to, and how I would play there, exploring its huge auditorium, and its floors of musty classrooms. An eerie playground for a boy not in school.
Lately, K___ treats Mace__ the same way he treats me. That Robot thing again. Like there’s no connection, just a good routine of good social skills.
Sch___ walked up to talk to me, and K___ did most of the talking. I was going to try and be more honest with K__, try to talk more, but suddenly I felt different.
I hate not being able to talk. It’s an awkward silence when K__’s commentary hit’s a lull because he’s told everything, while I don’t have much to say about my day, my adventures.
How do I say that the central part of my day is that there is a boy inside of me who was extraordinary but is now grown? How do I explain that the rest of my day seems boring and trivial in comparison, despite a classic deployment all around us.
When I went to take a shower, I thought about if K___ had been born in the house, if his life would’ve been relatively the same. Maybe I didn’t have much spunk. A__ and H__ had spunk. Both were confidant, good looking, popular. Meanwhile, now they’re goners.
The picture perfect life of K__. One story of coolness and success after another. Is it true that I prefer a life like mine over his? One with true Difficulty. One that was Real. Or is that just something I tell myself?
Maybe I was a boy, though I didn’t play catch or football with neighborhood kids, like K__ did. Maybe I was a teenager though I didn’t play basketball or go to high school or go on dates with girls in cars, like K___ did.
Maybe I was just as real, because I felt the pain of not knowing what it was like playing catch, or football, of having friends, of going to school, or being a good boyfriend. Maybe I was just as Real. Maybe I still am.
Sometimes I think about K___’s life compared to mine, not by choice, but because it’s always in front of me. He had a totally different experience.
I watched a film starring two women. One is a carefree, educated, successful, business woman, the co-star is from the other side of the tracks, without a high school diploma, and with a lot of problems and obstacles. It’s a comedy.
In the beginning, I liked the first woman better -- her life is the most normal, the most ‘together,’ the most promising and clean. But by the end of the film, the second woman steals the show, because she has serious problems, and more opportunities to rise to the occasion.
Just because the first woman’s life was so normal, doesn’t mean it was better. Just because it lacked the problems, the indignities, the messiness of Real life. Somehow, the second woman’s life shines -- and it wouldn’t have if it hadn’t been full of problems.
Just because K__’s life was so normal, so different, doesn’t mean mine wasn’t just as good, or maybe even preferable. Just because in one moment the first woman laughs, and in the same moment of the other woman’s life the other woman cries -- it doesn’t mean the first woman’s moment had more value. In real life it makes me wonder, while in film it seems so obvious.
When K___ steps out the back to smoke, or when he goes on mission, or to the gym, he acts like what he’s doing is the coolest thing in the world.
For the most part K___ chose his story, chose its elements out of want, or because he thought they were cool -- college, weed, mechanics, soldiering, etc. Even chose his manner, his brand of masculinity, by what he wanted, according to his own Him, his own quiet conscience.
I had little choice. Seems like there’s nothing cool about living through Abuse and securing your humanity afterwards. I started writing notes back when I held a restaurant job at night. I kept a little notebook in my pocket, and would pull it out occasionally. The hottest girl there stepped out for a cigarette. I was sitting on the stoop, writing something, by light of the street lamp.
_What do you write in that notebook?_ she asked.
I was caught off guard. I lied, saying, _Lists. Like grocery lists, you know?_
_Oh,_ she said, looking at the ground. Though I couldn’t make it all out, suddenly she said, _Pretend I didn’t ask. Forget I said anything. It was better before. It was interesting, you know? I didn’t mean to mess it up._ And she quickly, awkwardly, left.
Maybe there was something cool about it, somewhere in there.
Mine and K__’s friendship isn’t founded on the idea that I think he’s so cool. His dealings with others may be based on that, but not ours. It’s not by choice; I can’t help it. I like him because he’s K__, not because he’s socially adept, or popular even, or because of his stories.
When I hear his stories of his times in elementary school, and high school, or parties and girls, or of one coolness or success after another, I then see myself, running out of that mustang, stone faced as I dealt with those early years in the house without anyone to talk to, a teenager, in the fields, a bandana on my head, I see myself in the warehouses, the stockrooms, the kitchens, with lower back pain, and pain in my feet, and pain in my eyes, as he straightens up from the rows of crop, and looks at me.
There’s something cool there, Ancient, something old-soul and deep, something proud and powerful.
People don’t see me that way. Maybe because it’s unrecognizable to them. American stories like mine never happened.
Which causes me to not see me that way, either. I then feel disconnected, and easily confused. Not knowing what to say, or how to say it.
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