I got into a bind driving home from the maintenance shop, hungry but in a hurry so I stopped by a Taco Bell despite myself. I really don’t like fast food. I figured, one time, Chuck, just this once.
An hour and a half later I had a raging fever. I didn’t feel the fever at first, I was changing clothes and noticed how hot my skin was. I knew I didn’t have much time but still felt weak before I had prepared the couch, put a gallon water within reach and turned the huge TV on. It was the second time in so many days where I wondered who had put what in my body.
It was dumb summer-time TV but I was so weak I kept going in and out of sleep. I woke up at one point to catch a woman on the show Last Comic Standing:
_I’m a lesbian, you might could tell,_ she said, (and the audience laughs.) _It took me awhile to realize it. I remember my Mom asking me why it bothered me so much when my best friend would go out with boys. And I’d say: BECAUSE SHE’S MY BEST FRIEND!_ (The audience laughs.) _But then I got it, I caught on, I got it, I got it._
I go to New York to feel free, I know that. But now that I’m free from that job I feel free all the time. The memories are strong, coloring my world familiar again, as if I belong in this world now. Just like shortly after coming home from deployment, how strong all the memories were. How I wasn’t high or drinking, just free. When I was working I had to remain high and drinking in order to hold onto that reality that is my true life. Funny how being on a path that wasn’t mine can infringe that much.
I thought it would take maybe a day to get well, but I stayed surprisingly painfully sick for three days. On the third day I managed to go to the grocery store, despite still being feverish and having a stomach out of control. I was so hungry. I hadn’t eaten for two days and now despite being just as sick I felt a strong hunger that kept making me eat whole meals every couple of hours. I had these strong cravings for lemonade and grape juice and orange juice and Breyer’s ice cream and Wheat Thins, items I never have in the house because they all seem unnecessary. Despite it being eighty degrees outside I turned the heat on in the house because is was freezing to me outside. Somehow, between the sauna I’d created and the odd choices of food, I was functional, and did house chores.
__________
(Thursday)
Last night I wrote B__ an email. She’s the daughter J__ and Ms J__’s get their emails through because neither of them ever really learned to use a computer. I told her I was coming to the end of day three of being sick and if she could ask Ms J__ what she thought I had and what I should do.
My phone’s battery had been dead for days but that had always been fine with me. I was expecting an email back, not phone calls. Turns out B__ actually went upstairs and woke J__ up, telling him I was very sick, then had the usual woman-sounding drama downstairs with her Mom, Ms J__, about how sick I might really be, what might should be done, all the while they are calling my dead cell phone and leaving messages.
I checked my email this morning, then answered the freshly-plugged-in phone. It was J__ and Ms J__ telling me to go to the doctor and making me promise to call them at two o’clock with the results of the visit, etc. etc.
They were both good natured about it but Ms J__ said the words: _You don’t go and tell family you’re sick and then put yourself in a situation where they can’t check on you._
_But I contacted you through email,_ I said,
_Why didn’t you just email me back?_
_Now you know there’s no such thing as email in this house. We want to hear you voice._
When J__ got back on the phone he said, _Please call her at two o’clock or I’ll never hear the end of it._
At the doctor’s they said I had very low blood pressure. The last time I had been checked the medic had said the same thing. He said I was just a little above having hypo-blood pressure like him. He said he had to take a pill a day for it. I didn’t bother to tell anyone I used to have very high blood pressure, due to all the trauma, and that they could stop treating my low blood pressure like a scary thing.
I went to immediate care which is usually around a hundred dollars. After the doctor examined me and ran a blood test they ruled everything out, said it was viral, that they could only give me prescriptions for the symptoms but otherwise there was nothing they could do. Then they charged me two hundred and fifty bucks.
I was so pissed that this civilian family of mine made me spend that much money for nothing. But out of consideration I didn’t express that to them when I called at two o’clock.
I wondered about the way the universe worked. K__ had taught me to Q-tips toward the end of the deployment, so I finally started. Everyday after showering I used one tip in each ear. Turns out Q-tips just push ear wax against the ear drums. I hadn’t really told anyone that I had this weird ringing and pain in my ears when I would wake in the morning, I just used more Q-tips, trying to clean the ear out. When I got so sick with the virus, encouraging me to go to a doctor, the first thing he asked was how I couldn’t be in any pain with so much wax packed against my ear drums. He told me to stop using Q-tips and to flush out my ears. Maybe my body went so out of its way to get me to stop hurting my ears that it caught a virus.
When I got home I watched this film called Death in Love because I couldn‘t think of anything else to do while sick. The film triggered me greatly, and it was hours before I could articulate it. It was centered around the sexual choices people made and why, and also about age, and what it was like to grow old after a rich sex life. When I think of my age I think, You‘ve accomplished so little. But then I think, You‘ve survived so much.
The only reason I was able to register that I had been triggered was because the sound of crickets made the memories strong, and the colors of my true perception heightened. I wanted to jump on to broken spirits.com despite not having been on there in awhile and beg for something .. But then I remembered that this is what I wanted, that I wanted the Real colors, not the word ones.
__________
(Friday)
I went to sleep around one in the morning and woke at one in the afternoon. I drank a lot of water before going to sleep, didn’t sweat, and never woke, even to go the bathroom.
I think the fever is gone. My stomach is still pained, but I’ve turned the air conditioner back on. Maybe I’ll be okay.
I looked in the mirror: See, I told you; you were only ugly before cause of the illness.
__________
I’ve rewired my definitions of Mom’s (L__’s) and R__’s actions in the House. While before their crimes seemed vague, unfinished, due to lack of memory, now I understand it clearly. I remember the sexual abuse, the reason they named me, all the lies they told since, all the violence and verbal abuse to keep me from being relaxed enough to remember.
Now I’m realizing my sister’s new definitions. The way A__ and H__ tortured me about being raped so often over a ten year period. The way they always dangled it in front of my slyly, never saying it all the way, how they got a sick pleasure out of it. The way whenever I would make a new friend how they would swoop in and steal him from me by flirting with him, then convincing him that I was some sort of compulsive liar, and you couldn’t believe anything I said.
I always knew by their manner and ways how disgusting they were, but I never really remembered or processed the knowledge of the actual crimes they committed. I knew who they were, same as I knew who L__ and R__ were, I always knew that, I always knew the four of them were debase, it’s only until now that I know what these debase people did.
Even memories I have always remembered -- mainly the ones as a teenager -- have now changed completely, now that they’re seen in a different light. I had no idea the four of them were this awful, I had no idea the four of them had been that awful.
I remember going into a Burger King for breakfast when I was maybe 12, with L__ and my sisters. The person in front was this black person who I couldn’t tell was a man or a woman. The person stuck their butt out almost as if on purpose when they walked, and had this affected attitude about them. I remember thinking, Is that how I am? Then I later wondered why I would’ve worried about that, what an odd question to ask yourself, especially in such a panicked, instantly-afraid kind of way. It was because I was being raped regularly, but wasn’t registering it yet. Couldn’t, it was too horrific.
I remember H__ trying to make fun of me for listening to music she thought intended for women. But when you’re being raped all the time, that music speaks to you. Instead of being the dominate one in bed, you’re the other, and you start to identify with it. She acted as if this made me less, my handling the rapes so badly. I was twelve.
When I look in the mirror I notice how much better I look, my face clear, the pores small. Is it possible to get better looking every day?
I notice I keep sports on all the time. I really do like to watch, I prefer them to the dramas and sitcoms which seem thick, trying. Sports are real. I remember how years ago I would feel embarrassed and out of place, like I was being dishonest whenever I had a game on in the house. But back then I couldn’t remember the rapes, only their consequences, which I blamed on myself.
It used to be a mental thing, my identifying with all these identifiers that the House forced on me, while making sure I never realized the truth of all the rapes. Then I would mentally force myself to identify with the opposite identifiers, even though I still couldn’t remember much, I could only see what was in front of me, I could see that they were lying. Then I remembered and the rewiring began. Now it’s natural. My original, natural Boy qualities casually showing up more and more.
What a work. To have wrangled life back in the other direction. Even across a gender line, even across the line in sexuality going from the non-dominant one to the dominant one. A work being accomplished. Volatile, tumultuous; brave. All I know is it’s working.
__________
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