Thursday, November 18, 2004

Letter to Child/ Parents

Letter to Child

Studying our Anatomy together, she says, “What’s this?” grabbing my chin. Her hand feels soft and dainty.

I say, “I don’t know.”

“It’s your mental protuberance.” She rubs my chin now. She says, “You need to shave.”

“I know,” I say.

She begins stroking my entire chin. “What’s this whole bone I’m palpating called?” she asks.

“Mandible?” and she nods her head yes.

“But that’s an easy one,” she says.

I look at her, sitting on the chair next to me.

She’s lovely, beautiful, succulent, pretty, womanly. She has blue eyes of the sea, long black hair of blackened ash. She has thin, almost-not-there eyebrows, slender, shapely legs peeking out from her jean shorts, thin, branch-like arms wrapped around my face. Her breasts lay hiding, as if not wanting to be seen but unable to do so. They are little clusters of grapes protruding lightly out from her flamboyant pink shirt. Her nose is a small, unnoticeable mesh with the rest of her face. Her lips are pouty woman’s lips. She is redolent of a sweetly sickening perfume.

I say, “Yeah, it is.” She takes her hands off my face and gives the smile that’s so her.

She says, “You always did get the easy ones,” her smile changing to a wicked smile. I smirk back at her.

We sit there and stare at each other for an uncountable amount of time.

I break the silence. “I’m not sure about this,” I say

“Not sure about what?”

“College. My major. It’s proving to be harder than I’d imagined.”

She gives a snorting breath and says, “Don’t you remember what they told us our whole lives? They told us we could do anything, as long as we tried.”

“I never believed that, for one moment.” Then I add, “Well, maybe I do every so often.”

“Well all you have to do is apply yourself,” she says, “and then you should be able to at least get by, and get your major, and do what you want in the medical field.” “But sitting here talking about it is getting us nowhere. Are we going to study, or what?”

“Yes,” I say. “And I guess it’s true. If I apply myself more, I should be able to get by. But it all still seems pointless.”

We study more. She palpates the bone in the upper, medial region of my chest. I tell her right away it’s the sternum. Her hands feel good on my chest, inviting.

She touches my ribs. She asks how many there are. I answer there’s twelve. She asks what the first seven are called. I tell her true ribs. She asks what the next two are called. I tell her false ribs. She asks what the last two are. I tell her floating ribs.

She touches the back of my shoulder blade. Asks what it is. I tell her scapula. She asks what the different parts of it are called. “I don’t know,” I say.

She brings over our college textbook. Sets it in my lap. Points. “This is a scapula, of course,” she says. It’s a somewhat triangular-shaped bone. All the parts are labeled. She points to each as she reads them: “The suprascapular notch, acromion, coracoid process, glenoid cavity, subscapular fossa, lateral border, medial border, superior border.” There’s another image beside the scapula – it’s a posterior view. She reads off the other parts of it on this figure.

We keep studying until twelve thirteen, and then we slam shut our textbooks, and grab some water to drink. She then goes to the bathroom, and I stand and stare out the window of her apartment.

A flickering streetlamp, the half moon luminating everything dully, a few cars passing by on the road. The stars twinkling, a few clouds floating leisurely in the sky.

When she comes back from going to the bathroom, I don’t hear her, she walks so lightly. I feel hands go around my back shoulder blades.

She says, “You always did have nice scapulas,” and she turns me around with her hands.

We’re face to face, and we lean in and kiss.

That was the night you were conceived.

---

It’s a while later, she sits on her bathroom’s toilet.

“I don’t see how I missed my period today,” she says. She sounds aggravated and nervous.

“I don’t know,” is about all I can think to say.

She holds the pregnancy test in her hand, and before my eyes it changes the color blue. “Blue,” she says. “What does that mean?”

I hold the package in my hand and move it into my eyes’ vision. I stare at it for a long while, not wanting to say anything, somewhat shocked, but not too much

She says, “Come on, tell me, already!”

“Pregnant.”

On the toilet she gives a face of surprise. “I don’t see how.”

“I don’t, either,” I say. I reel my mind for any possibility. I can only think of one reason that seems valid enough to say. “Maybe,” I say, “the condom broke.”

---

We’re ripping through the trash, trying to find the one lone condom.

Through a crushed and battered Wendy’s cup, I see it. I pull it out. I look it over.

It is broken.

---

She feels pain, racking immense chronic afflicting pain. Pain rattling her as she pushes, pushes, and pushes. “Harder,” says the doctor. “You can do it,” says the nurse. I stand on the sidelines in this sporting event and wait and watch as it is borne from her.

When it does come, it is crying, probably scared, afraid. Its load wail permeates all about the room. She holds him in her arms, too numbed and dumbed by the pain to get a full grasp of what has happened, too tired and inundated.

They cut the umbilical cord. They circumcise his penis. He comes to our house and lies in his crib.

---

The little thing, lying there. Goo-goo-gahgahing. Laughing that laugh. Right now weak and small, one day strong and big, another day weak and frail again, and one day, dead and lifeless and gone.

You should value your youth and covet what beauty you can find in the world. You should not kid yourself that life has a point. It does not. You should not blindly believe in a religion but choose for yourself. You should have humility and be skeptical of everything and anything. You should give value to every person you meet and understand why they are who they are before making judgments on them.

Some days you will hate your existence. You will wish to destroy. Some days you will feel hungering, lusting desire. You will wish to slake your thirsts. Some days you will feel old and rusted and forgotten, a relic from another time. You will wish to sleep forever and live another life you used to have. Some days you will feel all is mechanical, full of cogs and springs and tick-tocks, and you will feel dulled and monochrome. You will wish for color to entrance upon your eyes, to paint the colorless over in a new coat of paint. Some days you will feel a need to hug everyone you see because they are so beautiful. You will wish to know every person on this spinning ground called earth. And some days, and other days, and this day, and that day – and your life flashes before my eyes.

You will stand over the grave of a man once alive you called father. You will have whatever contortion of your face that I made you feel. You will cry tears if they are worthy of crying of me. You will put roses upon the grave if I was worth a flower. You will tell others about me as a needed memory if I was worth memories.

And above all, looking down on my grave on that day when it comes, you will be you – whoever, whatever, that is. And when you are looking in the mirror or walking along a lake and see your reflection, a part of that reflection reflecting back at you will be me. Will you smile to the reflection? Will you give it no time at all? Will you throw a rock into the water, rippling the reflection, will you smash the mirror into shards of hurting, painful glass?

---

“I do,” I said that day. I didn’t love her, but I guess I had to love you – just a little baby, held in your mom’s mother’s arms at the church’s booth.

“You may kiss the bride,” he said. I did. Her lips felt like the smacking on of handcuffs.

Although our lives are squelched with unbearable, chronic pain, we carry it with us because it makes life beautiful, even if it is without point, even if we are but dust in the wind.

I knew the second I took that kiss from her lips, felt us draw apart and leave, that this marriage probably wasn’t going to last. All I knew was you would last, and that would keep together.

---

Letter to Parents

You two are my gods, the only true and real gods I shall ever know. You both had hands at my creation. His sperm and her ovum coalesced as one creating this being now before you. In her, I developed, with her and his genes chanced together to make me what this being before you is. There was no gamble, for even god (and gods, as it may be) do not throw dice. From the moment it happened, it happened as chance, yet as it was to be.

The zygote was formed. Then the embryo. The fetus. I grew in your stomach, a parasitic thing which might as well have been a worm, but wasn’t. I had my nourishment from my umbilical cord. You often talked to me from your stomach, but I could not understand what you were saying, I could not understand you existed. My senses were senile – weak and dulled. I had no clue of the world existing outside of the confines of my little cell where I feasted and took away from you, the parasite you manned into creation.

When my time came to be borne into the world, you pushed and pushed with all the might of yourself. I’m sure your eyes were agonized with pain, your mind was reeling and thoughts spinning around. And when I came into this world, you held me in your arms and I was your child, your son.

I never asked to be created. Born. Made. I was raped into existence, I was forced to be here, to come here. If you would’ve never done what you did that night, then I would not exist. I would have no consciousness. I would not feel pain. I would not suffer. I would not feel happiness as it comes as soon as it goes. I would not know this world and its people.

I was strewn about in this world, thrown into its petty troubles. Its useless spinning, its useless scruples – its heavens and hells, its goods and bads, its rights and wrongs, its blacks and whites. I was an outcast when I arrived, a brimming, teeming thing waiting to be indoctrinated into it. Ready to be made to its ways.

You were happy, holding me in your hands, feeling pain cascading all over, ripping into you and hurting into you. But it was numbing away. It was over. I was born, another forgotten name to live his life in this world and go about his ways, and die just as soon as he was born, no one caring and no one stopping to revel in it.

His name, your husband’s, my real father, it was Tom Smith. When I was three, you divorced him. I have never known him since then.

Presently, I have immerged from childhood an entirely different entity. As a child, I was dumb, stupid, hyperactive. That was a different person who is now gone.

I find happiness in being a pessimistic optimist – meaning, I see everything which is negative in the world, and it makes me happy to know the truth without any brim of anything all too positive. I see the sun and how eventually it will turn into a red giant and swallow the earth, and everything on it, and it makes me happy – happy to know that by thinking my life is rather pointless, it is. I see that people work most of their lives, and it makes me happy to realize this and not believe that working is the main point of life – because I know there is more to life than slaving away for a society which really cares less about me, and more about the higher-ups on its shoulders.

I am cynical at my core, but outwardly I act crazily. I say things others are afraid of saying, I write things which touch my mind and feel I have a tremendous talent with words. I hope to write a novel, and am trying to write it now.

Since my mom’s divorce, when I was three, she has married another man, Terry Staebell. At this time, they are getting ready to get divorced. It is history repeating itself, something so inescapably human.

My step dad, or father as I’d rather call him, has been a good parent, despite many flaws. But, a human is never without his flaws (I am also flawed), for if a human was perfect and smooth and without ridges and mires and canyons, there wouldn’t be any dimension to them. Perfection is an impossibility, and won’t ever happen.

My father’s temperament is of an irascible nature – he is prone to get angry easily, and is as impatient as a circling vulture, wanting a dead fresh rotting corpse to feast upon and be on the way to find another. He also sometimes has gotten physical – but it has never been too bad.

Once, when I was that other person, the kid, I broke a hole in the wall when I was throwing a tantrum because I couldn’t go to a friend’s. The part I kicked and broke was a weak part of wall, but it still was not a good thing. My father then came into my room and saw it and slapped me – it was not a hard slap, but it still had the tang of harshness.

Innumerable times as a child he also would grab me by the shoulder because I would not listen to what he said.

One time somewhat recently, I was in a bad mood and retaliated myself physically. It did not go too well, and felt entirely awkward.

My dad now lives in an apartment, but when he lived here all the time, it was mostly unbearable. Each day would be a new eulogy by him about something I did wrong. I would be told over and over again that I was a “pig” my room was a “pig sty” I was a “slob.” Many times I would go into the backroom of my room and almost be on the verge of tears, but I would not cry because I don’t cry – not since I was that other entity, the kid.

Despite how harsh and brash and rash my father is, it has prepared me for the real world. Because the real world is also near the same. He has also taught me a sense of discipline and a sense of organization, even though I have none. I am a walking disaster, a heaving shoveling mess of piles upon piles of disorganization. But he tried to change that, and was rather unsuccessful – yet I’ve gotten some organization.

My dad is deeply into the Christian religion, and whenever I try to tell him my stance on religion – that I have none, and am agnostic (meaning, I believe our understanding of god is beyond us) he shuts himself out and calls me a fool because I have no faith to fall on. He then gets going on about how “I wasn’t raised” to turn against my religion.

Many times past, when I’d talk to him about other things, he would also shut me out. He would be sitting in his chair, watching TV (as so many other Americans uselessly and wastefully do), and he would tell me he didn’t want to hear “my psychobabble,” even if what I was telling him was something very deep and worth hearing. He’s close-minded, like many Americans, and it makes you feel frustrated. Frustrated that so many people are so indoctrinated and don’t think for themselves.

My mother, on the other hand. She smokes, which I cannot stand. She is rather depressive and inward. At least, that is the impression I get.

For weeks on end, during this summer, she would go to the bars and get drunk with her “friends.” She would end up coming home at 1 or 2 a.m., and stupor in. Sometimes she would come downstairs and bother me in my room. She would ask me to hug her and give her a kiss and tell her everything is all right. Ask me to tell her “I love her.”

My mom hasn’t really been my mom for a long time. I feel like I know her a little better now, but I still don’t know her much. When I was a kid she never hugged me or asked for a kiss. She really wasn’t a dominating force in my life, my father was – and that’s the way it’s been.

I can tell you it is very awkward to suddenly be asked to hug someone you don’t even know and haven’t for a long while, someone who goes out night after night getting drunk, when she is thirty years old and has responsibilities to deal with which are much more important than alcohol.

Their marriage together has been shaky, but this served to efface it even further away. And now we are at this point, where my dad is at an apartment and they’re getting a divorce.

I can relate more to my mother as a person than my father. She is also as creative as I am, and used to do crafts, but has stopped. She also comes off as more caring and endearing sometimes than my father ever could.

I do not really believe in love all too much, nor marriage, due to the two divorces that have happened in my life. I don’t believe in “true love” or “the one” or any such rubbish. If I am to initiate a relationship, I will be very careful about it, and I will not marry easily at all.

At this point in my life, I am rather wild, and I won’t be tying the knot for a while.

Although I cannot really stand my parents most of the time, and I constantly curse this pointless, mostly painful (although it is sometimes enjoyable) existence, I am glad they have given me shelter and food and made whatever part of me is theirs.
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