A month after my mother died the taste buds on my tongue swelled up and became so painful that I couldn't eat or drink anything for two days. Since I had spent the intervening hours eating nothing but chocolate Haggen Daasz and playing Life almost obsessively on the computer instead of sleeping, I wasn't really surprised. I figured it had it coming. I was thirteen, and had already learned that abusing my body meant it would abuse me right back. Still, as I choked down water and tried to ignore the burning sensation filling the inside of my mouth, I wished one of the adults around me had told me to take better care of myself. Then again, maybe they did-- I don't remember much of anything between the phone call from the police station and the plane flight.
When I stepped off the plane and into the aggressive humidity of Hawaiian air eight months before my mother died, I had consoled myself with the knowledge that I wouldn't have to make the trip back to the mainland any time soon. As flights went, it had been one of the worst, and coming from me that is saying something. I've flown on my own since I was nine, and have been on planes where electrical systems have failed halfway to our destination. Ten years later, I still count it as one of my top three most miserable flights. So I suppose being forced to make the return trip several years ahead of schedule snapping me out of my fog-ridden stupor makes sense. My grandfather flew with me, but to this day I can't remember a single word he said to me. At the time I thought I was taking it all rather well-- I made all the phone calls to the rest of my family to give them the bad news, and got into a fight with the chaplain when he told me I should be crying instead of taking care of business. Now, though, I am not so sure. I am aware of what happened, just like I am aware of the general timeline of the American Civil War-- the facts are there, but I don't associate them with actual personal experience. That doesn't strike me as the work of a healthy mind.
My first memory that feels real after all that time occurred after I had been back on the mainland for a month. I was miserable that I had been forced to move to a completely new state for the second time in one year, and was in no mood to make friends. My grandmother-in-law had taken pity on me and dragged me out to lunch to get me out of my new, and half-finished, basement room. Our family is rather convoluted, as I'm sure is obvious due to the fact that I actually have a “grandmother-in-law.” My mother had a half-sister, who decided to take me in after her death left me an orphan. Her husband's family decided to take an interest in me, as well, and thus I found myself in the odd position of having a family consisting of almost exclusively strangers. We were sitting in a dingy booth in the middle of a local bagel joint, and while she talked to me about clothing I stared at my Coke and debated whether or not my mouth was ready for that much sugar yet. The entire place felt like it was covered in a thin film of dirt, and the longer I was there the more I felt the almost uncontrollable urge to shower. My grandmother-in-law didn't seem to notice, but since her house made me feel the same way, I was not all that surprised.
And that's it. Just the soda and the sense of uncleanliness. This happened six weeks after my mother died and one month after my birthday. There are pictures of my birthday party, and of me with a cake, but I have no memory of actually being there. I must have organized and unpacked my room, but according to my head it occurred all of its own volition. Did I cry? I can't imagine how I couldn't have. My mother's death was merely the culmination of an unspeakable year, not a sudden violent act. I needed time to recover.
When I was little, I always imagined memory to be a river. I assumed if I thought hard enough I could go back upstream, all the way to its source. Everything I had passed would still be there on the return trip. Unfortunately, it's not like that. Some of my memories have solidified like stepping stones, and I can use them to get around the past, but everything else is gone forever. And if the stones are too far apart, like they are when I first came to Missouri, then I lose all sense of time.
Now everything is much less disjointed, which I take as a sign that my mental health has improved considerably. I find it interesting that a lack of memory, and not memory itself, that tells me just how floored I was by the entire turn of events. I also assume this is why I have taken to obsessively organizing photos and blogging any interesting item that catches my fancy. I no longer trust my memory, and so I make sure I have tangible copies of the portions of my life I really want to hold on to. This quirk of mine has put me in the strange position of having some portion of nearly every day of my life for the past ten years accessible. With so much data at hand, I've noticed patterns about myself, the family I came to live with, and just about everything else. I've been told on multiple occasions that I am too logical and calculating, but I can't stop. I feel safer knowing there is a pattern, and my ability to read people and predict outcomes to interactions has been useful on more than one occasion.
The memories and accounts I find most fascinating in all of this junk I've collected over the past decade concern what's left of my family. One of the reasons why it catches my attention so frequently is because I feel they don't know me any better now than they did when I first came to live with them. I've since come to the conclusion that they live in a completely different world from my own, and this incalculable difference is what makes it impossible for us to become close. It's like looking at them through a one-way mirror. I know exactly what they are like, and know what they think the world is like, but they can't look at me and see with the same clarity. In fact, I really have no idea who they think I am. Based on our conversations, they are way off-target, but I've never been able to set them straight. After living with them for four years the sensation that who I was and who they were interacting with were so out-of-sync that it became painful. I felt like a literal representation of a square peg being forced into a round hole. There is a significant amount of humor in it, really. My family is well-documented proof that sometimes people are so incompatible that neither party can really understand what's wrong. It's not a malicious sort of thing, and usually I can just shake my head in wonder as things keep on as they always have, but sometimes the absurdity of it all hits me and I have to collapse in a corner for a while.
Doesn't make sense, does it. Unfortunately, this isn't really something that is explainable in abstract terms. My family is something you really have to experience. And, since I have been experiencing them for the past eight years, I can say with absolute certainty that they are an acquired taste.
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