Who am I?
At this point, I’m not sure I can give you the answer that you’re looking for. I am many things, all of which I am unsure of. I guess that’s just how life works though and I’m learning to be okay with that. You can’t really control what happens, so I suppose the best thing is to “get used to it” or so said my father months earlier, lanky frame stitched to the wall as he looks down his nose at me, the child in the corner nursing the shattered sense of reality with shaky hands missing the skills only time would bring about to put things together again. To adjust. To heal. Even now, as I sit here typing this I reflect on life, adjusting, shifting, and getting used to a new normal for a couple nanoseconds before continuing on.
“Get used to it”, my dad shrugged as I sat over the ledge of our front step, rocks digging uncomfortably into the leg that was resting against the ground, the other tucked under my shaking body, rattling with the understanding that everything I had known was a lie, shifting my world in dramatic ways and causing a stomachache as a reflex reaction.
“Get used to it, or give up?” I corrected inwardly, rolling my eyes as if I were watching my patience flit by in the wind, graceful and transparent.
I don’t deal with stress well.
‘Divorce’ is such an interesting concept, as is getting used to everything you’ve ever known being taken away from you and replaced by hollow space. Not to say that my parent’s separation was for the worst, because it definitely wasn’t, but it just sort of rocked my world for a while.
The psychologists say that’s normal.
Watching, waiting, I saw my mother coddle the papers that announced her sentence, delivered carelessly by the mailman with chilled gray eyes, passive, a sharp line to his jaw and numbness to his tone as he shattered my mother’s understanding of what is, what was, and what would have been.
“Should have been.”
Swaddled in sorrow, my mother wept over the death of a child she’d been raising far longer than my brother and sister and I. Dashed to death against my father’s harsh tongue and her escapism, something she claimed she couldn’t help because a traumatic childhood had beaten it into her. Buried in the blood of nights torn apart under an aging house with lips for seam cutters.   From my perch, sun burning my skin in the frostbitten way my father’s words had, clothes wrinkled and gaze unwavering, I watched him come home from work, slink into the basement, and stay there until far past the time he should be in bed, only to come out for a split second before disappearing with the shadows and my mother’s longing for a relationship she spent so much time on. Time wasted.
Who am I? I learnt a lot of things from that day, the day of a death sentence for  something that may have never not even really been alive, I learned that “get over it” may just mean to shove things under a metaphysical rug, to bottle them up and let them eat you away as time passes you by, taking everything you thought you had. Through glass bottle eyes, I see the world; cold, unaffected, distant. My knowledge can never be based again around other people, because presumptuous is it to believe we, as mere mortals, know anything at all. Especially about ourselves. Only hypothesized gods and goddesses should know about the fate of their pawns, fumbling through life and clinging to those they assume will stay. Their attachment is only velcro.
Who am I?
I don’t think I’ll ever know.