A World on Mute - 1. A World on Mute

When I was six years old I found a litter of kittens. I was angry and confused. I was frustrated and didn’t know how to deal with my feelings. I played with those kittens until they were old enough to learn to run. A vicious game of pulling their tails and blowing in their ears. I taught them to be afraid. I taught them not to trust people, only themselves. If I had to beg for mercy to stay alive, so did they. This was hell. They were puppets. I was God.

I slept in the basement from the time I was nine until I was about 14. I had a nest in the corner, fabricated out of old jackets and a cardboard refrigerator box my father refused to throw out. The only way to get in was to squeeze in from behind the furnace; the front was barricaded in by years of clutter. If he couldn’t find me, he couldn’t hurt me. Half the time he was too drunk to look.

The bruises on my mother were taboo. We didn’t ask, she didn’t tell. We heard, though. Tears, screams. Glass shattering across paper thin walls. Bodies being flung across rooms. I had more important things to concentrate on. Long division for example. Ignore it. It will go away.

Troy went to live by the sea when I was 11. He was my father’s stepson from his first marriage. His father had run off, and then his mother passed away. My father inherited him, so to speak. He was the spitting image of his father, sandy brown hair with great teal eyes. I loved him like a brother. But to my parents he didn’t belong, and I knew he felt it.

He gave me a hug and told me big boys don’t cry when I was four. He sat in the garage smoking cigarettes and playing the guitar and he told me he would be a rock star someday. He filled my head with stories about surfing with his cousins in the town where his mother was born in the outer banks of South Carolina. He told me I couldn’t ever tell anyone about his ‘scoreboard’. Perfect lines of raised skin across his forearm, hidden with bracelets and long sleeves, that he gave himself at night when he broke down and cried for his mother.

Catholicism wasn’t exactly right for me. So I stopped going to church some time around my 13th birthday. The only priest I had ever known moved to another parish. Long gone were the days of a forgiving God who loved all of his children. The only homilies we received after he moved in to town where those of fire and brimstone. Falling specifically on me.

I wasn’t ready to lose my virginity. I was too young, and I did it for all of the wrong reasons. I wanted to feel loved and needed. I mostly felt numb and cramped in the backseat of a high school senior’s car. There was no relationship; there was hardly any feeling involved. I wasn’t someone special to any of these boys. I was a practice run so they knew what to do with their girlfriends the night of prom.

The three people who knew told me I had been raped. I didn’t care. I didn’t care what they said or what they thought. I didn’t even care if they decided that suddenly our friendship was over, and in two out of three of those cases, it was. All I wanted was a ride to the doctor’s office so I could take an HIV test. The nurse quipped that she didn’t administer HIV tests to many 14 year olds. I guess that was her way of breaking the ice.

Claire wanted to die. She kept telling me she had nothing to live for, and a lot of times, I believed her. I knew how she felt and where she was coming from. Maybe it was worse for her. Obviously it must have been. I never took cocaine, but apparently when you’re snorting it, you lose your appetite. She lost a lot of weight. Too much to be healthy. She started having trouble breathing, and once or twice, or maybe a dozen or so times, I sat with her in the bathroom while she coughed up blood. But she looked stunning in her size zero low rise hip huggers. And she was happy when she was tweaking out. In our little 16 year old world, that’s really all that mattered to either of us.

I was born into the wrong religion. The wrong family. An all around bad situation. My life’s been interesting, I guess. It wasn’t good, but it could have been worse. Saying it was horrible and complaining about it, that accomplishes nothing. And it wouldn’t fix anything or make it better. So I didn’t complain. And still I don’t. I’ve found ways to grieve and to smile, to live and to die, in a metaphorical sense, of course.

I watched two girls, cheerleaders, peel the duct tape slowly off of their mouths. “Thank God. Okay guys, Day of Silence officially over. You can talk again.” The bell finished ringing, and the few kids left in the class room, the ones who were wearing duct tape over their mouths too, started their own process of peeling it off slowly or ripping it off in one yank trying to figure out which way would be less painful. My piece of tape came off unceremoniously and nearly painlessly.

Life was funny in the way that I used to feel so claustrophobic in my own skin, and now I found myself willfully subjecting myself to the same experiences that haunted my childhood. Obviously the element of choice and the knowledge that at any time I could just stop made it easier. It was still sickeningly ironic.

I had a lifetime of experience of staying silent. I knew how to blend into the shadows. How to be seen and not heard. Hot to not even be seen. I knew every square inch of my house, down to which floor boards creaked and in what way, so that I could avoid them. I lived in a silent world. A world on mute. I was happier that way. I felt safe that way.

“God, did you ever think it would be so hard to keep your mouth shut for long?” one of the cheer leaders asked as she walked by.

It wasn’t that bad.

© 2006 Caipirinha

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