A couple of years after my father's death, I was flying back to Humboldt next to a gentleman who inquired about my business. He was a little older than me, a kindly, smaller man with a narrow face and a straggly goatee. I told him everything I knew. I was going back home to spend some time trying to find myself. "Don't take too long," he said. Then his face retreated to a shruggish smile and our conversation was over. He read his book. I thought of something else.
I live in a strange world. School children of the 70's heard about the Great American Melting Pot. We were fed dreams about cooperation, potential, and a better tomorrow. At least, I was. Teachers told me I might become the President. Everyone praised me for being smart, tall, athletic, artistically talented. I just wanted to be loved, to not feel so alone. The story adults told me about the world I lived in didn't exactly fit with what I wanted, but I was good at adjusting myself to imagine happiness in it. Of course, times alone with my dad were a complete nightmare, but I had accepted that as a temporary component of my life, a soon-to-be-overcome hindrance to my full connection with the rest of humanity, a humanity that had something figured out, something I had never quite fleshed out in my own mind.
I live in a strange world. Teenagers in the 80's sang along to "We Are The World". We were scared by threats of nuclear war in a climate of adults who acted like the crises would be resolved soon, leaving room for something. Peace? No one fed me big dreams anymore. I was hoping to land somewhere in between my grandmother insisting I could be a doctor and my dad's "you could be a good cocksucker in prison" mantras. As my dad got more and more violent with me, I felt more and more alienated from the possibility of ever figuring out how to be like the other kids. By my senior year, I was happy with keeping a calm look on my face, hoping for no more than an invisibility of sorts. Can no one see how devastatingly out-of-place and disconnected I feel? Good. If no one saw it, maybe I didn't need to feel it.
False confidence is a machine of inertia. Through strength of will or fear of complete rejection and destruction, I learned to keep acting as if everything was ok. A day at school might be followed by a night waiting in the car for my dad to be kicked out of this bar so I could drive him to the next one. Getting up and doing it all over again with a straight face took a lot of self-control, especially when I didn't know what insanity might be unfolding at home while I struggled to focus on my physics test. The difference between refracted and reflected light got all mixed up in recalling last night's speed purchase and the general mood of my father while his female companion for the evening asked if he would buy heroin for her. What was this one's name? He didn't like buying heroin for women. That look in his eye was often a precursor to murderous violence. Coming back to the classroom, I would look around to see if anyone had noticed me, the one in the class who didn't fit. Then I would turn back to my test paper quickly, gripped with fear that my thoughts had been on display. What question was I working on? Wishing I had had time to study, I felt my self-confidence falling. Smart was all I felt like I had. This would surely be another mediocre performance, another failure. I always got the third highest score on these exams, always third. What if I had the chance to really try. At least I still had my potential.
I live in a strange world. It's strange to me. When dad killed Sandy in front of me, I felt like the stranger. I hadn't let go yet of my idea that I would someday assimilate and belong, not until that moment. Before that day, before those magnificent, gasoline and tire-fueled flames engulfing her body, mocking the light drizzle through the trees, I had had a chance to make it. Before that grey day, before that very second, I could have fooled everyone, passed for normal, acceptable. I watched him staring into the fire. A single drop of rain struck my brow and dropped from the tip of my nose. The cold mist in the air was my messenger from God. This was the end of my hopes. I was too dirty to ever be clean again.
I gave up on my life when I was 16, and I've been beating myself into faking it ever since. Every morning the sun has risen and forced me to keep up the charade. At times, like everyone else, I've felt happy and hopeful, forgetting my childhood trauma for years at a time. It's always been there, along with the nagging reality that I just don't belong here, driving me to recreate and also retreat from the patterns of my youth, sabotaging my happiness and wreaking havoc on the people around me. At 42, I can honestly say, this is as much as I've been able to figure out. My life is still a train wreck. The cars stopped moving years ago, but the parts of me that still see it happening are still impacting the parts of me that tried to forget and pass for normal in this world that still seems so strange to me.
In finding myself, how long is too long? If I don't take my whole life to do it, won't I just be accepting a false construct? Could I be satisfied to live out the rest of my life based upon a version of me that I made up for the sake of peace? Should I shorten the search for self to lessen the difficulty of life; move forward in false happiness with my fingers in my ears, blind to the nightmare swirling at my deepest core? No thanks, man on a plane who has no fucking idea what it's like to be me. I get that people just want me to be happy, but I'm not. Would you be? Are you? Would it be the end of the world if we all admitted how we really feel about this life, this strange world? Maybe it would only be the end of feeling like strangers.
© 2013 Ernest Samuel Christie III
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