Memoir by Mindless1

[mindless1]

Not Yourself
(Memoir)

by Mindless1

Suicide is not an option. You can either shove the food down your throat or shove the plate aside. Put on those black shoes you wore to Aunt ********'s funeral, take that walk down the sidewalk as three blocks becomes five blocks. The scene is like a strange archaic painting, leaves rustle while birds flip through the air kissing the wind. People continue to part from these places, they can gather and then they'll seperate their ways. No one knows you, no one ever tried to get to know this 'shy girl' who didn't speak up loud enough for anyone to hear her...Suicide is not an option.

Repeat that mantra to yourself as the skies turn grayer and your skin itches with anxious wanting. What is it that you wanted in the first place? With your head down, not wanting to meet anyone's gaze...not that they were looking anyways you continue with a sort of awkward strife. The sun seems to burn out in the midst of all this struggle, struggle with the concept of human. Humans die, humans die and nothing is left of them...what will be left of you when you leave this place? No, no one will remember you. You aren't that well known, that memory worthy. Most people pay you no mind as they continue their days.

Once upon a time, before the coffee and the cigarettes and those cold feet with numb fingers and the Sunday paper and your rigid discipline, there was a memory. It was like a gunshot to my spine. I believed in something, but then I couldn't believe in anything. Everyone had to be somewhere, and everything had its own place but nothing and no one belonged in the spaces between.

Where do stories like this one to have to begin? It is hard, it is almost unimaginable to tell a story like this one. It was overall a rough ride through hell and all places high and low and between. My attempt at creating a story of the metamorphosis. How the genderless girl created her womanhood.

It starts out here- I am here, sitting upon an orange couch in the living-room. I am listening, as the dog scratches at her flees and then plops down onto her huge doggie bed, to 'How I Feel' By Wax Tailor. Yes, it is ironic, as I am trying to pinpoint exactly how I do feel.

'How do you feel?' Therapists, don't they like to ask this question a lot? Well, it's pretty comical. I know how I feel; I just have trouble describing it. I feel silly. I feel unwanted. I do not know how I exist without any reason.

"Do you have anything to say to me?" The reader asks me unconsciously. I rreply then, that I just want to be heard. I want people to know my life exists somewhere in this wide open space of golden opportunities.

I want to be a multi-dimensional figure and not a figment of your imagination, and a role model too. I want you to love me; ....I want to be immortal. But we both know we all die; although it is in dying that we are truly immortal. If you think life is real you will soon realize that we are nothing but projections of this artistic rendition of space and time.

There's too little that is real in this world. We are not the superheroes and we are not allergic to Kryptonite. Yet we are all so beautiful--and my brother is lying down and he lies down with such a satisfaction and beauty below the steps while he pets our pet dog, Juno. I love my brother's innocence. I'll add that-- I guess you could say, we are our own sort of revolution.

I am just glad that I am here. Do you want to know why?--actually I really should try to form a relationship with you, reader. I know myself well, and yet, don't you want to know me? I have a lot of substance to my being. These concepts often are overlooked: like my dimensions, my vices and virtues, my habits, my ideals, my selflessness and my own vanities. I just wish you knew, because, I am so obsolete.

If I existed in more than body--or flesh, emotion, and thought, what would I be capable of? Could I save the world from this oppression called time, and would I help you who work so hard to perfect this imaginary dream? I like animals, people, the sunshine, music. I am listening to music constantly, Pandora just switched to Bjork. I love trip-hop, indie, and alternative music.

I wish I could somehow scribble down these colors, make a picture book of my whole story and then, never erase it. The story of my life. I wish I could just, hold the pencil in my hand and scribble a whole universe onto these walls. This external realm of meaning. But what really is in a meaning?

As we feel along these walls, in through winding loopholes as we climb climb climb...right now, I am thinking about my dreams. Last night, I had this amazing dream about the apocalypse. Would you like for me to share it with you? Well, I will tell you another time. Hm, well what do you want to hear? Do you have a particular question for me to answer?

"Why do you bother to do all of this when you feels ‘hopeless’?"
—I guess that I feel hopeless because I know that there is something missing. I am 'bothering' or 'willing' to do this because- through writing out the experiences I can....somehow reflect upon it, and analyze it, and it becomes immortal.

"You really are lost, aren't you"?

Hear me out, read these words, "I might be lost to you, but at least I have the courage to stand for what's right."

In the beginning, I was born. I remember being born, or at least I think I do. I woke up, exploding out of a dark red beating heart, a thumping that I'd grown accustomed to. The rocking back and forth in the chair, then, it all exploded into a balloon of light and happiness. There was so much happiness here! My hands were so very tiny as I reached out and grabbed my father's forefinger, and then he laughed. He chuckled again after quite awhile, “Ok you have to let go now,”

I'm sure he once told me this story. How could an infant remember this so vividly? I remember it so clearly though, that I wonder. I also remember my yellow baby blanket, being a little ball curled in someone's arms, being carried like I was this beautiful life-force, through the rain up the stairs of a building with white pillars. I was carried in my baby blanket; I remember only smells and colors. I remember the faces, and comments. The: "Oh she has such blue eyes, what beautiful eyes!"

Then, I was nearly six months old when I began talking. I talked a lot. I have often wondered what it was like...but the memories are coming back now. I remember the high chair, the taste of baby food- I liked the pear and banana the best! We can fast forwards to when I was four years old: when I lived in the "Castle" and I remember the 'robbers' who stole the...haha what's the word...stroller! Yeah, That's it. They even stole our thanksgiving turkey as well as they dropped our television on the way out. Echoes of mom screaming at the men in black, shatter through me. I lived in Pittsburgh until I was nine years old.

Many years were like bliss, before things began to spiral. This is a more vivid description of my childhood tale:

I was born on January 13th 1989. It was Friday the 13th to be precise. My parents were both 21 then. When my mom had been ready to give birth to me, my dad had to rush her to the hospital in Pennsylvania. It was very icy and snowy that year and he had to break the door open just to get in the driver's side. All the way to the hospital he had to hold onto the door to keep it from flying open.

We moved to Pittsburgh, and this is where my earliest childhood memories are. I sometimes think I can remember the day I was born, the joyful look in my father's face when I reached out my tiny hand and grabbed his finger and wouldn't let go.

I began talking at six months. I was a very talkative kid. We used to go lots of places in Pittsburgh and for me there was always something to do. I remember my dad would take me on walks through the park in a baby backpack. I had my own individual blue chair that hooked to the table for me to eat at the table with the adults. I guess I can remember so far as when I first began to talk. I remember breaking out of my crib in the middle of the night sometimes to go downstairs.

[mindless1]

I was four years old when we lived in an apartment that was shaped like a castle. I used to sit on the stairway and admire the stained glass window with a slight crack in it. We had neighbors who were sometimes too strict for me. I didn't like them using the word "shutup" which wasn't allowed in my house. "Shutup" was a bad word. I would get sent to my room for using it.

Four was also the age when my younger brother, Joshua, was born. I remember the day clearly. I was at the apartment with my aunt Karen as she was babysitting me. We got a call from my dad who told us to come there fast. I have an image of when we first reached the birthing place where mom was. My dad opened up the door and had a look of both surprise and urgency. He told us to hurry up and come inside.

When I was seven I was an ambitious girl who wanted to be a singer, a dancer, and was always looking for an adventure. I often times acted like a tom-boy: watching power rangers and playing with toy cars. I loved going on hikes in the woods and climbing hills. My first best friend was a boy my age that was a lot similar to me. We have a picture of us holding hands in our strollers when we were just in kindergarten. Sometimes I was off in my own separate world. I had an over-active imagination and loved to write stories.

When I was seven I was the mother of two dollies, Samantha and Kelly. Kelly was a Christmas present. She was one of those new born dolls that could eat and wore a diaper. I took to her as if she were the real thing. I practically believed she was alive.

This was a fairly long phase of mine that I didn't give up until the age of eight.

In preschool I had two teachers, one was plump and black and the other was thin and white with blond hair. I think their names were Mrs. Jonas and Miss Christie. I remember for class we would sit around the circle on the floor and learn the days of the week. Each day week we learned a new month. The months had characters that represented them so it was easy for us to learn.

I made one special friend, Carolyn. It's a strange story how we first met. When it had come time to choose a dancing partner everyone rushed to find a friend. I picked out the one girl who looked like she didn't have any friends. We became close friends after that. She had a Barbie car and I was always asking my parents for one. It was too expensive, they would tell me. But I remember going to Toys R Us and admiring them at a distance, asking ‘please?’ I imagined it was fun driving around in your own mini car.


Sometimes the other kids would pick on the girl named Carolyn, and one time I came to her defense. A whole group of boys had tackled her and I wrestled them off of her and clawed one boy in the wrist. He cried and I was put in time out for the rest of the day. That time out seemed to last for centuries. Maybe I shouldn’t have came to her defence.

I never liked kindergarten that much. My teacher's name was Mrs. Hammer and had poufy blond hair that stuck out on either side. She was always taking off points and scolding me for being late. I lost some interest in some parts of school.

In the first grade I took part in the school plays and had fun doing that. I made some friends but always seemed to pick out the ones who were weird. For some reason, this pitted me against everyone else. When I had started to become friends with the "Weird kids" everyone else just figured I was weird too.

In the first grade I went to a Catholic school and had a teacher who was also a nun. She was somewhat strict with me because I was a "slowpoke". Sometimes I was so slow going down the stairs that all the other kids would rush by me calling me "slowpoke" "slowpoke". I wasn't a slowpoke but I was always very careful.

I remember when my dad first walked me to my school in the beginning of first grade. I would run down the long steep hill which led to our house until I got to the stop sign, swung around it three times to gain balance, and then took a left on 13th street towards my catholic school.

In school I first learned how to perfect printing out words and then in the second grade I learned cursive handwriting. In the first grade we did simple add and subtraction and in the second grade we learned multiplication. At some point I fell behind in my reading though and had to take a recess class. During the class I spent my time folding tissues and making them into purses.

Nearing the end of second grade was when things started to fall apart. My mom was sleeping hours and hours a day. I would come into her room wanting to snuggle or to do something like we once did. We used to do so many things; she was the one who taught me to write and to imagine so much. We had big art projects, anything I could think of we created.

My dad always took me to museums and libraries. Brought me presents when he got home from work at U.S. Steel as a computer programmer. Back then he had to take a bus because we only had one car. My parents had married "young" as they say. They didn't have a formal wedding in a church, but had a judge pronounce them husband and wife. My mom was young and always there to brighten up our days.

I thought constantly. I was somewhat mature for being in the second grade, considering that I had thought I would be so mature just to realize I was still so young. I tried to explain my thoughts to my friends but they weren't that enthusiastic. I walked to school every morning from my house. It wasn't a very long walk but I loved walking.

I was excited that I was going to go to the third grade at St. Scholastica; but at the time my parents weren't getting along too well. They fought a lot about bills, spending money, and I always tried to stop them by putting myself in the middle of it. This usually made them get mad at me. This turned into a never-ending cycle for me, they got mad, I tried to get them to stop fighting, and then they would start saying bad things to me. It was always that they were "having a discussion" not an argument.

[mindless1]

I used to run around my neighborhood, it was like a separate world from the city. Our house was a hundred years old, made mostly of stone. It was a nice house with a basement. I was afraid of the basement when we first moved in.

I had a friend in the neighborhood named Adam and our parents didn't get along. His mother thought I was a bad influence on him and told my mother that she didn't want us playing together anymore after I had convinced him to run away with me when our parents came to get us. When he described some morbid things about her and she overheard, she thought I had somehow told him to say those things but I hadn't. I saw him later on at a museum but I couldn't say hi and he didn't recognize me.

I made friends with the adults in the neighborhood as well. I would always go over to Jody's house to play darts and had a good eye. I beat her at darts plenty of times. I don't know what caused my mom's depression. It might have been influenced by a number of factors, she had gained weight after the pregnancy and her feet always hurt from a muscle condition that runs on her side of the family. They were fighting all the time and her feet really hurt.

But mom just wasn't the same. She wouldn't wake up even after I shook her repeatedly. She didn't want to play or talk or anything. Some of the reasons I had such an escapist imagination. I talked to God, I even talked to trees. I also had imaginary friends which I had named. Joshua watched tv constantly. He was always in front of the television watching Sesame Street or something else.

Mom saw a doctor who prescribed her Phentermine which would help her weight alongside of Prozac for depression. I remember seeing the bottle of pills and thinking of it as wrong, that she shouldn't take them. I saw them as the evil things that were ruining her life.

Things started getting scary. Mom was very emotional and not making any sense. She would tell me stories about things that had happened to her in her childhood. Venting all of these suppressed memories that I thought were real. She didn't know that they weren't. Jim, who she was supposed to marry, was banished from the family by her parents and she was meant to find Jim. He was her true love.

I also have a memory of a story, but my memory is confused about it. One day her father had made her a cherry pie to bring to school and she had forgotten to take it with her. In one instance I remember she said he got mad at her about it. And at another instance he had come all the way to school just to bring her the cherry pie.

She had a special box were she had all her special items. She told me that when she was little she had set out a whole selection of pictures down and then suddenly the pictures started flying around the room. "What did your mom say?" I asked "Well she screamed...they didn't believe me...they didn't believe it was magic."

Magic was everywhere, it was my childhood, and now it had become something else to me. Something evil, twisted, it was as if I had become lost to the child I had been. My parents were fighting about everything and dad didn't know she was sick...he didn't know it was because of all the pills that she wasn't making any sense.

I prayed for them not to get a divorce. I was sitting in the living room as she stood in the doorway and suddenly announced "I'm going out." "Where are you going?" I asked.

"I'm going to fight bad guys."

The funny thing is that I remember dad had been saying it was ok. That she was doing just that, going to fight bad guys.

She ended up at a bus station and then was taken to some hospital, I don't know where, and stayed there for what seemed like forever. We moved into grandma's house on my dad's side. I always asked about her, "When is mom coming back? Where is she?" Dad never told me where she was. He said she was away and that she was sick and needed to get better. "Your mom is sick." He would say.

"But when will she come home?" I would ask.

"Very soon." Dad would say reassuringly.

Finally, in around a month we got to visit mom where she was in the hospital. I never knew why she was there or what happened until I turned seventeen.

She used to sing to us before bed. Joshua was her Joshiebear and I was her Sunshine. She had written a letter to me and handed it to me when I visited along with an angel penny. I wish I still had it but I lost it somehow.

At the end of the letter she quoted the song, "You are my sunshine, my only sunshine" she was bright and happy and there were wheelchairs. She was sitting in a yellow seat. She was beaming to see us. Then finally, we took her home. But I don't know what happened when she was there, all I know is that she had and probably never will tell me.

When years later my dad told me that she had tried to commit suicide, I was in shock. No one had ever once told me the reason she had been hospitalized. He actually thought he had told me when I was young, but he wouldn't have. He said it so casually that it scared me and angered me at the same time. I thought she had just lost it because of the pills. The doctor had over prescribed her on Prozac and that's what pushed her over the edge.

Afterwards, after she had been taken to the hospital, my parents never saw each other. My mom got her own apartment in Pittsburgh and my dad moved back to Latrobe and stayed at his mom's house. Mom and I would spend every Monday watching a certain tv-show and I made a good friend, Barbara, who lived below in the apartment. Her parents were divorced too, she told me, and she didn't like having to go back and forth.

I had to go back and forth for awhile. I went to third grade in Latrobe and hated the school, hated the teachers, and everyone hated me. I got pushed around sometimes but mostly I was picked on by the teachers who dumped my desks and made me write things during recess. The classes seemed to be too hard for me. I had no interest in cells or punctuation and grammar.

I had more fun staying at my cousin's house. We became very close at that age and still are close friends now. We spent a lot of time exploring forests, parks, making up stories, playing made up stories. I was still imaginative but also had gained some weight. I began eating more and people called me fat. That Christmas of ‘97 we celebrated at mom's house. We had a small Christmas tree but it was a really special Christmas.

The following summer I stayed with my mom and my brother and I had to go to a YMCA camp while mom worked full time at goodwill helping with people who had disabilities. That had been her passion, helping people. One person she helped especially was Jody, a woman who was blind and had trouble talking. She spent a lot of time taking care of her, talking to her, having her at our house.

At the YMCA camp I was always teased. I was called every name you can think of and blamed as if my being white made me a racist. I was punished for repeating things that others said that I didn't know were racist. The majority of the people at the camp were black. There were around five white people and the rest of the camp was black kids. This pitted me against everyone because they didn't like me.

There was this one boy, who was aggressive with me, wouldn't let me sit at his table, always picked on me. I was afraid of him and dreaded going to camp. I punched a young Chinese boy in the face once, out of sheer stupidity. I was just being stupid, or joking..He had been my friend. But then I made friends with Unique, who was mentally retarded. People laughed at her for being named Unique. So I became her only friend. I would play with her at the playground when no one else would.

The fourth grade was spent in Pittsburgh with my mom at another Catholic school, Immaculate Conception. I joined the choir and did pretty bad in my studies. I still wasn't very good at making friends though. I made some friends, but a lot of the popular girls didn't like me. One of my favorite toys was my Pikachu Gigapet. I loved playing with that thing. I had two other Gigapets: a dog and a cat that batteries had died.

Near the middle of the fourth grade my dad came to my mom's apartment asking her to please get back together with him and he wanted us to be a family again. I had prayed a lot to God for them to get back together. That hadn't actually divorced yet although they were living in separate houses. Mom had wanted a divorce at first but then they decided to get back together. I was really happy. We were a family again. We've been a family ever since.





~~~~That's all I have. Any critiques are welcome!