Gravity

The following post is something I wrote a while back. The catalyst was the realization that certain people in my family will never see us as a real family. I have recently vowed to be  much more discriminatory in who I allow in my life rather than continuously allowing blood relatives to emotionally abuse me because of biology. This was what I wrote as I was making peace with that decision. It's a little graphic and not a feel good read but it's real and was my reality for a long time. This not who I am, but rather part of the journey I have taken to get to who I am. 

Were there happy times when I was a kid? God! There were so many it's hard to think of just one. My mind is instantly fragmented into hundreds of tiny pieces; each telling a story; each a piece of a whole.

I remember the sounds of the night in Mamaw and Papaw's trailer in Kentucky. Those humid July nights when the air was thick and held the smoke and sparks from the camp fire. The woods slept as I'd lie awake listening to the echo of male voices outside drinking moonshine and laughing in their drunkenness. There was no place safer. The essence of my childhood still creeps about in those woods...searching for the rest of me.

I don't remember saying much when I was a child. I listened a lot though. My parents having sex in the next room, my uncle's hot breath on the back of my neck as I wondered if anyone else in the 1st grade was getting fucked up the ass, and the sound of my brother's grave whispering my name telling me  should be in that hole.

All these things, and so many other forbidden things I kept to myself, and some I still do. I kept them because as awful as they were, they were surrounded by so many wonderful things. The love of my mother, the pride of my grandfather and the admiration of my little sister.

It was these things that made all the shitty things feel tolerable, even worth while because it meant that somewhere in all of that I might be worthy of that love, that pride, that adoration.

My Mom and Dad were married as teenagers. Mom had turned 16 the month before I was born.
I was not healthy and expected to die before sunrise.

I still wonder if sometimes I'll be lucky enough to die before sunrise. But the sun keeps rising and I'm still faced with the decissions I made yesterday and the day before that.

Many many years have passed since I heard Papaw drinking moonshine by the fire. I've recently found an over weight middle aged man staring at me whom I don't recognize, though he's always in the same place; the mirror.

Papaw is now a box full of ash that is buried just a few feet from where he used to get drunk.
My mother, who used to make me feel like the most important little boy on the planet, now is reduced to seeing me whenever her abusive husband will allow.
My sister who used to make sure that  I got the first popsicle, is now married to a drug addict who sits back and watches her while she stumbles closer and closer to the edge of the cliff with each pill she takes.
There are days, like today, when the pain and disappointment flavor everything...days when I'm certain that any god who may exist is a cruel son of a bitch.

It's then that I look up and remember that while the years have robbed  me of some of my family as I knew them, I have been busy creating my own. I found myself in this house with a man who would stop time for me if he thought he could and 4 young children who look to both he and I for the answers to all their questions.

So here I sit...with this family of my own all around me. I don't remember how we all found one another but here we are, and I want nothing more than to show them to, share them with, these precious, priceless  people of my past who never really existed.

I search for them at family gatherings, in ICU rooms and in the cars that occasionally grace my driveway, but they are not there; not really. They have scattered to the recesses of my mind where they exist as I remember them; and that fact fills me with a void..a vastness, larger than the universe itself.

I think it is human nature to seek solid ground, something to pick up with your hands and recognize when there's no gravity.  So is it really any surprise that I searched the nation and found two Mexican boys in Texas who also had no gravity? Or two little black boys from Columbus who didn't even know what gravity was?
Was it so wrong of me to search and create my own family while the one I held in my hands fell through my fingers like sand..turning into people I don't know.
So did I adopt these children to make myself feel better...look better...less broken perhaps? Fuck yes.
I did. And I think that makes me a human being. A flawed, stumbling human being trying to find some peace during wartime, some solitude in chaos and some gravity in time and space. Yes, I am guilty of that.