trauma can affect your memory, but your body can remember….
Write about 8th grade is the writing prompt today, as if that was easy. Let’s imagine I’m like everybody else who remembers their adolescence. My mind shut down years ago, the cognitive memory took a vacation. Guess it was under flight mode?
My 8th grade. My slight panic arises, I don’t remember anything. Or barely. I have a face in mind, a balustrade, a girl I so wished she would be friends with me, who never was.
Rita, the girl with long blond straight puffy hair. She would sit in front of me in class and brush her hair constantly. I wished I had her hair.
What was I doing? Did we have a uniform? It was a christian junior high.
Was I in California? I didn’t know anybody.
Part of me is freaking out. How could I zap an entire section of existence out of my life?
I have a vague memory of a class room to the right in the back, did we eat there?
What was happening at that time in my life? I must have been 13 or 14. Where was my brother? My adopted sister would have been 3 at the time. I have a flash of us playing a practical joke on her and putting her in the basketball net. I wonder if she’s traumatized from that, she still remembers.
It’s all blended.
I don’t know what’s true and what’s not. The first time I kissed a boy I was in California, I must have been that age. Must have been when mom took us to California from Arizona to see our dad. They had broken up, she went back, to try to save the family.
He lived in a little apartment building. Basic. We used to spend our days in the hollowed out area of a giant bush in the complex, we loved forts. They were our safe space.
My brother and I would make forts in the living room, from the plastic fold out table to the chair, we would drape sleeping bags over it and hang out in there.
When our parents were gone, we would whip each other with wet towels. We fought brutally or maybe we were just letting out our pent up emotions from all that was happening in the family.
Did it not even concern my parents that changing schools 13 times in the span of my 10 years of schooling was a bit much for a chronically shy hyper sensitive child?
Did it not even occur to them?
One night, a woman arrived at my dad’s door, knocking, banging to see him. He finally went out. We were supposed to be sleeping. I think we slept in the living room.
They were talking, no idea what they were saying under their muffled voices, guess that was Dad’s new girlfriend while he and Mom were separated.
Why did my mother go back? Why do women go back to their abuser? He was changed, I think that was what she believed. Things would be different, she must have been struggling. 3 kids, working at night as a nurse.
As kids, we have no clue what our parents do to make sure we survive. I had no idea.
We used to throw snails on our neighbors giant windows overlooking the common green area. We would watch them slowly smear their way down the window to their final crash on the ground.
Things kids do.
Not to mention using magnifying glasses to roast ants.
That boy… I barely remember him. I think he had glasses, we played together. I remember a kiss, a quick one, then never seeing him again. Name? No idea.
I wonder was I really in junior high? All this sounds so immature. To think, 2 years later I would be going to bars with a fake ID.
This must have been earlier, I wouldn’t have been hiding in forts at 13.
It’s all a mess and part of me reaches out to my younger self and says, damn girl, you must have been going through it not to remember a single thing.
I recall slamming my finger in the car trunk.
I recall getting pneumonia and coughing until almost threw up by a car in a parking lot.
My lungs, need for air, sense of compression? I always felt like I had a cage around my chest. One day, I would break free. But I couldn’t back then.
I don’t think I was still spanked at that age. The church wouldn’t have allowed it.
At that time we were probably in the new punishment phase of writing bible verses 100’s of times repeating the same one again and again. Verses about sinning. How could I forget them now, after writing, sleeping, dreaming the constant hammer of guilt into my body?
Or maybe it was the soap mouthwash? Laying on the bathroom floor with a giant bar of fresh new square soap lodged into our mouths after being carefully grated into our teeth. We would lay their for what seemed interminable, letting the soap drip down our throats, our mouths cocked open like a pig with an apple.
That was for white washing. Little white lies had to be cleaned out of our system.
That must have been younger.
At 13 I lived with my mother. Yes, that must have been it. I was into Metallica, Skid Row, Kiss, I had posters on my walls. I had a black and white polka dotted bedspread. We lived in a house I loved, an open floor plan with bedrooms on the sides. I could easily get out without my mother knowing.
One of the nights she was at work, my friends came over, I pierced their ears with ice and a needle.
I rode the bus, I liked a boy. I was too shy to speak to him. My emotions had no idea how to let themselves out. One day, he sat close to me, I slapped him. His face was red, he was stunned.
I liked him. Why did I do that?
My first fight with a girl happened in that time, we pulled each others hair, that’s all I remember.
I must have been a churning ocean of hormones, emotions, trauma and survival mechanisms. The world was a vicious place that I never felt at home in.
What was I like? I must have been a pain in the ass. I reproach my mother for not being there for me emotionally. She was probably just dealing with her own PTSD from being with my father and working to raise 3 children.
I had no idea. I just criticized her. She slapped me once. I was 16 already.
I had no idea. No idea what went on for her, I was removed, distant, in my own mind bubble, protecting myself and surviving in a world that I had no idea how to navigate.
You want me to talk about 8th grade? Well, you know what, it’s not that fucking easy.