I'm not alright

there must be diamonds somewhere

in a place that stinks this bad

In the garage I watch her mix the paint, the air dusty and smelling faintly of mold even in the warm weather. She is pouring white into the red and stirring it in.

“Mommy I don’t want it pink!”

“I know you don’t, I won’t make it pink I promise.” She says as I watch the white swirl and disappear into the red.

“Mommy no you're not I can see the pink!”

“Honey, just be patient”

My furniture is being painted. I wanted it to be covered in the darkest carbon black. Blood red on the drawers is the compromise.

You can always hear her in the house, partly due to the thin aged walls, mostly due to her heavy stomping. She stampedes instead of walking, usually in high heels. Heels her doctor told her she was absolutely not to wear if she wanted her knees to not degrade to cartilage-less husks of grinding bone. She is incapable of closing doors. The cabinets in the kitchen, the doors between rooms, the microwave is always open and has an odd number of seconds left on the clock. She blows through the house, disruptive, loud and always sudden. She even speaks loudly and the more excited she is the louder she gets until my ears ring and throb. She is never still, he hands are thin and long with knobby knuckles and pink pearl painted nails. They shift and rub on the stick shift knob, and twist on the steering wheel. I hate her hands. Watching them fidget makes me remember their hard bony tips tugging at my clothes, clucking as she tells me the fit is all wrong. My hands are identical to hers.

My room is on the second story of our house. It was built in 1926, but when we moved in the entire second floor was unfinished, only studs for potential walls. My father finished putting up drywall and basic lighting, but in the bedrooms there are no baseboards- just raw edges of drywall ringing the floor. In mine there are many tiny LEGO bits crammed under much of it. The hallway and stairs remain unfinished, bare bulbs dim and fluorescent. Under no circumstances was I to touch the exposed insulation. The stairs are as old as the house, dry cracked and splintering. They are steep and narrow and I was not allowed to walk down them, but I had to scoot on my little butt to get down.

In my bedroom there are two windows; one faces the street in front of the house and the two enormous sugar maple trees. The other faces out over a neighbor's roof and the odor of the ancient lilac bush waft in. That bush is one of my favorite places to play, in amongst its gnarled branches is a cave- green and dark and quiet. In six years there will be a flood in Salem, largely caused by poor storm drain design, also caused by being a city built on a flood plain. In the aftermath the city is redoing our lines. To prepare for it my father decides, unilaterally, to drastically prune back the lilac. The cave is gone forever, and I am heartbroken. The lilac survives but the pruning turns out to be unnecessary.

In my room, alone, I am filled with a sense that everything is well and right and proper with my world. I am content and happy and certain that this state of affairs will continue forever. This is my only solid memory of being happy until I am in my mid to late twenties.

At school in the second grade I realize I am, despite my earlier confidence, not the fastest runner that has ever lived. So I stop running. I attempt to learn how to ride a bike. The first time I fall off onto gray sidewalk and green grass I cry and swear I will never touch the damn thing ever again. I still do not know how to ride a bike. My parents buy me bike accessories for my birthday- colorful beads with holographic stickers for the spokes, a novelty license plate with my name on it. I find them tacky and boring. They stay unused in a basket in my room for a decade.

In high school I stop eating. My mother will complain to all about how difficult it is to feed five people dinner every day. She complains while slipping in that she cooks every day, and we sit down as a family to eat. She is clearly the best mother with the healthiest family. If only we were less difficult. If only I was less picky. I eat granola bars, cereal, milk, and microwave popcorn. At the mandatory family dinners I eat as little as possible before asking to be excused. My mother tells stories about how picky I am as an eater, how other parents worried and the doctor made mentions of my low weight. These concerns are brushed aside as “genetics”. After all, she was extremely thin as a child. By the time I am sixteen I am five foot eight and a hundred and seven pounds. My hipbones are as sharp as knives and you can see each and every rib, front and back.  I catch bronchitis, again, from a boy sitting next to me in class. After a week or two of coughing I was standing in the downstairs bathroom, the floor covered in mid 90's linoleum, light blue splattered with gray. The mirror is warped and dusty.  My grandfather, after hearing me choke and gag comes out of his room next door looking concerned.

“Are you ok?”

I cannot respond, but I shake my head and glare, not wanting him to see me like this. He stands there, I slam the bathroom door closed, and hack and wheeze. For a few seconds my entire airway is blocked. I make no sound. I cannot cry for help, but it clears before I need to. I hack up the vile glob into the sink and catch my breath, then go into my Granddad's bedroom. It's a small room, just enough room for bed, dresser and desk. It smells slightly musty like mothballs and old fabric. He tells me about him nearly hemorrhaging to death in the 40’s, when he had tuberculosis. He was doing laundry in his dusty basement and collapsed, spewing up blood everywhere. He thought he was going to die. I don’t really understand why he tells me this.

My grandfather was endlessly nosy. Always curious about the workings of everything. From my shower scrubs-

“Why does it have little tiny rocks in it? Doesn't that hurt?”

To the hierarchy of the city workers outside, to what exactly is that weed's Latin name and origins. He moved in with us when I was seven and in the second grade. He was older than many when he had his children so he was older than many when he had grandchildren. His hands were gnarled root clusters, tan and lumpy and bent in odd ways. He has rheumatoid arthritis, and for most of his life there wasn't much treatment to be done. His handwriting is unreadable to seven year old me, but that doesn't keep him from keeping logs of his greenhouse, the weather (including barometric pressure, temperature, wind speed and direction and types of clouds) and his own health. I know now that his hands hurt him all the time, and that's why he always went to bed at seven thirty every evening. He hurt so badly he couldn't stay up longer than that. At the time I just thought he was a funny old guy set in his ways. To be fair, he  held a rigorous schedule. He ate grape nuts flakes with one half a banana, a cup of tea (always the same mug), and always at six am. He had lunch around noon, sandwiches of Oscar Meyer lunch meat, tomato (grown in the garden) lettuce and mayo. He would have fruit, usually an apple or orange. The dog and the cat both would sit by his chair at lunch time, looking both very well behaved and very hungry. He never admitted to feeding the animals from the table to my mother, but he would toss them bits of lunch meat in front of me. He claimed not to like cats, they eat birds and poop in his garden, so I asked him why he was feeding the cat as well as the dog.

“Well the cat saw me feeding the dog, and he came over to beg. It seemed unfair to give some to Alex and none to the cat.”

He taught me how to paint with watercolor. He painted gentle landscapes, or he used to when he was younger. He showed me how to use straws to blow the wet paint across a page, how to mix colors, and how to care for my brushes. His paints came in actual tin palettes, the tiny brightly colored bricks dray and cracked until you add water.

I tell my mother I am sick and need antibiotics. She stops what she is doing, abruptly turning to me with brows lowered, again. Sometimes I wonder if she only has a set number of facial expressions.

“I don't really have time for this today!”

“Grandpa could take me? Please, I know I have bronchitis.”

The doctors waiting room is cool and calm with it's maroon and teal decor. I love the large fish tank with bright corals and a large gray eel that has been there as long as I can remember.

“You need to take these pills with food.” Said the doctor.

“OK sure.” I say, knowing full well I don’t actually eat meals and have no intention of doing so. That night I take them with a full glass of milk, hoping that will be enough. The yellow bile and bitter pill bits I throw up burn my throat.. Thick streams of mucus and scraps of bile are the only thing left in me, but my body insists on turning itself inside out. Endless heaving and spasms despite the little bit that there was to be vomited is long gone. I desperately chug down glasses of water just to have something to bring up instead of dry heaves. Laying on the floor in the bathroom upstairs bathroom with the claw foot tub and hardwood floors at midnight, my mother stomps in.

“What are you doing!” Her thick black hair going every which way, clearly enraged about being woken up- a high crime in my home.

“I’m puking.” I say, stunned and confused.

A pause and then

“Oh. When are you going to be done?” She is calmer now, but still confused. I realize she isn’t really very awake.

“I don’t know? I’m puking?” I answer.

“Oh. Ok.” She goes back to bed, leaving me alone on the floor. I decide I need to start eating, at least while on these antibiotics. Pills and bile is a taste I will never forget, bitter and burning.

She confronts me the next day after dinner. It was spaghetti for dinner, red sauce from a jar and noodles. I had been picking at it, trying to make myself eat more than I usually do. I succeed, but not in hiding my distress. She pulls me out of the dining room with its scratched up wood floor and grandfather still eating and brings me into the living room. She closes the door behind her. This means we are going to have A Talk. She glowers, black brows lowered and points at me. I take a quick step back and put my hands up in front of me, trying to ward off her palpable anger.

“I don’t care what you do, but how dare you do it in front of your grandfather!” she says. I don't understand and can't think of what to say, so I say nothing.

“You know he worries about you!” I realize she is angry about me starving myself. And not that I am obviously ill, but that I am obviously ill in front of her father. I am shocked and don't know how to respond. I agree to “not do it in front of him” and go back to my room. I don't feel angry until later. I don't feel much at all until later. There is no point in expressing it, expressing anger will always just make her worse. It is better to retreat to my room, read my books and stay quiet.

My room is filthy, a thick layer of clothes mixed in with garbage and art supplies. The clothes are almost universally black or olive green, the acrylic paint splattered on the floor is bright and every color possible. I try to decorate the walls, but no matter what I do it just leaves me feeling inadequate and disgusted by myself. Eventually I give up and leave them blank.  There is a lock on the door but I know using it would only result in more hours of Serious Talks. Talks where they repeatedly ask me what they should do with me. Long silences pierced by disappointed sighs. I gave up responding to their questions years ago, there is no right answer. Years of desperate trial and error have left me not emoting at all and I do my best to just sit and wait them out. Begging does nothing, carefully drafting up my own punishments does nothing, crying does nothing, yelling is absolutely not allowed. I have no idea what they want me to say or do. I stare at the floor, knowing that glaring at my mother will result in Consequences. Glaring at the floor seems permitted. They don't know I am waiting until I can get out of that house to somewhere I can do all the terrible things I desperately want to do. I want to run feral in the night, bare feet in the damp soil and the taste of blood in my mouth. Maybe they do know, maybe it just doesn't matter as long as I don't do them in front of anyone that they know.

The floor of my bedroom when I am sixteen is mostly the same as ever. Much of it is hidden in dirty clothes that never seem to fit how I want them to fit, always too short and hanging oddly on my skeletal frame. This is where I hide, or attempt to hide. I am not allowed to lock the door and my parents often wander in to check on me, or to demand I turn out the light and go to sleep. More than once an angry hand will reach in abruptly, turn off the light, and slam the door shut again leaving me startled, frightened and alone in the dark.  By this point any hint that my parents are mad at me leaves me a shaking mess, slamming the door on me in the dark of night leaves me terrified and unable to do anything about it. I dare not turn the light back on, so I can’t even read to escape my fear. I lay in the dark and think of all the ways I am a failure and a disappointment, and eventually sleep comes.

there are brighter things than diamonds

coming down the line