#rose prose

Plebeians.

I’m coming for you.

“Yeah!” He shouts as another one goes off, spiraling up into the air. Fireworks are so cool. If only New Years was every night.

Don’t mind the mess, Rose is just cleaning up.

There was this magical realism book I read when I was a little kid. It was about a child so slight and small she faded out of people's notice, and people would sit on her and shove her into their purses by accident. She was so unnoticeable that when she started living inside false walls of the house, her family hardly noticed the difference. She lived like that for years, gradually building out the space between the walls, making a home for herself on the fringes of everyone else's lives. Eventually, though, she grew too large for the space she'd been silently slipping through. Too solid to be a ghost. And people started really seeing her, and thinking about her, and wondering who she was. They wanted to know her. She chooses to leave her little world, in the end. She doesn't fit there anymore, and there's something exciting about being known, about taking up space in your own life and the lives of others. Plus there's a cute boy, something something puberty, something something sexuality...but I took away the choices she made herself, the human connection she was surprised and scared and, eventually, happy to find. This was a hugely influential story for me as I grew. I spent a lot of time wishing I could just disappear without a trace, just as the little girl did. I started thinking it was maybe even a little bit noble, to leave so few traces on the lives of others that they hardly remembered you. Like a martyr, silently watching, disconnected, unable to hurt or be hurt. As someone who had hit 170lbs and 5'7" by fifth grade, I liked the idea of taking up as little space in the world as possible. Of being small and escaping notice. Obviously this mindset was evidence of more than just having read this one book. There were a lot of other books, more stories about people living in the shadows, casting the barest of shadows on the cave walls. Affecting the world for the better, but without perception. Hell, I was Catholic. Maybe that's where that started. Do your good deeds like a thief in the night, anonymous, unlooked for, unknown. It was a Romantic thing. A private thing. A thing that I later had to address in therapy, because I'd gotten too used to being set dressing in other people's lives. A listening ear, a shoulder to cry on, a source of validation and a secret keeper. All with no secrets of my own, no tears to cry, no voice to need listening. It wasn't quite that unbalanced at the time, but the weight of the relationships I'd crafted for myself dug in, and sharp secrets cut my insides to ribbons. I could be open and invulnerable all at once. It's remarkably easy. People like to talk about themselves. All it takes to disappear is to turn into a mirror, or a bottomless dark sea. "I'm fine. I'm always fine. Let's talk about you." Everyone's problems were so much worse than mine. It made me feel strong, that I could help them carry their burdens. All of their burdens. It made me feel useful. I liked the idea of being a thing that was useful. More than anything, I wanted to be an inanimate tool that would help those around me, and quickly forgotten when they'd tired of me. To be loved, but for what I did for them rather than for who I was. I distinctly remember feeling a deep grief in high school that I tried to pretend didn't exist. I felt more grief then for my dog than I would for the 4 or 5 relatives that would die in the next two years, suddenly and, in some cases, by their own hands. I pretended that nothing was wrong. I wasn't very good at it. A friend of many years tried to lace her fingers with mine and hold this small part of me, and I ripped my hand away out of reflex. The intimacy of it enraged me. Her understanding enraged me. My sloppiness enraged me. At the bottom of the rage was shame. Never before had I more strongly wanted to crawl into the walls between our lives and disappear. I wanted to be a useful thing that would hardly be missed when it vanished. But people kept trying to see me. Kept trying to make me a burden. I didn't know how to be helped, or how to be seen. Didn't know I was allowed to want it, and wouldn't have if I did. I've spent a lot of time these past few years learning to take up space again. To fill the space I already take up. To learn that I don't need to be useful. To know that I don't have to be a mirror or a bottomless pit. To realize that the walls I built for myself were always more constricting than they were sheltering. That I don't live a life of magical realism. I've spent a lot of time in therapy, is what I'm saying. Sometimes the idea of being a ghost in my own life still appeals to me, as an adult. Sometimes I isolate myself further than usual and say that it's better for everyone involved. Sometimes I think of that book I read so long ago that I can't remember the title. And I think of how I have to choose to be present in the world every single day. And I think that it's worth the struggle of it.