Jennifer C. Quayle

This summer is spent wishing tomorrow won’t feel heavy again but finding that today always does, the heat always wins the ever-repeating fight.

This summer is seeping along the grooves of my brain; an invasive vine, curling and crinkling, filling up the gaps inside my head with its gnarled arms and oily leaves, choking out the life with pervasive, incestuous growth.

This summer is me weeping because I don’t know how to feel pain.

This summer is the world whispering, refraining, keening: “I don’t know, I don’t know, I don’t know” because we don’t and we know.

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Silent Scream

Jennifer C. Quayle

I’m a ten-year-old dropped into a tragedy I never asked for. I’m a ten-year-old with a dirty face, no food in the refrigerator, and a drunk father. I didn’t know what alcoholism was before I was thrown into the ring. I wasn’t prepared. One second I was playing with Barbies, and the next I’m pleading with my dad to change his mind, that stealing that horse is a bad idea. A tenyear-old hostage negotiator with nothing but on-the-job training; and you gotta learn fast. Sink or swim, baby. I quickly learned that being a child of an alcoholic is like being held hostage. Your every waking moment is spent appeasing, bargaining, pleading. You can’t go to anyone. You can’t tell anyone. And because of that, they always have the upper hand. Somehow this unspoken agreement was made. It doesn’t matter what they do. It doesn’t matter how much they neglect you. They know that you know that you’ll never say anything. This is your life now. Being a child of an alcoholic is like being kidnapped. Your existence has become nothing more than a car ride with your abductor, an imaginary gun jammed right up under your ribs, your vacant face turned towards the glass. You look at each passing car and notice that every person seems so normal, so unconcerned with the chaos that’s so obvious; they just choose not to see it. You aren’t sure if you remember what that feels like: leading a normal existence. You press your hollow face and shaking hands against the glass in a desperate attempt to get someone’s attention. You’re the quiet, overly-friendly kid begging for someone to see you, someone to notice your dirty hands and the terror in your eyes. When someone does look, they don’t see, but you mouth HELP ME anyway. But no one can hear your soundless pleas. Mistaking your desperation for some-

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thing else, they smile from behind the safety of their lives, and turn away. Growing up in chaos is like living on a battlefield. It’s violent, ugly, and overwhelming, and you fall asleep at night amazed that you made it through another day. When you fall asleep, the sound of battle still ringing in your ears, nothing feels real. All you’re looking for is stability and refuge. All you want is for someone to wipe the blood from your face and tell you that you’re safe. This is your life now. As a ten-year-old, you don’t expect to have to learn how to live with the electricity turned off. You don’t plan on drinking out of the dog’s water bowl because the well water is off, convincing your little sister that this is just a silly game, sheltering her from what it really is. I’d play with my friends across the street and try to act like a normal kid, while trying to push away the dread of having to make a mustard sandwich when I got home because there was nothing else. I marveled at the simplicity of other kid’s lives. I bet they never had to sit in the car while their drunk father drove to the corner store to get more booze. I bet they never had to turn the radio up so loud that it drowned out the drunken sounds of their father in the house. I couldn’t understand why this was happening to me. I looked at their pristine lives and couldn’t help but wonder what it was I did in a past life that was so wrong as to deserve this. I couldn’t understand how they got so lucky. I always heard that you make your own luck, but when you spend each day just trying to make it to the next, your spirit is so broken that you couldn’t make your own luck if you tried. When you’re living simply to survive, sometimes it feels like that’s all the luck you were allotted in this life. You get to live; survival is your luck and there’s nothing else to spare. That’s all we got for ya, kid. Try again in the next life. You’re becoming accustomed to the terror, the panic, the hopelessness that cloaks you like a mantle each morning. You’ve adapted so quickly; you hide, you stay outside, you make yourself invisible, just waiting for the day to end. Waiting for it all to

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end. You’ve realized that nothing can quell that sick lump in your stomach, so you learn to pretend it’s not there. I got so good at pretending, at hiding my real feelings. I’d slide on my mask, step into character, and I was so convincing with these feigned emotions that people wanted and expected. Everything I didn’t feel. I got so good at slipping into someone else’s skin, hoping that just once, someone would look into my eyes and see the hysteria there, the voiceless scream that is always there. This is your life now. Is there a name for that silent scream that blooms in your heart after help passes you up? When no one sees your desperation and dread? They’re here, and then they’re gone; they think you’re fine, nobody wants to get involved. What about a word for the horror that you feel when you’re alone with the thing that scares you the most? That bewildered alarm, knowing that you just ran out of options. Because there’s a panic that comes from waking up and knowing that you’re going to have to face things beyond anything you could have ever imagined. There’s a dread born from the realization that you have to internalize it all. This is your life now. But most of all, there’s an unfathomable sorrow that comes only with the reluctant acknowledgement of three simple truths: This is the hand you were dealt; This is the life you were flung into; And that you, and you alone, are the one that has to shoulder this burden that never should have been yours in the first place. You will carry this pain, this sorrow, and these scars for the rest of your life. You’re marked now and for the rest of your life. This is your life now. After a while, when I realized that this would never end, I would fantasize about running away from everything; vanishing like a magic trick. Shedding my life like snakeskin; drop it like it was burning my hands. A hollowness began carving out a deep place

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inside me, a deep, cavernous sad. The kind that settles in your bones and dwells there in the dark. My melancholia and I became friends. It became a pastime for me to push myself over the edge, into that black place, letting sadness drench me like a rainstorm. I dwelled on my sorrow, thrived on it. Grew a black cloud to keep over my head like a pet. Tended to my woe like a garden. As time passed, in order to swallow my panic, I began to see my life as if it were scenes in a movie. It was easier to digest that way; I could step out of the frame and watch this other person: locking the bedroom door, burying the dog. My stand-in would be the one who felt the echoing ache of loneliness and isolation, not me. The continual scream for help that was stuck in my throat was hers, not mine. This wasn’t my life. This was Her life and She was just a character; she navigated each day scene by scene. These things aren’t happening to me. (These are things that will never happen to me.) This wasn’t my life. (This couldn’t possibly be my life.) Because if it was my life, then I would be forced to see the ugliness. I’d drown in the despair and suffocate on the unfairness of it all. This wasn’t my life. This was a scene. And I waited desperately for someone to yell CUT.

Now, all these years later, in those empty in-between moments, sometimes if I’m really quiet and very still, I can almost put myself back-the tattered doll of my childhood self, back in the dollhouse of my past. I can feel the empty days and nameless terrors, the silent screams closing in around me as if it were just moments ago. It’s strange. I always think I keep these moments, these sense memories, tucked far away in the recesses of my mind, and yet, they must not be all that far away because they never hesitate to rush me when I’m the most unsuspecting. Whenever they come back, it’s a flood. A forest fire. They no longer feel like thoughts or memories.

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