Activity
Pretend your ear is a giant receiver. Now wander around your home, preferably at night, and listen. Are clocks ticking, washing machines rumbling, sirens wailing? Stick your ear out the door and listen. What sounds are appealing? What irritate or unnerve you? Why?
I am standing in the center of the downstairs floor – teetering on the threshold between dining room and living room. The tick-tock rhythm of my grandmother’s cuckoo clock breaks the silence. It comforted me as a child but never told the right time. I’d hear it chirp odd hours and odder times.
The distant noise of her TV upstairs creeps through the ceiling. Some late night cop show. I peer out the front door and listen. It’s uneasily quiet outside. In lower class Baltimore, that’s just as disturbing as the normal consistency of screeching sirens from cop cars and ambulances.
It’s cold. The air hisses past my ears.
None of the sounds irritate me. Nor do they soothe me. I go back up to my room and continue watching Silence of the Lambs.
Journal Prompts
Dip into your memory bank and write about the sounds of familiar voices. What words were spoken? Was it at the front door? The bedroom door? Arguments, tears or celebrations?
The voices are in the kitchen. I’m sitting on the steps leading into the living room that connected to the kitchen. Angry voices. They’re yelling. Another argument. It was almost like clockwork – the progression. They drink. Something gets said that sets them both off. Usually about cheating or money or who was the bigger fuck up that week.
The argument escalates. The tone’s volume turns up. I can see around the corner of the stairwell… the line of bottles and cans tossed on the floor erratically. I try to play “connect the dots” in my head and make pretty pictures from ugly ones.
I hear dishes falling and breaking. I still remember the sound of a lid on the floor spinning fast, slowing down until it stopped. A sudden silence fell over everything. It was as if time froze.
I’m waiting then for the sound… and it ALWAYS came. The sound of my mother saying the one final thing that always drove my father into that place where fists met flesh. I hear the impact of a pan against him. They fought each other, tussling and stumbling their way into the living room.
My mother is crying. I can see her bleeding. She falls up the stairs – oblivious to me sitting there in my pajamas. The moment my father sees me there, a small trace of regret surfaced under the haze of booze.
Is it sad I remember that he taught me to tie my shoes on those same steps during one of those arguments? He was trying to distract me from the things I saw or heard…
Think about the times you were truly heard. Who truly listened? How did it feel?
There are few people in this world who have truly listened to me. I think it’s partially why I stopped talking many years ago. My cousin and best friend has always listened to me. In the timeline of constant listening, she has been the only one.
I hope that one individual that I confide in now is truly listening to me.
I think they are. I feel that they are. I’m scared to trust but I am. I have and I will continue to.
Not an easy feat for me. When it comes to trust, I am still a child sitting on those steps and waiting for the moment the world tears itself apart again. And it does. Every single time.
Will there be a moment when I can sit on those steps and not hear the angry words anymore - when my nights are calm, quiet, and comforting?
Today…
I have been in a nasty depression as of late. I have had no energy. I lay in bed wishing to sleep and my mind just keeps racing. Found some items over the weekend that opened old wounds. The recovery has been slow and I’m starting to doubt myself again.
The found items were during a time when I was being attacked on every level of who I was. I was never good enough. It was all my fault. At least, that was a few of the excuses used. They said they did it because of my transgressions and downward spiraling – somehow forgetting what caused those transgressions in the first place.
I am selfless to a fault and it somehow always comes back to haunt me. Why is that? What do I seek by giving so much of myself even when it becomes toxic to do so?
Maybe the little girl in me is still looking for something on those steps with her perfectly tied shoes. Maybe she’s still looking for a moment when the two people most responsible for fostering her sense of belonging and identity in the world would lay down their words and their weapons.
Can’t we leave the weight at the door?
Not anymore…
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