Flashbulb Memories

A new year starts and I’m just as broken as I was when the last began. I’m tired of nursing my wounds. I want a truly new start. But I can’t leave this place. It’s where I always wanted to be. Now I’m stuck. I followed my dreams and now I have nowhere left to go.

The best day of my life was my fifth birthday. I woke up and my parents weren’t in the house but I could hear the mower running. I stepped out my front door onto the front porch. Everything smelled of fresh-cut grass. A colorful donkey piñata was sitting on our door mat. I hugged the piñata and made my way around to the back yard. My mother was fixing streamers to our chain link fence and my father pushing the lawn mower. They both looked so happy when they saw me. Mom walked over and picked me up. My father turned off the mower and wrapped his arms around us both. I can’t imagine ever experiencing anything better.

Mom has a brain tumor.

My 16 year-old brother had been tasked with breaking the news. I collapsed in on myself. That seems to be what I always do when being told horrifying, life-changing news. Mom and Dad were afraid of telling me themselves. They saw me as fragile, easily broken. My brother is my favorite person in the world and I’m sure they believed the news would be easiest to take when spoken through my brother’s voice.

The doctor says that it doesn’t look like cancer. They think they can remove it. Mom will be ok.

My brother then handed the phone to my mother. The moment I heard her voice I began sobbing. She asked if I wanted her to postpone the surgery until I got home. I should have said “yes” but the calmness of my brothers voice and my mother’s soothing words made it sound routine. Of course she would be ok. I told her to go ahead with the surgery and I would be there the next night. She would see me when she woke up. 

I love you so much. So, so much. You are the best mom in the world. I will see you tomorrow.

It takes three planes to get to South Dakota. A full day. When my last plane landed I had to wait a half-hour for a terminal to open. Such a small airport. I busied myself with the newest issue of Stuff Magazine. I loved their silly articles. I told myself that it was alright to laugh. That everything was ok outside of the plane. I never let myself consider the possibility that something might go wrong during the surgery. I never imagined Dad would be standing in the terminal, holding onto my uncle, trying to figure out the right way to tell me she wouldn’t be waking up.

I think I might be bisexual. Does that change the way you feel about me?

I waited for his response. I had never told someone I knew that I was bisexual. I had said it in text to anonymous people on the internet but never to someone I had met. I felt like it was time I came out with it. 

No. That doesn’t change how I feel about you.

“What does?” I replied. No answer.

I tried to direct the conversation to another topic. He was celebrating his 18th birthday the next day and I asked if there was anything I could bring to the party. I thought that might change his tone. It didn’t.

He was depressed and angry. When he got that way I would normally tell him that he couldn’t kill himself without me. I knew what he was thinking. I couldn’t love him but I was willing to die with him. That night was the one time my response was different. I was angry. And tired of fighting. 

You’re going to be sorry.

I didn’t respond. I logged off the computer thinking about what a complete asshole he was. I wondered whether he was worth giving up the limited edition Han Solo action figure I had gotten for being the first in line at the midnight showing of Empire Strikes Back. Maybe I would just keep it. 

My family have been Red Sox fans since 1919. That year my six year-old grandfather saw Babe Ruth play for the Red Sox in a game against the White Sox at the old Comiskey Park. Later that year Babe Ruth was traded to the Yankees, cementing my family’s long standing antipathy for the team. Grandpa always blamed the Yankees for stealing Babe Ruth away. 

The real details of why Babe Ruth was traded to the Yankees had more to do with Ruth’s demands for a raise than thievery on the part of the Yankees. The Red Sox were unwilling to double his pay and the Yankees offered cash. The Red Sox made the trade and got quite a bit of money to give him up.

I never discussed this with my grandfather prior to his death last year. I didn’t want to screw with my family’s mythology. It doesn’t matter how it happened but that year we became Red Sox fans. As far as I’m concerned, we always will be. I will always be thankful that my grandfather lived long enough to see us win in 2004 and win again in 2007. And I’m listening to the game right now. We’re winning. (This was written before our spectacularly sad losing streak at the end of the season. Truly and ridiculously spectacular.) 

I have to say that what I find even more amazing than the fact that my grandfather saw Babe Ruth is the fact that he saw the 1919 White Sox. That was the the year of the “Black Sox” scandal where the World Series was fixed. The White Sox threw the series and the Cincinnati Reds won. The eight players accused of taking bribes were banned from baseball for the rest of their lives. My grandfather saw those men play that summer. He saw “Shoeless” Joe Jackson run. How fucking cool is that?

My mom only turned away for a moment. She was pregnant with my brother and sister and we were crib-shopping in an Indianapolis department store. When she turned back I was gone.

A teenage store clerk saw the woman pick me up and begin to run. It happened so quickly that by the time my mother turned around the woman holding me and the clerk running after her were no longer visible. The sliding glass doors at the entrance slowed the woman enough that the clerk could tackle her. She wrestled me out of the woman’s arms and the woman escaped out the door, vanishing into the parking lot. She was never caught.

My mom told me this story several times throughout my childhood. It’s not something a neurotic insomniac child takes in and forgets about. I thought about it some nights as I laid in bed, imagining what might have happened had she made it through the door with me. I never imagined she could have killed me. I was a pretty, blonde, two and a half year-old. It just doesn’t seem like a woman in her 30’s or 40’s (the description given to the police) would take a little girl to murder her. I imagined that she would have raised me. And I would have had a different life.

Face… Guard your face… Keep your arms up… You don’t need to protect your titties. You need to protect your face!

Today was my third boxing lesson. My trainer won’t let me get away with anything. I got hit upside the head with his punch mitt at least 10 times. The first time my glasses got knocked sideways. I tried in vain to readjust them using my boxing gloves until my trainer started laughing and put them back in place.

“You can’t fight in glasses. I’m not going to put them back on your face again.”

Ugh. Now I have to get contacts. I hate touching my eyes. But I do want to fight.

I go through periods where I try physical fitness. I’ve never been very athletic. Neither have my brother and sister. I worry that this has always been a minor source of disappointment to my father. He was an All American football player in college and held the state record in shot-put for 40 years. I asked him about this a few nights ago. His reply was, “well, your brother was pretty good at hacky sack…” We both started laughing. 

“I’m sorry. You had three years to fall in love with me. Your time is up.”

Those were my words to the boy who then forced my first kiss upon me. I was sitting on top on a jungle gym in his back yard. I didn’t want him anymore.

“Please let me kiss you. You don’t have to count it as your first. Just kiss me and I will let you go.”

He climbed up the metal ladder stairs and rested his body on my dangling legs.

“I love you. I thought you were the one I would lose my virginity to.”

I could feel his erection against my calf.

“Kiss me and I will take you home.”

I lived a half hour away in the hills and had no other way of getting back. I relented and let him climb the rest of the way up.

It was the coldest kiss I’ve ever given. I can’t imagine what that felt like for him. I was cruel. I showed him how disgusted I was that he had put his mouth to my virgin lips. That he had taken that ideal teenage moment away from me. He apologized repeatedly throughout the trip back to my house. I sat silent, ignoring him. He began to cry.

After that night he changed. Cut his hair very short and started losing weight. He was always thin but at the end he was 6ft tall and 120 pounds. Knowing him this way made his viewing even more surreal. An embalming mistake blew up his body up to twice his normal size. 

“Megalophobia is a fear of large or oversized objects. A person who is megalophobic can have their fear triggered by any number of things such as buildings, animals and even planes.”

I have a really lame phobia. Living in NYC has definitely cured me of most of my fear of tall buildings although I think that I would probably start crying if I saw the Burj Khalifa. And planes flying high overhead don’t make me too uncomfortable though I avoid driving on the Grand Central Parkway (next to LaGuardia’s runway.) When an enormous plane lands right above my car, I begin to shake.

I don’t believe that oversized objects are going to hurt me but I shiver and my eyes tear up when something seems overwhelmingly large. I hate how irrational and uncontrollable it is. I wish I had a phobia that more people could understand. Why couldn’t I be coulrophobic? At least the fear of clowns makes some sort of sense.