Issue 10.1 Fall 2014

issue 10.1 cover image

 

 

Freedom

 

Henri Seymour

 


Over the course of life, weird shit just tends to happen to people. That’s a pretty safe assumption, no?
A friend once stopped me in the middle of a story I was telling to say, “Henri. Are you aware of how absolutely ridiculous your life is? Do you know how weird it sounds in comparison to mine? To everyone else’s?” Of course, my answer to that would be an unequivocal no. All I know is my own life and the stories people have deemed appropriate to tell me, and I believe that everyone is uniquely broken in their own way. Do you feel me? Everyone’s got stories in them; stories they love to tell or hate to tell, stories that shape them as a person. Yet somehow, everyone can relate to one another. We’ve all got that basic human experience, the previously mentioned ‘weird shit’ factor that binds us all together.


When I say my parents are divorced, I’m sure someone will understand that. When I say my parents are children who shouldn’t be taking care of themselves, let alone their kids- well, hah, some people should understand that too! Somehow, arbitrarily, my sister and I ended up with my father in the split. Neither one of them were particularly competent, but my dad had a steady income and a more stable mental history, so that’s the way these things go. For a long time, we lived in a little one bedroom apartment with a kitchenette, a lot of beer cans, and a bathroom that escapes my memory entirely. Isn’t it weird how something as everyday as a bathroom just leaves the mind? I guess I didn’t spend a lot of memorable time in there.


In a different bathroom, in a different house, there was one spot on the wall- just this one spot. There were two knots in the wood, and I always recognized them as eyes. Below that, there was another spot, and I considered it a nose. In that bathroom, for some reason, I can recall this pointless wooden fox. In the restroom I spent an unimaginable stretch of time in crammed together with my family? The restroom of the tiny apartment with the kitchenette and the beer cans? There’s a blank hole in my mind.
For some reason- and let me be completely honest, my memories of this are so fuzzy I might as well be making this up as I go along –my mother came back.


She brought along my baby sister, and suddenly there were five people crammed into a one bedroom apartment. We were all toxic to one another. Claire, the middle sister, was a manipulative brat with a crying streak so wide you could wash a window with it. My dad was an alcoholic with a temper. My mom suffered nervous breakdowns regularly. I pitched a fit when something didn’t go my way. Isa, the youngest sister? Well. I can’t say I remember.


And then, suddenly, there was a shift. No more were we a family of five, and though the apartment was bigger, it was emptier, too. Human memory is so fragile; I have only a little shame in saying I can’t remember exactly when Mom and Isa left, only that they did. My dad started dating a lovely woman named Pat, someone equally unsuited to him who stayed because of us- the children who needed someone competent to raise us. A lot of people in Claire and I’s life were like that. They stayed because we needed them, and the second we were old enough to make the big decisions, out the door they went. Even my father eventually left me, although it was in a more metaphorical sense than anything. Ultimately, I guess I made that decision to walk out the door when I was seventeen, even if we’d been having screaming matches and throwing forks and knives at each other. We’d driven a wedge between ourselves, and I was the one who brought my foot down on it and shattered the last link in our family.


There are too many apartments in my head, aren’t there? They all sort of blend together. One fight here, one close call with Child Services there, one loving memory of dancing with the entire family to shitty music in the living room there. Sometimes it seems like they’re all the same place, rather than five different box-like rented pigsties. All of them had me and my father, at least, right up until they didn’t.
Maybe the defining moment between my father and I—the night we accidentally changed everything –was the night we were arguing in yet another blank, timeless apartment. I called him a bastard, and immediately he shot back that I should look up the definition of bastard. “My parents are married,” he sneered at me. “Who’s the bastard now?” And for some Godforsaken reason that had me in tears in a second. I don’t know why. It’s not even strictly accurate- my parents were married when I was born. They just got a divorce. There was something about the way he said it, though, the utter contempt he’d just thrown at me. Understanding my gut reaction is actually hard for me now, but then it was a blow. It was a hideous, unfair attack on my livelihood. It could have been his assault on our assumed normalcy that did me in. I’d always thought that, yeah, okay. My family is splintered to hell and back, and sure my dad and I don’t really get along, per se, but we understand that the terrible family life thing is not to be touched in fights. Father dearest broke all the rules, as per the norm.


Right now, I stand as an eighteen year old girl. I’ve left my family behind. I moved out of my dad’s house a year before I came to college (unemployment sure is a bitch for people, isn’t it?) and my sister left years before that. There was a time when Claire confided in me that life just seemed pointless. “You work until you’re old, and then you die,” she said to me one maybe-dusky evening, and of course that’s a paraphrase. I don’t remember what she said exactly. I remember the star she’d cut into her wrist and the guitar she had upon her lap (or maybe resting at her side). I remember when she was little and scared and threatening to kill herself with a steak knife because she just couldn’t take our dad anymore; she’d been sitting in one of those green laundry tubs, then. Years and years later, she went to live with our mom in Wisconsin. I hear she got addicted to heroin, so I’m doing comparatively well, it seems.

 

Once, ages ago, before I ever thought I would deal with heartbreak or dysfunctional families, and I even went to church (me! At church! Can you imagine?), my dad used to tell me about what it was like when I was born. They’d thought I was going to be a boy, and they’d wanted to name me Henry. My dad told me, in vivid detail, what I was like directly after being born. Covered in viscous white and red goop, wrinkled like a weird little alien. He told me about his momentary panic when he realized I didn’t have a penis, as though something had gone wrong in the birth, but instead they announced I was female and he was so, so relieved. I sat through this story, paying my father every attention I could provide, my young eyes wide and no doubt my mouth open in a tiny ‘o.’

 

These are the moments of my life that I miss, and I miss them dearly. To be young is to let things be simple. To be young is to be your cruelest and kindest without restraint. To be young is to run barefoot in your grandparents’ grassy pasture of a backyard, treating every tree like a great spirit and plucking raspberries for quick consumption. To be young is to understand that, even though your father is a deadbeat and your sister is missing, they still love you. To be young, truly young, is to be free.

 

Those were the days.

 

 

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