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Post by abeautifulmind on Jul 30, 2012 5:58:54 GMT
Dear folks on here and anywhere else, My memoir is approx 250 pages, paperback, and located on Createspace. www.createspace.com/3816340I haven't quite finished the publishing deal yet, so please purchase the hard copy if you can afford fifteen dollars. It would make the world of difference to me. I also think people may enjoy it for it's deepness and questioning of psychiatry, etc. Peace
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Post by abeautifulmind on Jul 30, 2012 6:05:27 GMT
Chapter One: When I was little I remember asking my mommy what God was like. She told me God was kind of like Santa Clause; I envisioned myself with a big jolly man staring into a snow-globe that overlooked the whole Earth.
I told God that my parents looked so happy and that I thought it would be a good life. He told me I could visit Earth for a while to learn about life, and that everything, even the snowflakes had a dark and a light side. He said that there was also a dark side and a light side to every human being on Earth. I flew down to my parents and that’s how I was born.
I would tie my shoelaces and think about God, and I would walk down the stairs and contemplate the universe. I walked alone in my own little world, as three blocks became five blocks and became fifteen million journeys in one instant. I would dream of visiting other places and the wind and trees would call to me. I never heard voices or angry beings, but God talked to me in the trees and the wind and the flowers. It was magic.
Come to my Universe, and let the colors and shapes move you as if you’re in a trance; the voices will guide you into other dimensions. Be wary of the demonic delusions that can give you anything you want, but also everything you fear. Your imagination, slowly poisoning you with questions and unsolved riddles. It makes plenty of sense, but it’s all a secret inside your broken mind.
This is the world God left behind—full of strange archaic paintings, of leaves rustling and birds fluttering through the air, and there you are—embracing life. People continue weaving around you in their happy ways, growing up with new versions of themselves. They gather up on crosses before the bright red horizon.
But still no one knows the real you; no one may ever know that strange girl in the corner, the shy one who didn't speak up loud enough for anyone to hear. But now that everyone says hi as you pass them on the street, you tell yourself, I’ll take these pills because insanity is not an option. Repeat that mantra to yourself as the skies turn grayer and your skin itches with anxiety and rage. What is it that you feel anymore but love for the world?
With your head down, not wanting to meet anyone's gaze, you walk on. Not that they were looking anyways. You continue with a sort of awkward strife. The sun seems to burn out in the midst of this entire struggle; it’s your struggle with the concept of being mad.
You're an alien on this planet, earth. You're a punished Goddess. A failing mortal who wonders, “Why do people die? What will there be leftover? What will be left of you when you leave...nothing?” Please stay here forever.” Most people pay you no mind as they continue on. She isn't there, they tell themselves.
Once upon a time, before the coffee and the cigarettes, before the magic of adventure and the pain of sorrow there was a place where we were all the same. We believed in something, but then we lost our way home. Everyone had to be somewhere beneath the surface. Everyone had to bare their knives and shred at our last hopes of a peace. We wouldn’t let ourselves be defenseless to love. We could not be defenseless; we needed to know the laws of our Universe.
Yet maybe memory never dies, nothing is lost and every joy, every transgression, and every hope that you ever encountered is all stored in the waves of the universe and stars.
It was a rough roller coaster ride through heaven, hell, and all those places where the sight cannot reach. This is an attempt at creating a story of the metamorphosis. This is how the crazy little girl recreated herself and defied all odds. The story begins in the present, as the writer begins to paint a vivid fairy tale of her child-life. She sits here upon her turquoise couch in the living-room. She is listening, watching as the dog scratches at her flees and then plops down onto the huge doggie bed, and she is listening.
She is listening to 'How I Feel' By Wax Tailor. Yes, it is ironic, as she is trying to pinpoint exactly how she feels. How do you feel? I feel like a star. Therapists are all about feelings. They love to get into the grit of emotional torment and its tragedy. Well, it's pretty comical. I should know how I feel, yet I just have trouble describing it.
I feel like a cloud whirling in a cotton candy brain, a star shining piercing light that hums. I imagine the reader asking. What is your story? What do you have to say to me? I reply that, “I just want to be heard and I want people to know my life exists somewhere in this wide open space of golden opportunities. “
I wish I could somehow scribble down these colors, make a picture book of my whole story and then never erase it, never let it dissolve. I wish I could just hold the pencil in my hand and scribble a whole universe onto these walls.
As we feel along the passages in the ever present ‘now’, I am still thinking about a place long before. Let me bring you into a time that is all too familiar to me. The time is when I was born because I can still remember. It was all nothing but a red sort of darkness.
I’d grown accustomed to being rocked me back and forth in a rocking chair, and then it just happened. My hands were tiny as I reached out to grab my father's finger. I remember him smiling at me, overcome with such a joy at seeing his first child born. I cried. I remember it so clearly, being a little ball curled in my father's arms and being carried through the rain up the stairs of a building.
I remember smells and colors. Then I remember the faces, and comments. "She has such gorgeous blue eyes!” I was nearly six months old when I began talking in full sentences. I talked a lot, I guess. I remember sitting at the table and pretending to be an adult. I remember it as if those memories never left me, really. I was so home and yet so far away from the rest of the world. I wanted to stay young forever.
My parents were both twenty-one when they got married. Mom was pregnant shortly there-after. When my mom had been ready to give birth to me, my dad had to rush her to the hospital. It was very icy and snowy that year. He had to break the door open just to get in the driver's side. All the way to the hospital he had to hold onto the door to keep it from flying open. I was born on January the thirteenth in nineteen eighty-nine.
I was a really talkative kid. We used to go lots of places after my family decided to move to Pittsburgh; for me there was always something to do. I remember my dad would take me on walks through the park.
When I was four years old I used to sit on the stairway of the castle apartment and admire the stained glass window with a slight crack in it. I felt a pity for the crack in the window, and yet it let the light stream into the stairwell like in a fantasy world. We had neighbors who yelled a lot. I didn't like them using the word "shut up" which wasn't allowed in the house. "shut up" was a bad word according to my parents.
Four was also the age when my younger brother was born. I remember the day clearly. I was at the apartment with my aunt as she was babysitting me. We got a call from my dad who told us to come there fast. I have an image of when we first reached the birthing place where mom was. My dad opened up the door and had a look of both surprise and urgency. He told us to hurry up and come in. Inside, everyone was beaming, and I named a cabbage patch kid after my brother.
When I was seven, I was an ambitious girl who wanted to be a singer and a dancer. I was always looking for an adventure. I often times acted like a tom-boy: watching power rangers and playing with toy cars. I also loved going on hikes in the woods and climbing hills. I made up names for places, and in the section of Pittsburgh we lived in had buildings that were over two-hundred years old.
There was even a castle-like building; I would go up onto the roof and over-look the world from above. I was always off in my own separate world. I had an over-active imagination and liked to write stories. I was the mother of two dollies, Samantha and Kelly. Kelly was a Christmas present. She was one of those new born dolls that could eat and wore a diaper. I took to her as if she were the real thing. I practically believed she was alive.
I never liked kindergarten that much. My teacher had poufy blond hair that stuck out on either side. She was always taking off points and scolding me for being late. There's not much I have to say about Kindergarten. In the first grade I took part in the school plays. I made some friends but always seemed to pick out the ones who were weird.
For some reason, this pitted me against everyone else. When I had started to become friends with the "Weird kids" everyone else just figured I was weird too. I went to a Catholic school and had a teacher who was a nun. She was stricter with me because I was a "slowpoke".
Sometimes I was so slow going down the stairs that all the other kids would rush by me calling me names. I remember when my dad first walked me to my school in the beginning of first grade. I would run down the long steep hill which led to our house until I got to the stop sign, swung around it three times to gain balance, and then took a left on 13th street towards my catholic school.
In school I had learned how to perfect printing out words and then in the second grade I learned cursive handwriting. In the first grade we did simple add and subtraction and in the second grade we learned multiplication. At some point I fell behind in my reading classes, though, and had to take a recess class. During the class I spent my time folding tissues and making them into purses.
Nearing the end of second grade was when things started to fall apart. My mom was sleeping hours on end. I would come into her room wanting to cheer her up and to do something like we once did. We used to do so many things; she was the one who taught me to imagine so much. We had big art projects, anything I could think of we created. My dad would always take me to museums and libraries.
He even brought me presents when he got home from work at U.S. Steel as a computer programmer. Back then he had to take a bus because we only had one car. My parents had married "young" as they say.
They didn't have a formal wedding in a church. My parents had a court wedding. I thought constantly. I was somewhat mature for being in the second grade, considering that I had thought I would be so mature just to realize I was still so young. I tried to explain my thoughts to my friends but they weren't that enthusiastic. I walked to school every morning from my house.
It wasn't a very long walk but I loved walking. I was excited that I was going to go to the third grade at Catholic School, but at the time my parents weren't getting along too well. They fought a lot about bills, spending money, and I always tried to stop them by putting myself in the middle of it.
Then they would get mad at me. This turned into a never-ending cycle for me, they got mad, I tried to get them to stop fighting, and then they would get mad at me. It was always that they were "having a discussion" and not an argument. But I used to love running around my neighborhood as it was like a separate world from the city.
Our house was two hundred years old, made mostly of stone. It was a nice house with a basement. I was a little afraid of the basement when we first moved in. I had made friends with many adults in the neighborhood as well.
I would always go over to Jody's house to play darts. I beat her at darts and she said I had a really good eye. I think my talent scared her, as she was the one who taught me. I don't know what caused my mom's depression. It might have been influenced by a number of factors, she had gained weight after the pregnancy and her feet always hurt from a muscle condition that runs on her side of the family. My parents were fighting all the time and her feet really hurt. But mom just wasn't the same. She wouldn't wake up even after I shook her repeatedly. She didn't want to play or talk or anything. I talked to God and I talked to trees.
I also had imaginary friends which I had named. I had a friend in the neighborhood and our parents didn't get along. His mother thought I was a bad influence on him and told my mother that she didn't want us playing together anymore after I had convinced him to run away with me when our parents came to get us. When he described some morbid things about her and she overheard, she thought I had somehow told him to say those things. Mom saw a doctor who prescribed her Phentermine which would help her weight alongside of Prozac for depression. I remember seeing the bottle of pills and thinking of it as wrong, that she shouldn't take them.
I saw them as the evil things that were ruining her life. Things started getting scary. Mom was very emotional and not making any sense. She would tell me stories about things that had happened to her in her childhood. She was venting all of these suppressed memories that I thought were real. She didn't know that they weren't. Jim, who she was supposed to marry, was banished from the family by her parents and she was meant to find Jim. He was her true love.
I also have a memory of a story, but my memory is confused about it. One day her father had made her a cherry pie to bring to school and she had forgotten to take it with her. In one instance I remember she said he got mad at her about it. And at another instance he had come all the way to school just to bring her the cherry pie. She had a special box were she had all her special items.
She told me that when she was little she had set out a whole selection of pictures down and then suddenly the pictures started flying around the room. "What did your mom say?" I asked
"Well she screamed...they didn't believe me...they didn't believe it was magic." Magic was everywhere, it was my childhood, and now it had become something else to me. Something evil, twisted, it was as if I had become lost to the child I had been.
My parents were fighting about everything and dad didn't know she was sick...he didn't know it was because of all the pills that she wasn't making any sense. I prayed for them not to get a divorce.
I was sitting in the living room as she stood in the doorway and suddenly announced "I'm going out." "Where are you going?" I asked. "I'm going to fight bad guys."
The funny thing is that I remember dad had been saying it was ok. That she was doing just that, going to fight bad guys. She ended up at a bus station and then was taken to some hospital and stayed there for what seemed like forever.
We moved into my grandma's house on my dad's side. I always asked about her, "When is mom coming back? Where is she?" Dad said that she was at a hospital because she wasn’t well. I didn’t know what was wrong with her. So I would ask and ask. He said she was away and that she was sick and needed to get better.
"Your mom is sick." He would tell me. “But she’ll be coming home. I just don’t know when.”
"But when will she come home?" I would ask. "When she’s ready," Dad would say reassuringly. Finally, in a few weeks we got to visit mom where she was in the hospital. I never knew why she was there or what happened until I turned seventeen.
She used to sing to us before bed.
My brother was her teddy-bear and I was her sunshine. She had written a letter to me and handed it to me when I visited along with an angel penny. She told me on the letter how much she loved me. At the end of the letter she quoted the song, "You are my sunshine, my only sunshine" she was bright and happy and there were wheelchairs. She was sitting in a yellow seat. She was beaming to see us. Then finally, we took her home.
“Don’t let them take my sunshine away.”
I don't know what happened when she was there, all I know is that she doesn’t talk about it anymore. When years later my dad told me that she had tried to commit suicide, I was in shock. She had told me something else, and he hadn’t told me the reason she had been hospitalized. He was trying to protect me.
I had thought she had just lost it because of the Prozac and Diet Pills. The doctor had over prescribed her on Prozac and that's what pushed her over the edge. My mom has said that as well, and then my dad said she was doing it herself.
Afterwards, after she had been taken to the hospital, my parents hardly saw each other. My mom got her own apartment in Pittsburgh and my dad moved back to stay at his mom's house. Mom and I would spend every Monday watching a certain TV-show and I made a good friend, Barbara, who lived below in the apartment. Her parents were divorced too, she told me, and she didn't like having to go back and forth. I had to go back and forth for a while.
I went to third grade at my Grandma’s and I got pushed around sometimes but mostly I was having trouble in school, one teacher dumped my desk because it was messy, and made me write things during recess. The classes seemed to be too hard for me.
I had no interest in cells or punctuation and grammar. I had more fun staying at my cousin's house. We became very close at that age and still are close friends now. We spent a lot of time exploring forests, parks, making up stories. I was still imaginative but also had gained some weight.
I began eating more and people called me fat. That Christmas of ‘97 we celebrated at mom's house. We had a small Christmas tree but it was a really special Christmas. The following summer I stayed with my mom and my brother and I had to go to a YMCA camp while mom worked full time at Goodwill helping with people who had disabilities.
That had been her passion, helping people.
One person she helped especially was called Joan, a woman who was blind and had trouble talking. She spent a lot of time taking care of her, talking to her, having her at our house. At the YMCA camp I was bullied a lot.
I was called every name you can think of and blamed as if my being white made me a racist. I was punished for repeating things that others said that I didn't know were racist. The majority of the people at the camp were black. There were five white people and the rest of the camp was made up of black kids. There was this one boy, who was aggressive with me, wouldn't let me sit at his table, always picked on me. I was afraid of him and dreaded going to camp.
The fourth grade was spent in Pittsburgh with my mom at another Catholic school, Immaculate Conception. I joined the choir and did ok in my studies. I still wasn't very good at making friends though. I made some friends, but a lot of the popular girls didn't like me. Near the middle of the fourth grade my dad came to my mom's apartment asking her to please get back together with him and he wanted us to be a family again. I had prayed a lot to God for them to get back together.
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