The Miracle in July

And good things come to those who wait,
But drugs are quick, and cheap, and safe
Most days you rather waste away

[Broken Signals] by the [The Mugs]

It is late October, almost six years to the day since the last time I lived in the Kingdom of Denmark. I have been here three sky-drizzling days. I am not far from [Tivoli Gardens] or from the reminiscing Little Mermaid, the [Lille Havfrue], who forever stares into the waters of the Langelinie harbor revisiting her sacrifices for unrequited love. Maybe I'll go inside the garden this time. It wasn't  open when Daniel and I were here together stepping in unison on cobblestones, clinging and pressed close like shell-shocked survivors of circumstance.

During daylight hours I venture out on short errands to stock the refrigerator and liquor cabinet, to try to find a shower curtain, to acclimatize myself to the air, the time zone, and my choice to fly into the past. At night I wander my borrowed little house putting my things away in comforting places. My brain churns, calculates, audits, and the starlings do their song and dance.

I think about visiting the cake shop again to wait impatiently for a slice of autumn cake [efterårskageh] and hot chocolate. My mind wanders to the thought of stepping into the atmosphere of spices, tin-tiled walls and heavy-colored wood in the tiny tea shop once more. Or perhaps I could have a tiramisu coffee in the upstairs bookstore of a very old, gray-stoned building. I could sit in the same rain-streaked window I remember and look down into the faces below me. Maybe a face might glance up in return. I wonder what I would do, how my body might react, if the upturned face looks familiar.

I am tricked by the similarities between the gray-stoned buildings in Copenhagen, Denmark and the gray-stoned buildings in Portland, Oregon into feeling I belong here, that I am home again.

In the space-starved Scandinavian kitchen, as pleasingly modular and efficient as an Ikea showroom, the shoe box sits open and waiting to air my grievances. I know this process, my creative process. I know how to go about deciding the placement of a word before, a word after, and where should I put the comma? There's always a bit of panic at first. I approach my assignment hesitantly, like a feral kitten untrusting of the hand that set out food for me.

I am in my familiar struggle, at war with the art of writing, but this time it's different. This time I've rejected my story's blueprint as suspect and wayward, and I've left the safety of my home behind. Challenging the truth that shades the past requires an honesty with oneself only the sadisticly gifted are capable of. Although I am half regretting my decision to come here, and unbearably stuffed with curiosity for what lies in store for me, I am in my element.

I'll begin by declaring that the story doesn't start with Daniel's entrance into my life, but with mine. My love story starts, and ends, with me.

[My father] was a crafter of made-up words and silly songs, and usually sported a full swath of fur on the lower front half of his head. When I was a child I looked most like him, my face round and eyelids puffed, with a gap-toothed smile. My father was deathly ill as a child, submerged for weeks in ice baths to lower his dangerous temperature. This made his legs shorter than they should have been, with arms long and swinging like a gentle ape, and his chest carved with valleys of surgical wounds. He almost died again in a serious car accident at age 18, leaving a scar under his hair. He was my peace keeper, but not a coddler, and ridiculously forgiving. He had two main professions during his lifetime. He was a sign man, hand-painting huge letters on weather-sealed wood, often taking a [photo of me with the finished product]. And he was a numbers man, apt in calculating the fiscal realities of the general public. He was highly proficient in both left and right brain activities.

My father, who I called Pops, died the morning of Thanksgiving a few years ago, an event I anticipated but appalled and derailed me anyway.

[My mother] is mostly made up of North Holland genealogy, and she is who I most resemble as an adult. Now in her 60s, she still has her creamy porcelain skin, which is hardly lined, and an unfailing style of hopefulness. I didn't inherit her beautiful skin; instead I'm plagued by Pops' gift of jaw-line acne. My mother makes clothes and plays music: the flute, the piano, a bit of the reed instrument family. She most recently played percussion using pink drumsticks with yellow dots in her small community symphony. She would sometimes do silly things like gather my sister Ruthie and me into her bedroom closet with a moody flashlight, acting out the story of a kindly, left-behind extra terrestrial with a fondness for Reese's Pieces. She invented meals with names like [Mom Goofed But She Made Us Eat it Anyway] and read Women's Day magazine. My mother has an extremely high IQ, a love for teaching, and an edacious impulse to create. When I was young it appeared to me she had life, and everything else, by the balls. In actually, life has had hers in its grip for a very long time, squeezing her reason and her family inside out. There were times I was not quite sure what I had done to warrant the sudden rippling of screams directed at me.

When her bi-polar disorder was diagnosed, around the time Pops died, it was like one window had opened when another had closed.

I believe [my family] loved me ferociously, but their love was not enough to keep me from struggling in the stickiness of unhappiness. My earliest memories found me offended, wanting, slighted, always [hurting in some way that I couldn't articulate]. I could only feel it a thousand times concentrated. As a little girl I coped with the swelling confusion of childhood experiences, life's cognitive content, by feigning indifference to it. This appeared as good manners to grown ups, and sometimes as social shyness. When clueless adults complimented my parents on their obedient child, I harshly and secretly discounted approval from any of them about my good grades, my [funny little stories], or my thoughtful responses to sensitive issues.

I saw their failure to recognize how dark inside I was as complete proof I was utterly alone.

To further my undefined strife, my 5'10" tall body had "matured" by age 12, bringing unwanted attention. This made me uneasy. It wasn't just that the weight of inappropriate [lust] most often came from boys and men who certainly knew better than to let their eyes linger on the crotch of my bathing suit on the beach. I was also uneasy because I felt I was the only one who saw the burning behind it. My eyes are compelled to soak in every detail, and to search for questions to the answers I see. I could see that somehow males gave themselves permission to believe that I wanted to cuddle the junk between their legs.

This neglect in people to see the obvious left me disillusioned with being loved and wanted, and being wanted and loved felt like risk for abuse.

Just after my 13th birthday I gave away my virginity to a skinny 18 year old who regularly pussyfooted into my room at night by climbing the tree outside my window. It was [the loss of something dear] I suppose, but in my family I was late to the game. Ruthie had already been sneaking out at night to fuck boys in the darkly treed [Irving Park] by age 11. Ruthie's addictive personality and need to fill a hole inside her kept her gorged with unhealthy quantities of soul-soothing things. Attention and notoriety, the opposite of what I wanted, was what she craved. It was during this time that my parent's marriage rapidly deteriorated. A nasty, drawn-out divorce resulted, which spun me into chaos and a period of destructive self-loathing for choices I was forced to make.

Just after the start of my Freshman year in high school, my mother made me promise to keep a secret. In a few days, while Pops balanced the profit and loss sheet for a furniture store, she and I and my sister would pack up and travel nearly 400 miles to [Eastern Oregon]. I must decide what few items I would take and say goodbye to my friends, without letting on that I would be going away permanently. I kept her promise, against my better judgment, too panicked to deny her. I left my home, bringing with me a sense of guilt and torn loyalty, and leaving my Pops behind. Rebellion against my mother for moving us into her depression and a moldy trailer house on the side of the freeway soon followed. I made covert phone calls to let Pops know where we were, to tell him that she had hit me on the arm with a frying pan, to beg him to come rescue his girls. Finally he came to get us, meeting us in a small park in my hated new town, and he took us back home to Portland. We left all of our things behind us.

Pops called my mother a few hours into the trip back West to Portland to let her know we were with him. I was afraid of the fallout of this [vanishing point], a brutal opposite repeat of my mother's disappearing act, but my fear cannot compare to that of his. And when we arrived back in Portland, I still couldn't go home. We went into hiding from my mother, who shortly moved back to Portland. The court battles waged and for several weeks I stayed out of school and lived with friends from Pops' side of the family. When we were forcibly turned back over to my mother's custody, under the stipulation that we stay in Portland, we again stayed out of school and hidden, this time from Pops, with the help of my mother's church network.

I remember how my father always apologized for the ugliness of the situation, promising an eventual peace. He was bewildered at my mother's decision to leave him, and how she chose to do it. I continued to be furious at her cowardly escape and at myself for playing along. My mother, sinking into the vehement embrace of her then-undiagnosed mental imbalance, began to take every opportunity to express her disapproval at my traitorous campaign to come home. Finally I was asked by the courts to choose who I wanted to live with. I felt more protected in a life with Pops; that was my choice. It was Ruthie's choice as well, although I suspect for her the big win was not having to live in my mother's small farming town, where drugs were so much harder to score. My mother's reaction to my decision was to accuse me of wanting to take her place in my father's bed, calling me a "cunt."

My mother, her mental health in fine form these days, has no memory of this dagger-tipped exchange, and for that we are both thankful.

I was finally allowed to go back to school, which is where I met Becca. This darling girl, with a family who openly loved each other, spent a very long time learning who I was and patiently supporting me emotionally without my permission. I lost the first half of the school year in the child custody tug-of-war, and gained a distrust of anything that I hadn't already spent considerable time picking apart in my head and with my mouth.

Ruthie coped by running away, drinking and getting high. She became one of those smelly, aggressively sneering street kids who smoke clove cigarettes and beg for money all day in [Pioneer Square], singing their [hate street dialogue]. By age 13 she was candidly screwing old men at night for a place to stay and a hit of meth. Sometimes she would come home for a few days, then leave suddenly, taking whatever she wanted with her. Sometimes she would call and I would meet her in a hotel room where some child fucker would put her up for a few days. We'd make small talk while she washed her underwear in the sink. And sometimes after such a visit I would call the police to report her whereabouts.

She always knew when I'd make that call, because she could see the despair spilling through my transparent face.

My life has been like a race through war zones, a marathon of endurance complete with whizzing shrapnel upsets, the dead bodies of friend and foe littering my journey. The goal in life is not to cross the finish line, but to live for the breathless moments of reaching the island shores of neutral reprieve and cautious exuberance. Experience has taught me how to rig the system, to stay longer and longer in a state of comfy weariness. Achieving this requires an expensive cease-fire with the truths and consequences of the past. How dramatic that sounds! And true. Life is visceral and unrelenting, inundated with melodramatic unfairness and tearful happiness. It is unpredictable, and hard, but also boundlessly inspired and absurdly gorgeous, all at the same time. I see all of that. I see the comedy and tragedy of human nature, and it breaks my heart.

So early in life I became disenchanted with love and the meaning of family, with the hand of unwanted interference and forced life choices. It did not fit well with my inclination to silently observe the idiocy of human actions, my own and that of purported "adults". It countered my uncontrollable impulse to interject my opinion in my trademarked, icily dismissive way. I had to learn that the world was not out to thwart my happiness, and that it also did not owe me any favors. It has not been easy to learn the art of appreciating the compound interest of my intuition, of shedding my crown of thorns, and surviving the fallout from hard choices.

It took a violent, life-threatening event to shake me loose from the belief that I was a helpless victim.

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The Miracle in July is the work of author Michelle Anderson.