Our little hearts have turned to stone
I'd better be happy alone
[Happy Alone] by [Earlimart]
My enlightenment was set in motion on July 5, 1993 during a fracas in which I was left an amputee. Not a limb, only the tip of a digit. Left hand, middle finger. It was the day before my 23rd birthday. Without a doubt, having my finger ripped from my body was the best thing that ever happened to me. Personally.
At the time I thought I'd die in [recovery forever], or maybe that I had already died and just hadn't noticed.
I was six months pregnant and moving out of the home I shared with my baby's father and a couple of housemates. The pregnancy was premeditated, planned by us both. We lived in the ghetto that [Mississippi Avenue] used to be before its liberation by hipsters, back when gang bangers ruled the poor neighborhoods. He had found himself a new girlfriend, had caught her eye over the romantic thunder of rolling balls at the [Hollywood Bowl] in what I imagine must have been love at first strike. It was her Sweet Sixteen birthday party.
He kept her a secret from me at first, telling this beautiful little girl that I had been asked to leave but refused to go, that I had been hospitalized for mental illness, that he wasn't sure the baby was his. But when she wanted to sleep with him in our bed, instead of in his car or on her parent's couch, I was openly confronted with the truth and escorted out of my home. After three years of hanging by an emotional choke chain, jerked around by a man who enjoyed tricking and sleeping around on me, I once again left home and everything else. This time I left behind a part of my body.
I felt I probably deserved this treatment. Some unknown, unconscious behavior of mine must be pushing kindness and affection away. It must have been my strangely intense, coldly empathetic way of relating to the world. Maybe my heart beat too slow, or maybe I was simply difficult to love. I remember packing up, shoving random, unimportant items into a cardboard box, stabbing useless words into the air. And I remember my housemates hanging like [ghouls] on the walls of our pretend domestic normalcy, not daring to rattle their irons in my defense, or to point out to my former finance that he was throwing the mother of his child into homelessness so that he could play house with another child.
Today my only regret is not taking Pops' words to heart in time: the most important choice you'll make in life is who the parent of your children will be.
It happened almost casually. It was a typical door-slamming fight — with a catch. I squealed something savage on my way out and pulled the door hard for the loudest last word. The accurate aim of my sprayed words angered those inside the house and a knee raised a foot to hasten the conversation's end. There was a wet crunch. Then my shocked, infuriated screams filled the air.
It was my wake up call. Now, as I type these words with 9 fingers instead of 10, it feels like a divine intervention, an essential and horrific catalyst leading to the knowledge of how I must exist on this planet, bombarded and over-aroused, within the confines of dumb injustice.
I remember the first time I felt the sad weight of human [heretics] as a [1st grade] troublemaker in the school lunch room. I had made a big, rambunctious deal about the dessert on my tray, repeatedly identifying the gray, translucent frosting on the rectangle chocolate cake as Vaseline snot. And that's exactly what it looked like: chunky petroleum nose goop. My verbal tirade was hilarious, my classmates appreciative, and I had bravely allowed myself the rare pleasure of commandeering the center of attention, with an air of having always been there.
Before long I was chastised by an unamused teacher for my creativity and banished to the table where the clinically retarded students ate lunch. The table was in an adjunct room with tall, lush windows. It was much quieter than the echoing lunch room-slash-gymnasium-slash-auditorium. The teacher looked into my face and I could see that she read my expression to her order as dumbfounded. She wagged her sneering head toward the door. I took my tray with its snot-frosted cake and left the room, unapologetic.
As I chewed my cake in exile, which actually turned out to be tasty German chocolate, I processed what had just happened. This teacher believed that sitting with retarded students would be shameful to me. This was something to be reconciled, understood. Should I be embarrassed to sit here? I was not, but should I be? My brain measured the scene of my punishment. The windows were uncovered and flooding light into my skin. I recognized a couple of young, overly friendly faces seen regularly in the hallways. Everyone had impeccable table manners. There was a quiet, white hum. I felt calm. It was sweet, fleeting [solace].
I could also see the children I had just entertained with my gross narrative through the doorway, searching for my eyes, giggling pointedly behind their hands when they caught them.
A disturbing disconnect broke in me. There was a great compulsion to convict as ludicrous the motivations of that teacher who sent me to this sensory oasis, a place I quite enjoyed. I applied the same label to myself for acting like I didn't care what my classmates thought. I did care, and this disgusted me, but I didn't want to get punished again. I didn't want to face that expectation of personal disgrace — that I should be ashamed for preferring that lovely room, that quiet, sunny room with the polite, kind students. That day I realized that there were rules I had to follow, murky and preferential rules that dictated one's lot in life.
How was I supposed to trust in my skill at navigating life with its unfair, emotional rules, when those who seemed to be in charge either shrugged at the hypocrisy or embraced it and wore it as a smirk?
And then, years later, here I was with blood squirting from where my fingertip used to be. It looked like the end of a hot dog had exploded, a bone-white fuse still sticking out of it, waiting to be lit. A primordial outrage welled up in me as I stood outside the door of yet another house no longer mine, howling at the moon and staring in horror at my hand's new shape. Fresh red grief dripped down my arm. A tirade against the collection of characters who had superbly acted out their parts in the fiction I called my life came flooding out of me, and I raged against myself for casting them in the roles they played so well. At the very moment I lost a piece of myself a tender fragile ember sparked inside me. The anguish was unlike any I have ever experienced.
Over time the yellow-green pus that pooled in my wounds morphed into new skin, mending from the inside out, leaving a scant scent of my cauterized hopes that quickly hardening into marbled scars.
At first I went back to my old ways: blaming others for my panache at choosing the short stick in love and life, defiantly wearing my uniform of post-traumatic stress, blasting a frosty indifference at anyone who dared to get close. I screwed around, simultaneously disinterested and horny. I refused to be romanced. It smacked of falseness. No one made it past my scrutiny, and I was often irritated by the idiotic toying for my attention. It didn't seem worth it to spread my legs for a few hours of endorphin cocktails when all potential sex partners seemed, like me, to prefer lovers instead of love to compensate for cracked personalities.
I now wanted much more from a cock and a pretty pair of eyes, but I also knew I wasn't ready for that kind of responsibility.
I decided that dating and sex and boyfriends were too much for me to handle. I tried mood-altering prescriptions that only numbed the hurt, never extinguished it. I burned hotter for something still unknown and uncommunicated, as fragmented as my broken finger healing in a short, crooked, [Xanax] smile. I was newly altered, jolted awake to find that I was a single mother with the hand of a careless wood-shop hobbyist. I could barely take care of myself, and I was now responsible for a small, helpless life form — my son.
Something had to give, changes had to be made. Maybe if I was able to shake my sadness, if I could learn to recognize what was good for me or bad for me, I could gain some insight on how to be my raw-nerved self within the confines of love. Learn to have love for myself, and accept the love of another, for me.
For the next six years I turned away all romantic advances and took pains to inflate the faint life sounds of my heart.
That fragile ember set in motion that fateful day in July triggered the beginnings of self-love and grew slowly into a roaring fire pit. Bordering it were a small number of select loved ones who were my rocks: my dear childhood friend Becca, my beloved Pops, and a few devoted individuals who somehow trusted me. I learned to trust them in return. I untangled myself from anyone detrimental to my goals, sometimes simply shutting them out, sometimes flinging vicious final words to make sure they stayed away. I thinned the herd brutally.
Like an uncertain, sickly child learning to walk, I stumbled into accepting my hard-wired temperament. I've discovered it makes me sensitive to life's subtleties, more easily drowned in the fluids of a heart frantically ingesting the world around me. I began to see how much extraordinary energy and time it takes me to understand what I see, feel, hear, and taste. I began to understand that the quality of my life was only as good as the company I kept, and that it was time to swallow the hypocritical pill of human nature.
My finger, throbbing back to life, became a symbol of cause and effect; my penance for failing to love and accept myself, and for blindly trusting the wrong people.
One day, while sitting in my [neighborhood coffee shop] I realized that I was content. I was truly, unhesitatingly [alive with pleasure] for the future. The very next day I went looking for a someone worthy to love, someone who could understand and appreciate my unique perspectives on love and life. That search eventually brought me to here and now, to my little house in Copenhagen, where I sit vainly attempting to harmonize with the starlings in my yard and with my past. And it brought me to Daniel. Of all people.
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The Miracle in July is the work of author Michelle Anderson.
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