january 15 2024
It’s a bitter cold winter day and I’m home, in Toronto. I go to pilates and daydream on my walk to the studio. I daydream during class, trying to hold my arabesque steady. I daydream on the walk home, snow flurries whipping my braids all around my face. I’m having a hard time with all the endless grey weather and I don’t want to see anyone, really. I retreat into myself, I go swimming in the caves of my mind. I’ve always had a deeply inner world. I could spend hours inside my own head and never get bored.
I’m 15 again and I get into another fight with my mom. She slaps me. Something breaks inside of me and I slap her back. I remember her eyes - pure shock emulsifying into black anger. She comes at me again and the scuffle is over pretty quickly but when I run to the bathroom to hide, I look in the mirror and see that I have three giant scratch marks down my face - pink flesh poking through red tears. It looks like I’ve been attacked by some kind of animal. I cry in a way that sounds like a scream then I clean myself up and pull myself together. I leave the bathroom and go to the kitchen, where I know she is. She looks at me, sees the marks on my face and I catch this look in her eyes that I haven’t seen before. Regret. This is the first time she’s left visual evidence of her violence on my body. That’s usually my dad’s handiwork. She doesn’t say anything. I leave the kitchen. I feel defiant and bitter.
The next day at school, my friends ask me what happened to my face. I tell them a cat scratched me. I don’t know if they believe me but no one says anything. When I get home that evening my mother comes to my room and apologizes. She tells me she’s sorry. She tells me she won’t ever do that again. She tells me she’s praying to god for me to become a “normal, obedient child’ so that we won’t have to fight. She tells me a parent beats a child to save their soul, to make sure they follow a righteous path so they can get into heaven - this is what she knows. My fists are balled up so tight, I break skin. I avoid looking her in the eyes for the rest of my life. She leaves for work, a night shift. I can hear my baby sister crying in the other room.
It’s 15 years later as I write this and I’m laying on the floor in my apartment in Toronto. And I could go on. I left home at 18 but not without cuts and bruises, a body full of tragedy, a private school education, 300 dollars, and a hole in my heart the size of multiple drug addictions. But it’s complicated. Life is complicated and people are so so so fucking complicated. Of course, it would be easy to paint an ugly picture of my parents but that’s so yawn and passé. Like, who doesn’t have trauma? Like, who on earth hasn’t suffered? I’m an adult now and I mean it when I say that that’s not my intention. I mean it when I say that I have forgiven them. I mean it when I say that, in the end, I think they did their best and it doesn’t matter because I am so free now.
I just want to tell the truth about my life. Reader, I’m tired of hiding from the past. I want people to know what I’ve been through, what has made me.
I need to let the world know who the fuck I am.