Do you understand, that ’family’ is laden with hidden dark and burnt offering meanings to me? That I don’t know, and never knew my family, because all I remember is pain? I can’t accept your love so easily because I’m always always always waiting for the other shoe to drop. And when I start to relax, to get comfortable and reach a little better place, better understanding better, bet her to start speaking up nitpicking and prodding and painting and rebuilding rehabbing...
And it’s not for you to do. I am. I am a self rehab project and I am not the future you.
I am the present me.
I am a boy from the ghetto. I am a man. I am learning to stand on the earth on my own two feet. I am a man with a mouth like a sailor. I am a man who swears, before God, I do solemnly swear to tell the truth, the whole truth the half truth, and anything but the truth.
I am cracked and flawed.
I don’t tell you everything because you say you’re family, and I’m your family. And that I am your grand son. I am not grand, and I am not the rising son. I don’t tell you, because you say that treacherous word Family. And to say (those hushed and invisible words) out loud what is wrong, means cutting open scars, and bleeding out, and leaving myself up on the table, and open to injury. Weakness. Open to weakness and critique and who the fuck cares if it’s the truth, or not because it burns and leaves me cauterized and numb. And it makes the worst things seem attractive.
What I hated most about prison was always being watched. Never alone, never disappear, never invisible. Never, never seen. Always, to be seen was to be broken battered bruised.
I cut them out of my life because there was always pain present. Because it was a cancer eating through me, and to remove it was the only way arrest the process. I don’t know. If you know. That my father called me boy. Not by my name. Boy. You. Boy. You boy. He would say, "Come here boy," when I fucked up.
And his hazy drunken red gaze always watching. No matter, the state of his stupor, his lazy torpid gaze searing into my skin. Watching, waiting. Keeping an eye on things while my mother was at work. Long nights, late into evenings and when she was asleep, while my father kept an eye on me.
And I remember when her dubious protection shattered. I remember that splintered moment, lifting my head and my chin and pulling back. Digging my fingers into the thick gritty clay of my pain and eating it, swallowing it down, feeling it sticky coating my teeth. Licking my lips and swallowing clotted faintly salty earth-taste. I remember it aching, and washing the taste from my mouth with rich golden nectar that burned away and seared the fragile endings of nerves. And it stilled my aching jaw, and banished the thick clay lining of my stomach.
I remember pouring liquid into me, until I felt my guts rust, and coughed up red oxidation, and I remember a taste in my mouth like pennies.
And I think it causes me too much pain, to have you be involved. For you to hold my head and force me to look.
I am not the future you. I am the present me, who is made up of many past mes, each one a shadow, laid one over the other to make something like a solid.
There was a woman who called me her grandson. She was very motherly and in all fairness, easily old enough to actually be my grandmother. And I really hated when she called me that and it made me very uncomfortable. I still tend to get long best with women that aren't particularly "motherly." Mothers freak me out.