Soliloquy

I didn’t know what death was when I was seven. I went to bed every night afraid of the moon. En la cama. I sat, unable to glance outside my own window. Shapes and shadows projected themselves across the wall by the closet, adjacent to the window. And on my feet. I misremember memories (does that sound right? I don’t remember memories? I forget things?) from my childhood because I’ve changed my room so many times. Stories and memories get jumbled by movement and change.

I think of my mother and her warmth. She cradled me to sleep those nights my stomach dropped from even seeing the moonlight in her hair. Her green eyes. I couldn’t look at them because, in the small, deep, black pit of her pupils was the thumbtack of the moon. A little fucking glowing orb. Orb orb orb orb. Night. Light. Star on the ceiling. The blue room.

My baby room was pink. Light pink. On the middle part of the walls was a decal of teddy bears and bows. My grandma, the one who disowned us, helped me scrape the wallpaper off when I was nine. She disowned us when my sister asked for money for college. And grandma’s own body–her own cruel mind–disowned her. Dementia. Alzheimer’s. She died alone. In the South. Her family in the East. I imagine she died in Aztec scarves and a cowboy hat. Old bitch helped me paint my room when I was nine. We chipped off the teddy bear decals and painted the pink room blue. The blue room.

In grandma’s house we solved puzzles. Of picnics and sunsets and old paintings. I think one was that painting of all those people sitting on the hill in Paris or England. Blocks of color fit so perfectly together to make that picture. But grandma disowned us.

And when I moved into the next room, after my sister left for college (which she paid for by herself), I moved into her big, purple room. Pretty soon I’d mark my territory in every bedroom in the house. Away from my blue room and all of its new colors and happiness. I moved into the purple room in high school. Even then I was still running away from the moon. Instead of my mom curling around me, shielding my body and eyes from the silver light, I had other people in my bed who curled around me, entered me, stripped me of my being. They’d comment on how beautiful I looked in the light. How clear and freckled my face was. And my back. Pounded or spooned, I clenched my eyes until there was just a deep midnight blue.

There were times, though, that I went to bed with the moon. I laid with her on top of the covers. Sometimes, I’d stand in the shower. And my body would rack with sobs. I’d get so woozy and my body would give out and I’d sit on the floor of the tub. Remnants of dried pubes and Dove soap and grime probably got in my asscrack as I sat there like a fool sobbing because I couldn’t handle the thought of the moon. And being in space.

But before those times when I sat in bed with the moon, reluctantly giving myself to her, I lay with my Grandfather. He wasn’t married to the old, demented bitch who gave birth to my father. He married the sweet woman whose face looks like a Hollywood tabloid and whose voice sounds like Bailey’s and sweet cream. Memories of Grandpa are tainted with the end. The early memories of Grandpa’s old house: the white house with two cats and the brick oven built in the wall and the dusty sewing room I’ll never see again. And and and and.

Where am I? In all of this? Am I in Grandpa’s sewing room? Or in grandma’s puzzle room? Or am I in my blue room? Or the purple room? Which, by the way, I painted yellow. Someone told me that they (they who? the Man? the prison-industrial complex? Slave owners?) painted prisons yellow to drive the inmates crazy. All I think of, when I think of madness, is brick.

So I think of Grandpa’s brick oven in the wall and eating shepherd’s pie. And spitting out the peas. Then hating ground beef. Then not eating during Christmas. Then eating my weight at New Year’s and vomiting. And vomiting. And vomiting.

A new year begins.

Grandma goes mad and all her walls are white. The house is gone. Both houses. The puzzles. The sewing supplies. The needles. The oven.

Everyone died before I was fourteen. Grandpa. Grandma. My uncle and my favorite cat on the same day. I tried to die. Twice. The only memory from both attempts was moonlight’s smug crater-faced expression staring down at me.

The first time was pills before bed.

If it ended then, I think I’d be more complete. I would’ve died thinking I’d experienced heartbreak. Never actually feeling it.

The second time, I, I.

The moon goes through its orbit. I try to reenter my body.

I come back to the field where I smoked weed for the first time.

My white blouse feels tight on my body.

Loose on my wrists and back, but suffocating. Innocent white.

The flowing of linen in a field.

Makeshift water bottle bongs and preteens choking on plastic smoke and diluted weed.

When I got home, I walked in through the other door. Mom was watching The Sound of Music.

“Have you seen this?” She asked. Seven times. That’s how many times I’ve seen Julie Andrews teach those ten, or forty, little Dutch kids to sing and play banjo in a field. Not the field I just smoked weed in for the first time. Not the staircase in the city where I smoked my first cigarette.

Von Trapp. I’m trapped. I’m trapped, Mom.

“Yes, I’ve seen it,” I respond to her.

All she sees on me is white linen and pink cheeks. All I see around her is the inevitability of death and the moonlight between her curls.

"Soliloquy" was published as a Creative Non-Fiction piece in the 2019 publication of Folio: Southern Connecticut State University's Undergraduate Art and Literary Magazine.