Dolor Comedenti

September 19, 1999.  It is 10:30 at night. I’m crouched on the bathroom floor, with my hand in the toilet, the lid sitting on the top of my wrist. This is how I attempt to hide my smoking in the house from my parents. My mother is asleep at the opposite end of the trailer. My sisters are slumbering in their room on the other side of the wall, behind the toilet. My dad is out, taking his friend home after a weekend of fishing in the Gulf. He’s been gone for several hours and I’m expecting his arrival home to happen soon. I’m hyper-aware of sounds; I hope to be able to finish my cigarette before his return. I’m getting close. I have to be careful not to hotbox the cigarette, so I can only smoke so fast.

I’m thinking about the school I attend and about how I could possibly get my parents to allow me to return to public school the following semester. The school I do attend is a private, Southern Baptist Academy and I hate being there. I’m not able to follow their very stringent rules–that are supposed to be followed outside of school, as well. The principal gives me an uncomfortable feeling, like I should never be alone with him. I don’t have any evidence to support this instinct, but it doesn’t make the feeling any less real (I later found out that he had, in fact, been molesting one of the other teenage girls that went to that school with me. It took me a long time to realize that my instincts were usually very spot on).

I’m running through possible manipulation tactics when I hear a car approaching my driveway. I sit very still, ready to jump up and run to my room. I wait a few seconds for the crunch of gravel in the driveway, accompanied by the sound of an engine. I drop the cigarette and quickly jump up, flushing the toilet at the same time. I fly out of the bathroom and straight to my room, literally jumping in my bed. I close my eyes, heart racing for fear of being caught, and pretend to sleep. The front gate on the porch creaks as my dad steps onto the porch. I listen to his footsteps cross the porch, which is situated along the side of the trailer, running half the length, which includes by my bedroom window. When he reaches the doorway, the screen door opens, and he knocks….wait, he knocks? He lives here. “He must be too tired to find the key on his keychain,” I think. I take a deep breath and get out of bed, trying my hardest to look like I’ve been woken up by his knock. I walk out of my room, clear the hallway, turn the corner into the living room and approached the front door. As I do, there was another knock and my annoyance with my dad’s impatience creeps in. I roll my eyes and open the door. Two policemen are standing there.

“Yes?” I ask.

I can see my neighbors standing at the other end of the porch, near the front gate. My confusion and fear are growing.

“Is your mom home?’

“Yes, she is asleep.”

“Do you have any siblings? Where are they?”

I gesture to the smoking bathroom end of the trailer and say “down there.”

“Will you please go wake your mother?”

“Why?”

“We’d rather discuss this with her, please go get her.”

Feeling scared and agitated by their lack of response, I go to the other end of the trailer, where my parents’ room is. I gently shake her shoulder and say “Mom, Mom, wake up. The police are here.” She jumps up, with the confusion of sleep, and runs to her door, then turns and asks me why they are in the house. I told her I don’t know, I didn’t ask them to come in.

I’m fairly certain that at this point, and until they told her what had happened, that she thought my father had been arrested. I didn’t know my father had a drug problem, so the only option to me was that he had gotten into an accident. What really happened never crossed my mind as an option–it never does until you know, I guess. As we were walking through the kitchen, my neighbors came in, too. My mother told me to go to my room. I did it, without question. I had no idea what was going on but I was terrified. My fight or flight doesn’t activate every time I get scared, often I am calm and reasonable. This was one of those times. The two sisters that were part of the neighbor’s family came with me, they were my childhood friends. As we were walking into my room, it almost clicked in my head what had happened–but denial was keeping it right outside my grasp. As I sat down, I noticed that my friends were crying. An accident still seemed reasonable. I didn’t want to ask how bad it was, I was becoming more afraid of the answer. Just as I was about to find the courage to ask, my mother’s shriek came from the living room.

“NO, THIS CANNOT BE REAL!”

I looked at my friends and they looked at me. We sat there looking at each other for what seemed like forever but was probably moments. One of them nodded.

I don’t remember how long we were crying. In fact, most of that night is a blur. It could have been several hours; it could have been one. There are a couple things I remember. I remember those girls stayed with me, my mom’s grief was too much for me to handle and they stayed. My strength in the face of tragedy came from that night; my feeling of always needing to be the strong one did, too. I do remember how the crying stopped–with comedy. I still do that, to this day. To stop my pain, I make jokes. It was unintentional that night and still is, in most cases. When I blow my nose, I sound very much like a foghorn. That’s what ended our tears that night and brought us to sharing humorous stories of my dad.

We ended up on the trampoline in the early morning hours, still talking about him. I looked over at the fence and realized that around the time he died, I h

ad been jumping on the trampoline and there’d been some new blossoms on the flowers growing on that fence. Those girls were there for me during the one of the most painful experiences of my life, and I barely talk to them today. That is also a common thread throughout my life from that point forward–distancing myself from someone that had seen too much of me.

The following day, we didn’t have to go to school. Unfortunately, I am too self-centered to remember how the news affected my younger sister. I do know that as the oldest, I had more time with him, and I frequently had been able to spend quality time with him. I remember all of those times fondly. We used to drive around Houston and he would show me his old stomping grounds and tell me stories about when he was a kid. He would let me work for him and he would take me fishing. He would cuddle on the couch with me and watch Ripley’s Believe It or Not! and The X-Files. He’s also the person that taught me that the way to deal with arguments and anger was to yell–which I later found out was not the best way to handle those situations. Listening to him and my mother fight was when I first experienced that heavy feeling of lack of power, the same one that I later felt when a man would break up with me or I would get caught doing something I ought not be doing.

Reflecting on that night, I’ve highlighted the things that I learned from remembering this. These things are a common thread in my relationships through the years-almost like a baseline of my behavior. I’m a thinker, I’m self-aware, I know what I’m doing and why I’m doing it. It’s only been in recent years that I’ve discovered that I don’t have to be that girl I was that night. This tragic experience doesn’t have to color every feeling and action I take. People will abandon me, either by death or by choice, but I don’t have to let it define how I will treat the people that will stay.