Fog

I went to an elementary school where one of those Open House Nights happened at the end of the school year where you show all the work you've done throughout the year and parents also kind of shop for next year's teachers. I was going from second to third grade and my mom and I walked into this one empty classroom at the tail end of the evening and the teacher ended up being the guy my mom would marry the following summer. He hid from her the fact that he was an alcoholic bi-polar addict with a lot of anger issues stemming from ultimately feeling abandoned by his biological parents as he was also adopted, plus a lot of other shit.

This motherfucker had juuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuust enough masks stored up on his nightstand to wear one a day until it was too late and they were married. He brought the clouds. In all of the ways. 

I went from living on a block in a town that was diverse, filled with sun, my childhood, and zero conditions, to the opposite of all those things when my mom got married. It was the eighties, I was the flower girl, it was before the days of including the soon-to-be step-children in the actual ceremonies with promise rings and bullshit kiddy vows. 

And I will trust my gut over everything forever because that day was fucking sad. My grandma was sad, I swear my mom was sad, and the sun was sad because she declined  the invitation.

I lived my life thinking that because I was never sexually molested or physically abused, that that meant I had a "good" childhood. When in fact an abuse did exist. It was abuse of my spirit, my magic, my light, my sun. And the entrance of my mom's husband into my life was a soul-crushing experience. Because how do you name the event where your little gold soul shrinks to quarter capacity as a child? Is it the first time you experience him losing patience, yelling, and throwing a plate in the sink after some coded arguing at the kitchen table? Is it the way he would make your already struggling in math brain make you calculate what the change would be before he would hand over the amount owed to the cashier? (I remember on one of these occasions even the guy behind the counter watching my obvious shame accompanied by beet red cheeks saying, "Come on, give her a break.") Is it watching him grab your mother's wrist while she's on the phone because he's uncomfortable with the conversation she's having? Is it being told, "Get out of the mirror Alex" because I was caught doing something like looking at my reflection in the living room. Bitch I am an only child I consider mirrors to be homies.

Or is the general dis-ease he brought into our lives. The facade which he could no longer maintain. The micro-aggressions, the tension. And my mother, who for whatever the reason, probably mostly pride, didn't cut us the fuck lose upon realizing she married a manageable monster.

I am done minimizing the ways in which I had to recover from the loss of my  childhood.

Sun

I was raised in the sun. From birth to 7 I lived at 1825 Eucalyptus Street in Seaside, California.

 
The sun was in me. 

I dream about this house more than any human or place. 

The deck that I pretended to paint with a bucket of water and a paintbrush. The sun won  every time I turned around to check my dark mahogany progress; faded now back to butter brown. Josephine would watch All My Children first and then Days of our Lives while napping on said porch in those licorice looking braided plastic lawn chairs. She'd watch with her ears only while I painted, or played, or daydreamed, or dressed up, or did any bright thing. Do I idealize this time because it's so far away? I don't think so. On bikes til the auntie street lights came on. Rainbow striped carpet with cats and dogs and love only.

I have been shown photo albums of this chapter of my life. I am always not just smiling, but beaming with wonderment. Big eyes, big cheeks, steady open pout. When I have moments, and there are many of these moments of deep-wave sadness, I think about those photo albums, and all that joy, against today's politics, war, genocide, colonialism, corruption, this fucking revolution which everyone I know feels on the brink of. 

But that's the thing about the sun, you can receive it whenever it shows up like the house in my dreams. And I'll always have that house. Years untouched and so compact that it's as if the day he came into our lives, the clouds came in.