meatus.

Page after page, word after word, I try to progress.
Progress towards a character that in itself is a story,
And the story, an allegory.
Her name is on the back of
his page long biography.

we all have our preferred means of suicide.

I

Contrary to what you were told, she was a lot like you and I. Born to an audiologist father and a psychiatrist mother, in the upstate of New York. She grew up eating raisins, picking mushrooms and swimming in pools of bottled water. Known to have often smeared mud all over her face, she  sistered twin boys three years younger. She picked up the accordion when twelve, mastered Italian before her fifteenth birthday and graduated from high school, with flying colors that is, days after she turned seventeen.

It was the year 1995 and even though she was doing great her family was in shambles; the grownups especially. Every night, after dinner, haunted by their important lives, they’d sit in the dining table and argue about gender, music, art, Oedipus complex, nascent affairs and the like. And before going to bed, they would list the sacrifices they’d made for each other. Finally they’d fuck then fall asleep. Every morning they woke up pretending to feel better but they were only growing more bellicose. So she wasn’t surprised when they broke the news about the divorce. It swept the twins off of their feet, but she’d seen it coming the entire time. In fact, she’d actually wished for it. It has been often suggested that she came out unscathed after all the drama, but the birds report otherwise.

A few weeks later she decided to put her hair in dreadlocks, paint “the lady is a tramp” (how New York bourgeois of her) in a few old t-shirts and go on a hike. After hiking for a week she returned. Her anxieties were waiting for her at the back door of the house. On the other side of the door was the kitchen and it had two more doors- one led to the dining room and other to the living room. Her cousin slept in the study while looking for a new place to move in to.

Later, that summer, she went to a music festival in Spain where she tripped on acid, smoked hash and wrote poetry that made sense to no one. Her friends were busy writing social narratives about their high school but in reality they were merely talking smut to become the epicenter of attention for as long as they could. Neither that nor the music festival lasted long. She did befriend this one kid who I will write about in detail later. Ok I will elaborate a little but not a lot, she never thought he’d upset her or she’d lose him. But it happened anyway; things fell apart. Things fall apart.

Anyhow, weeks before she was to go to college, the older one of the twins had his heart broken for the first time. It was a bit more serious than that- he had a fall but not many know that he was pushed; he had horrible dreams and would often wake up sweating if not screaming. It got to a point where even the thought of sleeping got him really worked up. Consequently, he was neither sleeping nor eating and this caused scissor pain in his stomach.

What had happened was they’d all gotten drunk and the girl had accidentally slept with his twin who was high on a concoction of illegal paraphernalia. He had no clue of where he was or what he was doing, that is the best way to put it. Anyways, no one came out of the episode unscathed- the druggie twin hung himself from the ceiling by means of the tan Alligator leather belt he’d purchased at the vintage store. The other one refused to attend his funeral. Here, I’ll skip some details but I have to mention that he came out of it stronger while our protagonist was torn between the dead and the alive, the victim and the unforgiving, the guilty and the betrayed.

She’d done well on her APs and SATs making it possible for her to attend one of them Ivy league schools without paying a fortune. The girl was talented I’ll tell you that. She only packed two suitcases for college. She carefully folded and arranged all her clothes to make the most out of the space. It was when she was in the middle of folding a bath towel that it occurred to her- certain feelings were much heavier than love. College was five hours away from her mother’s house and nine from her father’s. She maintained her stability by keeping family at a distance. Everyone says she did the right thing. Maybe. Maybe not.