Sour Heart

Whenever I’m home for a few days, I start to feel this despair at being back in the place where I had spent so many afternoons dreaming of getting away, so many late nights fantasizing about who I would be once I was allowed to be someone apart from my family, once I was free to commit mistakes on my own. How strange it is to return to a place where my childish notions of freedom are everywhere to be found—in my journals and my doodles and the corners of the room where I sat fuming for hours, counting down the days until I could leave this place and start my real life. But now that trying to become someone on my own is no longer something to dream about but just my ever-present reality, now that my former conviction that I had been burdened with the responsibility of taking care of this household has been revealed to be untrue, that all along, my responsibilities had been negligible, illusory even, that all along, our parents had been the ones watching over us—me and my brother—and now that I am on my own, the days of resenting my parents for loving me too much and my brother for needing me too intensely have been replaced with the days of feeling bewildered by the prospect of finding some other identity besides “daughter” or “sister.” It turns out that this, too, is terrifying, all of it is terrifying. Being someone is terrifying. I long to come home, but now, I will always come home to my family as a visitor, and that weighs on me, reverts me back into the teenager I was, but instead of insisting that I want everyone to leave me alone, what I want now is for someone to beg me to stay. Me again.

That’s life, it just is. Not everyone can have everything they want.

I was fully cognizant and participating in my own creation and suddenly it was clear to me why we don’t remember what it was like to be born—because it would give us too much insight into what it will be like to die. To be present for your own birth was suicide. To know the true wonder of suddenly existing was to know the true fear of suddenly ceasing to exist. They had to occur together and there was no prayer for what I knew in my flaky soul—that there was no way to escape the fear. It would always be there, amplifying joy and stealing from it. Still, it was tempting to sink into it, to roll around in its outer rings where occasionally the fear converted to a kind of happiness that turned an entire afternoon into an image that would stay forever, loom forever, return forever.

We made secret and not-so-secret promises to ourselves that this current life was temporary. No one lived this way forever. We told ourselves we were going to escape one day or another, although I never figured out if dying counted as escape.

“You always go against me.”

“It’s not that. It’s just if everything is easy we’ll never learn. It’s supposed to be hard. That’s how we know we’re learning.”

That was the secret to being me back then: if you never say a word, people will think you don’t know anything, and when people think you don’t know anything, they say everything in front of you and you end up containing everything. On the inside, I was vast. But on the outside, I was a known idiot.

I worried about how I was seen, who I was seen with, and what kind of abysmal creature other people thought I was—these fears disfigured me though the damage was invisible to my parents, whom I could never compete with as they were always a hundred times more worried, more fearful, more occupied than I could ever be.

I worried about a world where my existence barely mattered. A world where I did not exist at all. Maybe that was the world I was headed to. Maybe that was the world I deserved

All I had wanted for so long was to be part of a family that wasn’t mine. To have an excuse to love mine less, an excuse to run away instead of staying so close all the time.

“When adults are sad, they bury their feelings in drink.”