at the close
There are peonies in a vase filled with tepid water. The flower petals open like a last gasp—beautiful, deadly—and I am reaching into the vase and grabbing the rough stems with one hand, holding the flowers close, closer, to the pit of my stomach. I look like a flower girl, or a bride, or a mourner. The weather in Colorado is lovely; May brings a renewed greenery to the fields of hay, the grass amongst littered rocks, all the untamed land which rumbles across the landscape like a carpet, mid-unfurl. I am 22 years old, back in Colorado in the early days of the pandemic, after years of swearing I’d never return. I am here on my house’s front porch, sitting for a photograph with the backdrop of a lush Colorado behind me. In the frame, my long legs sprawl—mid-pose—as my hand curls tighter around the peonies. These flowers—their delicate, plush petals—are one of my last, lingering joys from childhood. I grew up picking peonies from a neighbor’s garden, their centers sighing a sweet perfume amongst the small and thick hedges. I hold them now with me as I enter the house, walking past decaying furniture and torn rugs, through the mustard kitchen and towards the dining room table where my family sits in semi-circle, waiting to sing me “Happy Birthday.” As they sing, my mother approaches with a vanilla cake, and I am smiling and laughing and heaving—close to breaking—spare the peonies which stitch my selves—girl and adult—together. My father lingers at the right-hand side of the table. He no longer lives in the house since I realized that he sexually abused me, repeatedly, from ages three to six. Even though my mother saw the abuse and recently confirmed my accusations, the family has prioritized keeping together over keeping me safe. My mom now gestures at the cake for me to blow out the candles, to extinguish the flame with my breath. I pull the last of my air into my mouth and let the too-late, empty scream sputter into a low, silent breath. This is the last family event I remember, all of us together, happiness embroidered and stamped by my silence, willingness to keep them together as I am slowly breaking apart. I feel the tectonic plates crumbling—it is over, all over—and so, before I realize, I am releasing the peonies and walking towards the deck, grabbing my pipe and inhaling the weed, shutting the door, taking the poison, swallowing it down, down, into the pit of my stomach, into silence; nothing. I return to my party fifteen minutes later. I eat my cake. I hug my dad. Someone places the peonies back in the water.
It’s the summer of 2020—hope for the end of COVID feels nearer, nearer than it will ever feel again. I am newly out of a residential treatment facility and seem stable, besides the weed, self-harm and rebounding anorexia. I am back in my pink bedroom. I have no desire to excavate the girl who grew up here, trembled between the white bedposts—so I put her things away. She had a pink and purple suitcase full of precious childhood objects: notes from family, a pink Birthday tiara, tiny trinkets, flowers, and stickers. The precious childhood gets tucked in the closet, under the boxes of individual dolls who sit, withering, behind a plastic screen. I make the bedroom as inviting as I can. I take down the gaudy green curtains, move the desk closer to the window, strip the comforter down to its white base. Our family home is dark and falling apart—a hole over the stairs where the water leaked, couch legs sagging with the weight of time. Even the animals—cats and dogs—walk with their heads hung low, stepping amongst the clutter of myself, my mom, and my two brothers. My father no longer lives in the house due to my parents’ decision “to separate,” which is a relief for all involved but also leaves a residue of shame that is difficult to remove from our many surfaces. While we accept the shame, my mom draws the line on smoking indoors. Thus, as the summer turn warmer, I spend most of my days on the porch, smoking weed and watching everything—the sun, the moon, my future—fade.
The back porch is the true entrance of the house, but it faces the right side of the property and thus collects empty flowerpots and moldy dog beds. As a girl, I’d spend summers out here reading in plastic lawn-chairs—in fact, I once read the entire Lord of the Rings series in one warm summer, my dog Bijoux resting her gentle head against my leg. Although Bijoux is dead, this place still feels like the peonies, a portal to another place, another version of myself. The porch faces the mountains, and I watch the sunset reflect against the stoic, bare peaks, trying again and again to assign shapes to this landscape, as my fingers fiddle with my lighter. I don’t remember how I first started smoking out here, but now most evenings (and afternoons and sometimes mornings) involve slinking down here and inhaling marijuana from my glass pipe. This routine is a fragile, precious thing, even in the depths of my addiction, I can feel a version of myself through a tunnel in the very far recesses of my mind. It is a version of me, not yet real, of writing this story and not feeling ashamed. It is a version of myself that is okay, that is far away, that moves on and stops smoking and even—maybe—finds a sense of peace. So much of her remains elusive that I cannot conjure one single image into my mind. But I feel this person close to me anyways, as I sit alone, wrapped around myself on the floor of the wooden structure—watching videos, listening to music, laughing, taking photos, studying my face in the warped reflection of my green pipe. I can’t say it’s not all my fault, but one day—soon—I will.
Not long after that birthday party, I decide to shave my head, breaking free from more associations. I take the cool, metal clippers, reserved only for my brothers, towards my dark tendrils. I run the clippers over my skull, back to front, front to back, hair parting and falling in clumps. My bare head feels smooth, refined, as I gaze at myself in what was once my parents’ shared bathroom. After the hair is gone, I bleach my head, sharing a photo with the caption “I am BLONDED.” Over the summer, as my head turns from blonde to rust and then back to black, I am mostly away and out of my house, driving aimlessly on dirt roads, suspended between a red, barren landscape. I get on dating apps, which take me towards cliffsides and into river gorges, hiking across jagged mountainsides and in coffee shops, crying soft tears when yet another man tells me he cannot save me, cannot fix me. The summer is split between productivity and destruction—I work on a campaign promoting voting rights on the Western slope; I sleep in parking lots when I am so high that I can no longer drive safely. I am walking through hotels to meet men for one-night stands; I am on Zoom, in AA-style meetings, begging them to take this pain away. Confess, they say; grovel, they demand! I grovel, I confess, and then I get back in my car and under another man, sprained and disfigured like a bug, belly-up.
In one of my bursts of positivity, I make a friend (desperately needed) in the barista from my local coffee shop. We sit in the park near her work. She sings and strums her guitar, fingers plucking out the chords. There is so much pain, in the spaces between my ribs, deep in my chest, but she and I talk about it, discussing the sexual abuse and violence we have both endured. She was raped as a child by a family friend—and somehow, I think, telling our stories to one another makes us feel less tainted, less alone. I see her in my memory: silky dark hair covering half her face, a baritone voice filling the space between us and the Aspen trees, the ducks in the pond, the passing shadows. This park becomes my space, beyond the landscape of the everyday, the bleak associations of growing up and returning, caught in a pandemic and a family mid-fracture. I come to sit in this park alone—as my hair grows, I take photos of myself near the picnic benches and duck pond, feeling like I have a space somewhere even if that space is not my home. I am desperately trying to find the beauty—in my widening face, in the landscape, in this situation. The photos show the proof of it years later—of the beauty being here, within me, even if I could not see it then.
Throughout the summer, my family reacts to these developments—my frequent comings and goings, my hours spent on the front porch—without much fanfare, dismissing these episodes or being altogether consumed by larger, bigger problems. For example, my brothers continually ask: “Why can’t Dad visit for Christmas?” And then, too: “Why can’t be go back to before?” My mom decides we must address these difficulties through family therapy. I have things to do—mountainsides, men, smoking—so I am really quite too busy, overbooked even, though somehow, I am dragged back in once more. My older brother comes back into town for the first session. When we arrive at the therapy center in a nearby town, it’s a run-down building near the outskirts of the main street, next to the animal feed store and a single bank. Our therapist, a man with long hair and a gentle-enough disposition, leads us to a dingy basement. It appears the space we seek—perhaps the resolution we seek—requires climbing downstairs, then through a corridor, and then, eventually, turning right. There we find a room—moldy, plain—with old carpet and old walls and old wooden chairs. I learn later that there is a door that allows you to walk right in through the parking lot, but I suspect the therapist believes in the theatrics, the dark descent into our pain. Family therapy, I learn quickly, is not meant to be comfortable—this is a space unlike any other familial space, in that there are no associations—no art, no comfort—besides that which we bring in our memories, if we bring any at all.
The therapist takes his seat at the center, gesturing for the five of us to arrange ourselves around the room. The room contains eight chairs, with one placed in the center. The chair in the center, we learn, is where the therapist sits, like a many-toed gargoyle—it is purposefully unnatural. The door to the parking lot shines light across my shoulders, illuminating my three brothers—their curly hair, same crooked noses—and their anger, like pagans before an altar. There is precision in the therapists’ movements, in the way he opens the session, as if he practiced this monologue in the mirror. He discusses how we’re here to heal, here to listen, here to come together as a family. We all take turns discussing how we are affected by the revelation about my father, based on my accusations and my mother’s memory of him being “sexually inappropriate” with me when I was three. No one calls it abuse—except me—and no one is very much interested in considering why. My youngest brother balls his fists, angrily describing how everyone continues to overlook him. The other younger brother exhales a stream of insults about how I take up too much space—always favored, always valued—while everyone else dissolves in the distance. I wrap my fingertips around the edges of the plastic chair, thinking of ways I can hurt myself when I get home.
Back on the porch, I smoke from my pipe and listen to the echo of frogs chirping in a melodic chant. They alternate notes, as if they are translating some great, divine code, or perhaps just reminding one another that they are not alone. The summer is getting cooler, and on this nightfall, I am wrapped in a blanket, warmed by the small fire between my lips. My brothers have not cooled down since family therapy. One of them texts me: “I don’t think trying to convince me to believe my father is a rapist is being vulnerable.” The dark evening hangs around me like a curtain—the sky, especially here in rural Colorado, is alight with pinpricks of bright, white light, stars that are unaware and altogether unmoved by the scene below them. A frog hops into my view—staring at me with impassive, cool eyes—small enough to cup in one hand. I wish this frog was a messenger—that between the starlight and waning moon, someone has sent this small, bumpy creature to me to show another path, another life. He stays rooted. He is silent. “Speak,” I beg the small frog. He looks at me with his tiny green-saucer eyes—observes my finger coming down towards his skin—and allows me to touch his cool body one time. I think, in passing, that he must want something from me, but he hops away as quickly as he came. Around me, coyotes, rabbits, cats, dogs, sheep, chickens, frogs, and insects all swim in the soup of existence. I imagine myself floating on my porch as if cast down a river, bobbing slowly towards a place of rest.
Family therapy sputters out as quickly as it began. I bow out, citing my worsening mental health but also feeling the whole thing to be wildly unproductive and stupid. I no longer make the trek into the basement to participate in sessions, so my father is now a participant. The family sits, in unison, on the mismatched chairs in the dingy basement. The therapist gives my father the floor. He explains, calmly, that he remembers this incident for which he has been accused. This is news to my mother, who begins to fume, recalling that he denied these accusations by claiming he had no memory just a few months prior. He admits, and then, with a subtle twist of his speech, begins to build the narrative. It was a mistake—better yet, a misunderstanding. My brothers take him at his word. They accept his apology. Several years from now, a family friend will also accuse my father of sexual abuse, at which point all of my brothers will spiral and clutch their hands at the sky, wondering why they didn’t see this coming. But, for now, boyhood protects fragile manhood, and the opportunity to break the cycle seals closed. The apology tour wraps, and everyone marks this episode in their mind as final and resolved. Family therapy ends, for good this time. My family members each shake hands with the therapist and leave the basement.
As the summer turns cooler and fall begins to approach, I brace myself for a final semester of college, which will occur online, in the confines of my pink bedroom. I strangely seem to enjoy the routine, cutting back my smoking to an evening-only activity. I take a writing class with a kind professor and kind classmates—I learn to read, sitting still in my green chair, practicing the flow of breath in and out of my body. No one in my class knows I am sitting in the house, in the bed, where I was sexually abused. And yet, they listen, making space for me to describe the violence even if I can’t name it yet, or claim it as something that belongs to me. I adopt one of my family’s cats—she was bullied constantly as I grew up, including by my dad who used to kick her and force her outside. Now, this cat, Ralph, lives with me in my room, learning to accept care, her soft black fur growing, over the months, stronger and firmer in my hands. In a few years, Ralph will blossom—her personality will be so remarkable, so lovable, that everyone who meets her now would never recognize her then. She sits on my lap during zoom classes, green eyes gazing out into the corner of the screen. She sits with me as I write like she knows, and she wraps herself around my arm, pushing the words out and onto the page. When I graduate, I sob big and ugly tears of relief. When a friend of the barista offers to take my graduate pictures, to mark the momentousness of this occasion, I shyly oblige.
There is a tassel with my college and graduation year draped over my shoulders. It’s January of 2021, and I have graduated into a world rife with anxiety and fear, mid-pandemic and a job market marked by uncertainty. I am standing in a snowy landscape—the wild Colorado brush, out here in the desert, resists the fall of snow. The green shrubbery protrudes proudly. My legs are in tights and my hair has grown back, a muted black, down to my ears. The photographer takes a series of photos of me, instructing me to walk back and forth—like the realm of childhood and adulthood is one you can freely walk between, one side to the other. Snow is beginning to fall—the pictures reflect the white flurries, which gather like a crown upon the top of my head. The photographer directs me closer to a particular tree—its barren, thin branches pointing in multiple directions as small orange blossoms drip off from the outermost points. We take a few photos this way: the branch obscuring my face, my face filling out the space around it. I don’t look how I thought I’d look, and I don’t feel how I thought I would—I didn’t plan to graduate into this world or to be forced to overcome the struggles I have been dealt. The creative writing I did in my bedroom will lead me out and to an MFA program, towards pursuing a life I believe is worth living. And the cat, Ralph—she’ll move with me across the United States in just a few months. I don’t know all that yet, or maybe I do. The photographer directs me. “Close your eyes,” she suggests. I let my eyelids fall, feeling the sensation of snow on the bridge of my nose, across my shoulder- blades and on the back of my neck. “Breathe,” she offers, “eyes closed.” These photos mark an ending, but they also signal a beginning. My favorite is the last photo she takes. I can feel her, pointing the camera towards me. In the frame, I know I will stand strong, knowingly and unafraid, my eyes speaking a language of assurance, of self-determination. I can’t say it’s not all my fault, but one day—soon—I will. “Okay,” she directs me, “open.”