Dear Z, From A: Teddy Bears and Surgery

Dear Z,

I lived next door to a white building, which had no name and till this day remains untitled. I knew two things: it had water reserves—and a loud, obnoxious siren.

Every time there was an emergency, the siren went off. Cat stuck in the tree? You heard it. It was an annoying constant in my life growing up.

Let me tell you about the first time it went off. I had a fit, the kind that causes you to crumble and turns you into a ball. My reaction surprised everyone seeing as I couldn’t hear.

Anything loud made it seem like the wax in my ears was curdling. I often wore ear muffs to theaters to buffer the volume of the noise. Vibrations were bullets to the brain.

It’s easier to say I was deaf because saying “ear problems” was an understatement. People treat you like a survivor. That’s not accurate though. I wasn’t near the brink of death. I didn’t fight anything off. I just managed chronic pain while resenting the fact that I couldn’t hear like everyone else.

The severity of my situation didn’t hit me until blood came out of my ears one night. This event traumatized my parents more than it did me.

When I woke up with puss stains on my pillow, I destroyed my Mighty Morphin Power Rangers pillow sheets in the process. The yellow ranger’s suit looked like it was being invaded by a malignant tumor. Tears wetted my face. I threw out my sheets and later sobbed about it, the sheets, not my ears.

Subduing the ear pains became ceremonial. My head laid horizontal for fifteen to twenty minutes a day to receive cold, syrupy drops of medicine.  I kneeled next to a pot of boiling water and hung my head over the steam as if to purge the toxicity from my body. Before stepping into any body of water, I inserted ear plugs—just in case the water was polluted. I even wore them when taking showers. I lived in this bubble for three years.

The hospital was an extended relative’s house I would visit every other weekend. I’m sure I had some good visits, but I don’t remember. Doctors seem to only mention anything  to you if it’s bad news. After a Pap, my gynecologist will only call, “if [they] find something abnormal.” No news is good news, but when you’re five years old, everything is news.

Then I had to have surgery. They were going to cut me open. I remember thinking I was going to wake up with a knife sticking out of my head. I asked my brother if this could happen. He told me it would. I could always count on my brother being stolid. This image of a knife lobbed in my head inspired a series of horrific, slasher type stories that are locked away, but trust me, you’ll never find them.

The nurse injected me with transparent liquids. I don’t have a clear image of her today, except for her teddy bear scrubs. This is also when I learned about the existence of drugs.

So I started to sing as they rolled me away in my bed. I guess there was a waiting line because we parked next to a wall of glass and were on standby until the room was available. There was no urgency.

I continued to sing about being a princess [I remembered the nurse nodding her head . . . along with all the teddy bears heads too.] I can’t remember any of the lyrics, but I know it was my rendition of “I’m a Little Teapot.” I’m sure it sounded more beautiful in my head than what it ended up sounding like: drunken karaoke.

When the room was made available, my dad said goodbye to me, and they hauled me into the room that looked like an observatory. I upgraded from ordinary princess to a moon princess. That’s what the nurses started to call me. Moon Princess.

They said I had to catch a flight. The doctor didn’t say much as he reviewed whatever was on the tray. I caught sight of the scalpel and disappointingly turned my head the other way. I thought it would be bigger.

After another shot of drugs, I was in the clouds. I swung my arms up to catch the baby ones to carry with me to the moon. I had to bring a souvenir for moon people naturally.

A nurse held a mask close to my mouth. She added that there was a masquerade ball.

I pleasantly grinned at her and proceeded to sing to her (I’m told I serenaded her, but I don’t trust the source.)

We started to count down from a hundred, and when my eyes fluttered and eventually closed, orange light eclipsed two small white orbs. I was kept in the dark for several hours, but it only felt like seconds of black and hours of something else. I try not to think about what it might have been.

When I inevitably woke up, my face was covered in a film of oil, my breath stale and chalky. I thought I was experiencing vertigo.

The noise hit me like a bomb.

I could hear the nurses outside of my door whispering, bouncing wheels and metal, the elevator button, phones ringing, and the sounds of the sirens from the ambulances. It didn’t hurt, but I suddenly felt like a nugget that was lost.

Sincerely,

A

P.S. – When I told you about my ear problems, you said how it was all coming together now. It was disparate from everyone’s responses. The only problem was I didn’t understand what was coming together. I accused you of being religious. You laughed at me and said something like you have to go through the bad to get to the good. You said it better. I’d tell you that you were right.

[Thanks everyone for reading/humoring this. Book Reviews return March 2.]

Dear Z: Skin, Skin

Dear Z,

I had fisheye lens as a kid. Anything in front of me, directly in the center, I could see with no problems. Anything outside this field was skewed. Whenever anyone walked into my bad spots, I’d have a hard time seeing them, stretched out thin like plastic wrap. Then there were times when I just slightly turned my head, and they would fall into my bad spots. I couldn’t tell you when one happened versus the other.

I said yes to a lot of people without knowing what exactly I had agreed to. Much to my embarrassment, I said yes, when I so desperately wanted to say, “No, JUST no.”

My dad ingrained a few phrases in me when I was a kid, all precluded with the word “no”.

No, you don’t need candy. No, you can’t sleep over there. You already know my answer. I thought the last one was clever.

My friends’ perception of him was a no-fun parent.

My dad admonished my brother and I nearly every Friday night. My dad’s partners were Bacardi and Coke. Dad never had the bottled next to him when he drank. It’s a weird thing to remember, but then maybe it’s not. Mom had hers secured in her hand like it was another appendage.

My brother and I could not avoid the stories that concluded with the phrase “on the other side of the coin,” a coin, no less, that had more sides to it than a polygon. There were so many conclusions and after thoughts. It would be pretty if two sides only existed in those stories and fables.

My dad’s stories rang with lessons. Having fun was considered dangerous, that the opportunities to have fun lead to something worse. My dad used my mom as an example. I didn’t know what he meant. My family’s definition of having fun was an enigma to me. I seriously started to question the idea of fun, and if it was possible to have fun without going “overboard,” as my dad phrased it.

I got a late start on sleepovers, which I started to do roughly in the 3^rd or 4^th grade.  Jordan, whose dad owned a house in the country, was a hotspot. We would ride horses and four-wheelers, swim in her pool, and cook up some curly fries with ice cream on the side.

We made camp on her roof under a canvas of stars, which seemed like the perfect stage to unload secrets or other existential thoughts. When this happened, I felt like someone was unfolding a part of me, disrupting the design schematic of a paper airplane. I was being remade into what I actually was, skin. I tried like hell to fight it.

To me, I didn’t have time to be a person (who does?), not 100% of the time anyway. I had to function. Everything I had read about being human resulted in hospitalization or death. Like I said, I didn’t have time for either of those.

But I also liked being unfolded,  but I thought I couldn’t be a semi-folded/unfolded person. Under the stars though, I was okay being a crinkled piece of paper, even if it was only for a couple of hours.

Then the fun my dad spoke of had finally arrived by middle school. I saw fun in Audra’s boobs, Jordan’s cleavage, in women’s exposed midriffs, spaghetti straps, designer panties, lipstick, and painted nails. Skin was everywhere, and I missed the boat. The transition was painful.

My body was not a Body. It felt like only my head fit right. My ass was the center of discussion; it was a pimple I wanted to pop. I had no boobs to speak of, and it was the first time I was not happy about receiving the letter A. When I was home, I crawled under the covers. I wanted to crawl out of my skin.

Jordan’s cure for this was changing the way I looked, or at least, how I presented myself. I jumped on board, and we banded together to fix the problem.

“It’s a cute shirt! It looks good on you,” she said to me, which didn’t allay any of my doubts. In case you’re wondering, this shirt was a sleeveless, blue and dark tie-dye shirt, which buoyed around my belly. I’d be mortified to wear it today.

I packed the shirt into my backpack, set it next to my bed, and lied awake staring at the ceiling. The shirt sounded like a beating heart. When morning came, I vomited at least twice.

I kept the shirt in my bag and threw a jacket over me. The placebo effect kicked in right away, and I started to feel less worried about the day. I showed up to school, not wearing my life-altering shirt. Jordan frowned and bullied me into the girl’s bathroom.

“Put it on,” she said, her eyes pointed.

I wanted to say “no,” but the word always seemed to be paired with purpose and reason. My only reason? I just didn’t want to wear it. It also felt like I hadn’t practiced saying the word enough. My skin burned like my bones were forming an allergic reaction to my skin.

Skin, skin, skin, skin, skin!!!

I would have traded bodies with anyone that day.

“Come on, hurry up,” she urged. The stalls looked darker to me like the insides of a mouth. No one crawled into a mouth willingly, I thought.

I told her I had changed my mind, which elicited an eye roll from her dolled-up face. That look robbed me.

I stepped into the stalls and changed into the shirt. I wore my jacket over it most of the day, and Jordan would chronically tell me to take it off. I shook my head, and she would eventually give up. It was a start.

Sincerely,

A

Dear Z: Dog’s Cage

Dear Z,

For whatever reason, I am nostalgic. The problem is I’m too young to be nostalgic. Nostalgia seems only to be reserved for either the old or the dying. I haven’t lived long enough to be rewarded with it and knowing my mortality hasn’t affected me like it should. I feel like I’m trespassing into an abandoned house exclusively for ghosts and critters.

It’s strange saying you have two houses in your home town. That feels kind of like the thing you should have one of and having more than one does not make me feel extra special but more compartmentalized. I’ve grown into the habit of identifying the first as my childhood home, isolated on the hill, the center piece in a snow globe. It’s far enough away from the two gas stations (in case you miss the first one two blocks away) that it doesn’t impede on the expansive of our yard where I would spend my time racing through its openness, my arms like nets trying to catch butterflies. Then my dad ambitiously built a play area. I’d later call it “the monster” after falling off of it twice, suffering two sprained ankles, a bruised ego, and a third-degree burn from my own bumbling ability to hold a firework sprinkler and swing at the same time.

When my dad built anything into the yard, it turned into the focal point of activity or inactivity as my friends would prop themselves against the yellow poles and chortle at the random stray cat that found one person irresistible and preceded to stalk her. We wouldn’t talk much about school or the people that existed in it. This was even before we had social media sites. It’s hard to conceive we had anything to say to each other then. Conversations manifested organically. I can only remember the time fondly, teeth-filled smiles and episodic montage exaggerations glorifying our youth.

Before the play area, there was the dog cage, a silver squared fence that housed our dog, Dog, one example of my parents’ lack of ingenuity or mental effort to name any of our pets, giving them covert names like D2. It was sad seeing Dog alone. I thought seeing anyone in a cage was sad, but I think as a child, I thought it was more depressing being outside of the cage and having to watch someone locked inside. So I joined Dog in the cage, which made me feel considerably better, nobler than I actually was.

In the small square, Dog’s eyes drooped, heavy and torpid from the languid day. Once I quietly snuck out while Dog was sleeping, the guilt inside me silent. Not a word from my self-conscious. It was only when Dog woke up that I started to feel an adequate amount of guilt, which lead me back to the cage. To repent, I rubbed her stomach.

My dad oddly stared at me one day when he was preparing to mow the lawn. He said, “you don’t have to be in there, you know?”

“I know,” I responded, which I didn’t. I knew my chest hurts whenever I saw Dog alone, that my lips had a tendency to recede into my mouth, that meeting anyone’s gaze was like looking at the glare of the sun, and that talking about everything else but Dog was the worst.

I thought my dad and mom were being heartless and bad, the only words I really knew. Something needed to be done. I played out how the conversation would go.

Me: Dad. Mom. I really think you should get rid of the cage. It’s so sad, and it’s mean to do to Dog.

In My Head Mom: But honey. . . [my mom never called me Honey, but in my made-up world, she did]

Me: No, Mom. I think if you think about it, you know it’s wrong.

In My Head Dad: Hmm, I think you could be right.

When I brought the conversation up to my parents, I would learn that the door was left open to the house, and Dog had sped outside to chase a squirrel. I learned from my dad that Dog was hit by a truck, her body contorted like a snake through the truck’s wheels and axles. I learned several years later that my mom had tried to clean as much of Dog’s remains off the road using the kitchen spatula, which my dad would vehemently discard when he found out. I saw none of this, but I learned.

My dad disassembled the cage a year later. He buried Dog that week in our yard, far away from the cage.

Sincerely,

A