The Basement

The Basement

I was beloved until my own mother kidnapped me.
She dragged me away from them, through a legal loophole she had found and abused, she killed them emotionally by taking me away from them, taking the very reason why they lived away from them. I was their only daughter, replacing the twins who never came, the twins who drowned in their mother's belly and who were supposed to be beloved instead of me.

She got me and started to hate the reflection of herself that I was showing off. Soon, she started dismissing me. Soon, she shoved me into the basement. Soon, she hit me with clothe's hangers. Soon she realized I was in the way.

When I turned 12, they found me again. They bought be back. Yes, bought me. She sold the child she never loved anyway, she used the emptiness she created in their life when she took me away to make them pay. So I went back. In the house that I loved, the family that I loved, the family who loved me.

They gave me a colorful bedroom... this house was the house of colors. The yellow restroom, the red boudoir, the pink living room, the blue master bedroom. Mine was apple green, with two windows, one for the sun, one for the moon, with green and white gardenias the size of my head on the walls. There was colorful music, coming from Jeff's bedroom. There was colorful smells, coming from Claude's office: tobacco and the dog.

But...

In the house which was almost mine, in all of my despair and normality needs, there also was a basement. From the kitchen, between Claude’s office and the muscled staircase hallway, a door, identical to the others, opened on it. It showed an attempt of a flight of stairs, a few steps in fact, holding on by faith and a few century old nails. From the basement a strange smell raised, a smell of potatoes, of damp papers and soiled clothes, a smell we all avoided and were trying to keep out of the kitchen by entering the basement from outside. From the garage in the backyard, where everything was found apart from cars, a labyrinth gave access to every tiny corner of the basement. Of course, when it was time for us to go and get clean clothes from the dryer, we had no choice but to gather our courage and get down there using the kitchen entrance but I remember full well that for every one of us, it was like our very own way of the cross.

I always hated going down there. Found excuses, backed off from it, from its windowless rooms, its splintered shelves, its old medecine books from the previous century, its old dying furniture, the hodgepodge of every year spent here, every thing that was intended for trash but never found the way there. I was scared of the naked light bulbs hanging from the ceiling, of the cement floor, of the central drain which was cracking and adding a new scar every winter.

I always feared seeing, in a lost spot, a dead mattress on the freezing floor, a dresser, bugs, all waiting for me. I had in my stomach some kind of monster twisting my guts every time I thought that one day... one fine day... I’ll deserve the basement. One day, they’ll tell me to come here, will demote me here, will look at me crying while they’ll say : cry, you’ll piss less. For sure, one day they’ll see me for who I am, one day I’ll be impolite, I’ll look in their eyes without permission, one day they’ll realize my arrogant adolescence and they’ll have enough. Only solution left will be for me to get even tinier, pray for immunity and get lost.
One day it will be too late, they’ll see me, they’ll hate me, they will no longer want me, they will discover that I need to be punished. Thinking of it, I’m no longer 14, I’m 6, my heart sways into a never ending vertigo, my mind is spinning. Exactly like when I was young, a kid, I start seeing the emptiness, I get out of my body through my tears, I get smaller and so want to go away, exactly like when I was a kid and was getting hit.