Growing Up

As a child growing up in the Deep South, I would often gaze down the lined aisles of the fields surrounding my home. I would wonder where they led; if I could somehow get there one day. I day dreamed of camping alone along the lonely tree lines at the ends of the fields at night. I wondered if anyone lived there, isolated from the world around them. Nestled in the safety of the miles of corn and watermelon and herbs. I wondered if the people who I sometimes saw working in the fields lived somewhere in the darkness beyond the tree lines. What was beyond them, anyway?

It wasn't until I was older did I come to learn that the fields around my house were only a few miles wide; the tree lines seemed like more trees than they were and there were actually only a few trees planted scarcely to hide the illegal immigrant housing behind them. The fields were stinky and dirty and littered with beer bottles and broken American dreams. Where did the innocence go?

My mother often told herself in the mirror that she was fat; she was fat and she was ugly and then she would cry and tell me to watch what I ate because when I get older I will probably look like her. I didn't think she was ugly, but then I saw the magazines she read. The women in them flaunted high cheek bones and skinny waistlines and tight asses. I didn't even know where to begin to look like them. I looked more like my Dad, with his crooked nose and his big forehead. I remember taking pride that I looked like him; he was only my favorite person. After puberty started however, I began to note the imperfections that were me.

All around me I remember the pain. The pain of broken hearts and broken pride and hateful words and actions. I remember my first boyfriend who told me no one else would ever love me because I was dirty and he would make sure that it stayed that way. He stole my clothes without my knowledge and burned them. He did everything but cut my hair. Though I did that eventually of my own accord. The second boyfriend I had stole all my money after we had been living together for a while. He wouldn't let me wear the clothes I wanted to, and he told me my face was caked with too much makeup. Little did he know it was the only way I could feel safe from his scrutiny.

The third time I had a love affair, it was with an older man. He was much, much older, but he made me feel special and beautiful and wanted. I remember his big hands could enwrap my whole waist and his lips tasted like experience. It turns out he was battling his own demons, though. He killed himself in the same year.

I often wonder how people go through with killing themselves. How do they pull the trigger? How do they not flinch when they step off of the plastic chair below a noose? How do they let the ones they love live alone without them in their lives afterwards? Suicide seems selfish to me, but I sometimes long to feel the sensation of letting go. What must it be like, to know that after this simple action there will no more be stress, anxiety, hate, anger, tears? I moved away after he died. I couldn't stand in the same spot every day at the gas station where we met for work. I couldn't ring up the honey buns he bought every day without thinking of the sickly sweet breath he always had after it. The cigarette he smoked after breakfast every day. The tears he cried late at night but tried to hide after he would smoke another one.

After I moved away from my home town and to a bigger city nearby, I began my slow fall into alcohol. I had just turned 21, and the thought of a legal mind-altering drug now readily available to me made me giddy. I drank almost every night, and forgot about all the worries and thoughts that I had. Is it bad that my life was so much better on those nights? The nights that the world seemed confined to the small walls of my apartment, and I was safe inside.

Then I met Jojo. We worked at the same Sushi joint; he was the sushi chef and I had just got a job there as a server. His smile was so bright, and he made me feel like maybe there was actually some positive things left in the world. He was from Taiwan though, and a real relationship was not realistic. I knew this much, but I pressed on. It turns out that the sweet, bright smile of his face was really just a cover up for the evil he possessed in his heart. There is no love there, only longing. Only wanting and taking and taking and taking.

I sit here writing this wondering why I am doing so in the first place? I am at school, wondering if I even have that English essay due in class today. What am I doing this for? Biology major who sucks at Biology. I just want to run, but I don't know where to go. I just got a new apartment but I don't know what to do with it.

All I want is love, but I'm afraid that love just doesn't exist anymore. Maybe it was just a childhood dream we all have that lasts into adulthood. Maybe love is just the tree line; a line of trees meant to hide something sinister.