Do Better, Janie
- Dec 10, 2019
- 3 min read
by Tessah Melamed
Any standard victim of childhood trauma will be glad to inform you that it all ends in the bathroom stall of your choosing. The bathroom stall outside your therapist’s office, the one with the faded wallpaper and the lights that hesitate to come on when you open the door, or the one at the bar where you do drugs with your friends, or the one in your apartment you keep saying you’ll clean, but you don’t. Cleaning requires motivation and, as any standard victim of childhood trauma will be glad to inform you, motivation is something you sorely lack. Motivation, paired with the will to live, comes to you in the form of tequila, which will land you in, you guessed it, a bathroom stall. But this is where you do the very best of your thinking, where a locked door reminds you of all the promises your mother never kept, and your face in the mirror is just your father’s, waving goodbye from a car window on a Tuesday night while you stand on the curb in the rain, wearing the poncho he bought you in Disney World. It’s yellow and someone once told you yellow symbolizes happiness, but you’re pretty sure that was just Van Gogh’s excuse to eat paint.
Speaking of eating paint, you swallowed a bitter pill this morning: the antipsychotic you take diligently every morning, the one that forces you to function in a myriad of ways you couldn’t had you skipped it like you wanted to because let’s face it, you need a chemical combination to strike the crazy from your running record of personal faults. The specific brand of darkness that colors your insides in shades of gray, the tar that coats your lungs, you carve at it with your broken fingernails but nothing can silence the steady voice in your head begging for release and this is why you take the pill, because the voice cannot win but in a devastating upset, neither can you.
While you’re sitting on the closed toilet with your head between your knees hyperventilating as the party goes on without you somewhere beyond the door, let me remind you of the time you broke your mother’s favorite vase. The way she screamed at you, the way the veins in her neck pulsed like a threat to your very existence and how you cried, how you hid but her open palm still found your cheek, manifesting destiny — you, after all, are a collision course in a constellation of her making. You are the wire hanger in her closet, so easily bent, and years later when you tell your therapist she needs to fix the light in her bathroom you will recall the way your mother bathed you, scrubbing away imperfections until your skin was red and raw and tired, you’re so tired, and you wonder when your father will come home but he cannot call your white-walled living room with the couch he once claimed home anymore; home for him is in the arms of the pretty redhead from the supermarket he pretended he didn’t know when he held your hand next to the milk and the butter and the cookies your mother used to make when she was happy.
Happy, you think, is something foreign on your tongue: a melting snowflake, tin foil, the stale pull of your first joint, rolled by a boy you wanted desperately to love you. This is all to impress him anyway, let’s call him Jake, or Josh, or another standard name for a skateboarding blonde effort to forget, because as any standard victim of childhood trauma will be glad to inform you, all boys taste the same after midnight. Like smoke and glass and the daddy issues you swear you don’t have, but you did call him daddy for aesthetic purposes and you said it was because you were drunk but really you were just seeing how it felt. Somewhere in your memory a little girl in a yellow poncho stands on a curb in the rain; somewhere in a bathroom your twenty-something self plays mercy in the mirror, twisting the wrists of her reflection until she begs for release; they called it an Indian sunburn at the bus stop but no one speaks that way anymore for fear of offense; have you offended anyone lately? Do better, Janie. Do better.
Tessah Melamed is a writer from Seaside Heights, New Jersey. She enjoys chaos, cherry bombs and problematic men.
