Innocently Experienced Descents

Nov 3, 2017
10 min read

by Clara Roberts

“And if the people stare, then the people stare. I really don’t know and I really don’t care.”—The Smiths

I. Hand in Glove

At seventeen, I lose my innocence. I am torn open. It is October 2007. My Nokia cell phone is ringing, and I hide my body inside an oversized gray sweatshirt and black sweatpants, enveloped by three layers of blankets and the voices of redemption: Bob Dylan, New Order, Smashing Pumpkins, The Psychedelic Furs, The Cranberries. They make me want to stay under the covers forever and forget about how disgusting I feel trying to be a part of this world. I do not need to expect anything of the person who is on the other end of the phone call.

There are hardly any sunny days in 2007 — Baltimore weather’s fast temperatures remaining restless like the heavy clouds enclosing the grey sky. I wouldn’t have known if there were even a few undarkened exceptions this year, the blinds in my bedroom shielding the light. I think I’d implode if exposed to a day not mirroring my view of bright days as a mockery of one’s pain. I am a bat during the daytime.

I still go to school. My mother drops me by the trails of uniformed girls, looking at me with her blue eyes emanating routine concern for my inherent sensitivity to handling judgment from an institution of perfectionists and their rejection of students who even challenge their lives of jaded affluence and complacency and placidity. I go to school, not with pearl earrings, but with purple sunglasses on.

I attempt to immerse myself into rigorous academia and learn; and in English and double languages I do. In other classes I stare at the tendons in my mottled purple hands and pull at the skin not believing I’m here physically if my mind is depersonalizing. I want to disappear. At seventeen years old I am already bored with life, the emptiness making each day incomprehensible. I cannot yet drive a car, cannot yet maneuver my way out to the slippery black highway and tailgate to another state, change my name, or erase the failures I carry and reflect into others’ swollen hearts.

***

Each day I wake up in a foggy state of being, my eyesight dizzy as I’m feeling like I’m seeing myself from above, like Ester Greenwood’s disposition in Plath’s The Bell Jar. The character had felt “dull and flat and full of shattered visions,” and the glassy overshadow of my brain clutters with impulsive ones. Spanish 4 Honors is arduous, boys are tricky to read, and I am exhausted with my pretentious English teachers. The voices in my head never quiet down.

I make frequent trips to the bathroom, especially in the afternoon. I cry in the stalls.

Sometimes I hear another girl come into the stall next to mine, and I won’t leave until I hear the echo of her footsteps on the checkered floor tiles. The green door slams shut, and I sigh with relief because I can go to the sink and wash the tears off of my face. In peace.

Without warning, I get sick. I stay home and in my cave (my bedroom) weak and ill because of a shaky immune system. I find the strength to light up another few cigarettes and walk to the local Royal Farms to buy Diet Sunkist, another lighter. I have always believed you can never have too many lighters. I listen to the Plastic Ono Band on my over-played iPod stereo when I get home. Some of the songs on that album are broken records, her voice reaching octaves that shake glass against faint echoes of 1970s New York streets. Yoko Ono’s screams are strangely soothing and do not make me shut off the music. Seriously. But sounds are always intriguing, no matter how abstract or repetitive.

II. One Love

This pain has no origin, at least not that you know of. It is carved into your blood and bones. Your appearance fades into the background of all this chaos — the debris from your mistakes and people’s words; words, you hold onto them every time. You fade right in front of your own eyes.

Focus.

Focus on staying awake.

Try not to notice the time falling away as he holds you in his scrawny arms, telling you that he wants to keep seeing you but is too scared to be with you or anyone else. You only see him on his terms, when he is lonely and intoxicated enough at night to call and drive to the dim alley of your house. He knows you will say yes to him and sneak out every time on those random nights during the graveyard shift hours. You’ll climb into his green Dodge Neon with a half-smoked cig and he will touch you with aching longing, but not look you in the eyes.

No. He still wants to get close.

You are still not enough for him. Something from you must be missing. He can see you are a broken doll. You know he doesn’t see you. But through this blurred cold, you see him. You see him even though he doesn’t want to look at you.

Three years of being in his presence has made you only yearn to get closer.

Get close, even as he pushes you away with his forced detachment and his slow submission to liquor. Nothing is imaginary.

***

Days jumble just like his useless words and promises until the dreaded gray cloud hovers over you. Rain falls hard and burns as it hits the ground. October skips to December. You want someone to say you can be whole even though you feel like you are about to crumble. Insanity is not what it seems. You see it coming but when it actually hits you become blind and miss it. Completely.

Gradually, then suddenly, you find yourself walking into the bone-cracking coldness of the backyard, barefoot with icy breath flowing out of your chapped mouth. Time stops seeming like the thing that could transform you into something halfway decent. You feel like you have lost your way like model Edie Sedgwick, one of Andy Warhol’s superstars, when she suddenly jumps out of a cab and starts running toward an invisible destination. The coldness screams at you when you wind up trembling, confused, in the familiar alley behind your family’s house.

You are too tired for this; too tired of running to a place that you hope will make you rise above the instability. Edie would be able to relate to the running, the yearning to be seen and necessary.

You would hold each other’s breaking bodies and say nothing.

***

The world was no longer the one my parents taught me it was; they had lied, telling me how time heals everything. Life was a nightmare carrying a soft yet threatening cry. I was convinced that my skin stung more than everyone else’s. Thinking rationally was overrated and petty. I was attempting to carve paths which ceased to exist in Baltimore city—ones that were not dim and ugly. Nothing could change the fact that the boisterous desires within were becoming a reality.

I would stumble through the random schoolyards around my neighborhood, which were occupied by girls with non-biblical names. As the Newport cigarette turned into a stick of shadowy ash, I looked at the children playing on the jungle-gym and slipping down the slide. Kids chased after their fellow hyperkinetic friends and laughed when they fell because, before they hit the ground, their parents caught them. It made me remember the times when I was two years old and lived in an apartment with my parents. Flashbacks show me always playing there and every night my mom and dad would have me lie down on a knitted comforter and swing me back and forth like I was in a hammock. I would laugh just like those kids at the park; no matter how high up in the air I flew, there was always someone to catch me.

***

My mom screams, sometimes, and holds back tears about everything I do. She wants me to stop talking about death. She sees me in a numbingly hysterical state she could never have envisioned. We were best friends, always, and now we still retreat to her bedroom to watch movies to avoid how much I am upsetting and shaking her to an early grave. I repeat how I am not intentionally trying to make her sad, how I love her as much as I ever have. I call her “Mommie” in a quivering tiny whimper—a reminder I am still her little girl whom she could never hate and who maybe one day will stop crumbling into a mess of slick white dust.

III. A Taste For Escape

The girl spends prom night in the cloudless May night in the musty attic of a high school drop-out. This setting promises unrestrained and illicit behavior that her private school peers condemn — constant criticism of fellow peers — even at the prom after-parties; this place is where judgment of one’s character flaws are dismissed and maybe discussed later or never. She realizes that all of her high school years had ceased enclosing the tarnished hope of not being viewed as an outlier or sensing the anticipatory desire of a guy asking her to prom, ring dance, and homecoming. She lies to her parents and says she is sleeping at a friend’s house and that they should be relieved they do not have to spend money on a prom dress.

The attic is hot-boxed with dank herbal fog. The one light bulb on the wooden ceiling stutters and hums. Her eyes burn, and she does not need to excuse herself to the bathroom to check herself out in the mirror to know her hazel eyes are now bloodshot and her eyelids drooping. Watching the dank smoke float out the tiny attic window is more captivating than the chocolate fountain supposedly at prom reception and distracting her attention from the random guy’s hands tracing her crooked spine and breathing into her ear. He dropped out of community college so he could work in a restaurant and have more time to expand his mind with acid and weed; he can do this without worrying for class assignment deadlines. She lays her head on his firm shoulder and hopes he does not inquire further about what her plans are for the future. Later that night he finds her in the kitchen sitting Indian-style on the linoleum floor. He gives her pretty white pills she read about that are capable of turning her into Casper the Friendly Ghost. He says she deserves to experience this high. She wonders why he never mentioned this type of drug earlier, why he talked with sublime respect about hippie drugs without admitting he also consumes the ones that supposedly make one’s life “unmanageable.”

Dissociating herself from her current surroundings is the best coping skill she has that night, especially when a guy she does not want to even know smothers her with the focused affection she craves from someone else. The feeling of displacement makes her forget the pain’s origin. She eventually opens her eyes, sees she’s in a dark bedroom and starts laughing at the crumbling ceiling. Her friend is upstairs with some guy and the bedsprings shake the room. What time is it?

She knows she’s not going to sleep. She puts the pillow over her head to block out the bouncing noises of copulation. The guy leaves the girl in the barren bedroom and stays in the attic to record music. She slides her hand onto the bedside dresser and takes out one of the white OxyContin pills scattered about like Skittles and downs a few with an almost empty can of Diet Coke. The numbness entering her body is like no high she has ever experienced. She forgets about time. Clocks should not be a part of life in opiate reality. She might as well be levitating because the mattress doesn’t seem to exist and her limbs, she concludes, she is levitating.

She guesses right— she would get lost in this high; she closes her eyes and realizes the hours tumble past abruptly when her girlfriend wakes her up in the morning. Her friend’s dad drives them home in a minivan overflowing with espresso machines, and the girl thinks about what a laborious job he must have — installing the equipment at coffee shops all over Maryland and then coming home to his daughter’s demanding materialistic needs. He does not make any conversation, but hands her friend sixty dollars “just to have” as “spending money.” The girl leaps out of the van and speed-walks a block to her house. When she walks inside, she can see that all-too-familiar stone-frozen face of her mom. She knows she didn’t sleep where she said she would. She thinks the reason her mom nods and closes her blue eyes in agreement with her lies is because she wants so hard to believe her life would get better. She cannot comprehend how she is addicted to both feeling and not feeling.

IV. 2008

In June 2008, my mom cried when I tried on my white graduation dress. The scars from daily cutting and burning were branded all over my body. The scars — the fucking scars I routinely covered up every morning with layers of clothing despite the rising temperature — they screamed at both of us. She spent one-hundred dollars on cover-up make-up. It was over ninety degrees outside on graduation day. I almost fainted during the class photograph because I could not remember the last real meal I had consumed, and I felt sick when I saw my cover-up make-up melting and staining my wedding-cake-white dress.

After I grabbed my diploma I thought about how I never had to see any of those plastic girls anymore and they would cease staring at my mistakes. Thought about all those months my mom had to see me sleep much more than usual. The uncontrollable crying, tears a permanent smear on my face. The uncontrollable lust, the disinterest in pursuing dreams. The boredom with extracurricular activities — journaling the only safe outlet. Too many feelings: hopeless, helpless, and worthless. If I had lived decades earlier maybe they would not have had a label for me except crazy. Crazy has sounded less harsh in my head than Bipolar Disorder Axis I.

Medication adjustments were endless. Today I took my prescribed medication. I swallowed each pill, the slight bitter-chalk taste a reminder I’m still here.

***

After I graduated, I loaded make-up on my face. Thick black eyeliner, blood-red lip gloss, pale foundation. The people I hung out with that summer said it was a good look for me. I was not afraid to get high out in public during the daytime. I smoked blunts on the sour green lawns of my neighborhood and popped pills right outside Royal Farms. I made people laugh by saying, “Go ahead, bitch, call the pigs!”

My mom would call my cell phone to check up on me. I would just tell her to get off my back, that this was the first time I had ever had a real social life. She was preventing me from having fun. I snapped at her, telling her she was being spiteful and jealous, since she did not have me constantly around.

My parents kept telling me to “slow down” and I would storm out of the house in disgust, lighting up a Newport and blowing menthol smoke up to the sky. Deep in my heart, I wanted to slow down.

Clara Roberts is a graduate of the MA in Writing Program at Johns Hopkins University. Her literary nonfiction work has been published in Adelaide Literary Magazine, the Johns Hopkins journal, Penn Union, and on Used Furniture Review’s cousin online magazine, clampmag. She lives in Baltimore where she finds material every day to write about in her journal.