Tuesday, January 09, 2007
it is extremely lengthy.
but you must consider it is an assigned essay.
this is far from a blog post.
but do,
tell me your views.
i was quite proud of it because i came up with it pretty fast so,
happy reading.
hope the fonts dont get screwy.
“And we all fall down” is a phrase I think about together with a domino effect. I used to love dominos when I was younger. I would spend hours with my dad building a huge elaborate design of dominos which took up the whole living room, much to my mother’s annoyance, and we would take turns each time to push the first domino down and watch the rest tumble beautifully one after the other. My mother called it a mess, I called it art, but my dad called it chain reaction.
My father died the year I turned thirteen. After that, my whole family started to change. My mother pushed us in our studies to prove, probably mostly to herself, that being widowed did not mean she was incapable. I started to see a lot less of my older sister, or maybe it was just because she was hitting sixteen. My sister, who used to be an extremely bubbly, loud person became quieter at home but still listened to music so loud that you could hear it throughout the house. The only times are ever saw her was on her way out and on her way back into her room. My mother, on top of pushing us harder, pushed herself too. She started drinking a lot but was still able to climb up the position ladder at work.
I failed to see it at first, but bit by bit after my father’s death, my family was slowly falling apart. I resorted to cutting myself to help cope better. When I pressed the blade against my wrist and pulled it across, I felt like it was the only thing I had control over. As time went on, my mother gave up pushing my sister in her studies and instead, pushed me doubly hard. I managed to deal with my mother’s demands simply by cutting myself every time I felt she was asking too much of me. My sister too, had her own ways of coping with the control-freak my mother was slowly evolving into. By the time my sister finished High School, she had already had two abortions and was in a rehabilitation centre trying to get herself off whatever drugs she was hooked onto.
My mother, who blamed herself for my sister’s mistake, and, fearful that I might follow in my sister’s footsteps, cut back on her own office hours so that she could keep a closer watch on me. Because she worked less, she drank more, but she still kept me on a leash. She pushed me even harder than before and paid tutors to go through my work with me. After which, she would go through my work with me a second and third time, just to be absolutely sure I understood everything. I started cutting myself more often, and it really did help me pull through the increasingly long hours with my mother.
When my sister finally came out of the rehabilitation centre ad moved back home, my mother refused to talk to her. She felt that my sister was deliberately defying her attempts to show people how well we were coping without our father around. Honestly, I felt the only reason the three of us could “cope” was because we were finding different ways to deal with our emotions. My sister had her sex and drugs, my mother had her alcohol and I, well I had my cutting and these were all our emotional crutches which we leaned upon because we felt we needed to.
Three months after my sister moved back home, we found her dead on her bathroom floor. The white tiles were smeared with the blood from her wrist. It was evident that my older sister wanted her suicide plan to be absolutely fool-proof because she had downed quite a few sleeping pills together with alcohol. Apparently that was what killed her rather than her sliced artery, though that did not exactly help either. I guess my sister wanted to make sure that she would die either ways.
After my sister’s suicide, my mother quit her job and went into full time drinking. In one of her drunken stupors, she mistook me for my older sister and slapped me hard, demanding why I had to mess up my life. She cried herself to sleep in my bed that night. As soon as I could, I moved out to a smaller apartment. I did not hate my mother; it was just that, dealing with her like that every single day just wore me out. I visited my mother a couple of times a week and whatever mess ups I was having, I made sure I kept it well hidden from her. I still cut myself regularly as I dealt with college and boyfriends who broke your heart for the fun of it. It was the only way I knew how to cope and it was the best method, as far as I was concerned.
As expected, my mother’s health deteriorated and when she was suffering from liver failure, she, like my older sister, took her own life. It made me wonder how it was that some fathers could spend their whole lives drinking and abusing their kids and still live to say they’re sorry. Whereas on the other hand, my mother, who only started drinking after my father died, ended up the way she did. When I heard of my mother’s death and how she died, the tears did not come. Instead, I cut myself to vent. I cannot quite place the emotion I felt with my mother’s death. Perhaps it was anger at my mother for taking her own life, or maybe it was anger at my sister who did not help in the recovery of our family after my father died. Then there was a little part of me, which was angry at my father, for dying in the first place and sending our perfect world into a complete and utter mess.
Now, here I am, already twenty-five and stuck in an institution where they “help you deal with problems and emotions”. I was told that my cutting was a problem and against my wishes, I was checked into this place. My many years of studying, thanks to my mother, have gone to waste. I think the longer I stay in this place, the more I become like the crazy, quirky people around me. I spend my days arranging dominos again, just like I used to with my dad. It gets a little harder to expand the dominos over the whole room because some of the other people here, for whatever reasons they have, seem to get a kick out of destroying things. It hurts a lot when they do that, when they deliberately come over to the corner I’m in just to knock over my elaborately arranged dominos. They laugh in my face and piss all over my little domino pieces and it gets painful because these domino pieces are the only things that remind me that I used to have some sort of life way back then.
Just the other day, the cafeteria had small chicken pies, and they came in little pieces of aluminum. I saved my little piece of aluminum and started cutting myself after lights out. I felt the blood trickle down my arm a little and I felt so safe for the first time since the last time I tried cutting myself on the edge of the toilet paper dispenser. I felt so much calmer, so much more in control. I got out of bed that night and started quietly building and arranging my domino pieces. I started thinking about my dad, the way he used to laugh and the way we used to argue over who would push down the first domino. I started thinking about my mother, how before my dad’s death, when I was younger and she, happier I felt safe to run and cry in her arms on a rainy night. I thought about my older sister and how she used to sculpt small pieces for me out of her kiddies clay. As I worked, as I slowly built what I could with my limited domino pieces I thought of how my father’s death led to my sister’s which led to my mother’s death. “Chain reaction” my father would have called it, just like how he described the tumbling of our dominos.
As I completed my piece, and pushed down the very first domino I thought how my whole life sequence since my dad’s death was indeed very much like a chain reaction and how that was pretty much like the dominos that were falling one after the other right in front of me. I watched the dominos fall with my old child-like fascination and realized, like in this chain reaction, we all fall down.
1,502 words
- xoxo
charis loves you
3:43 AM
peeeeektooores!(: