Memoir by Winnie Grey
We’re sixteen and we’re stupid, but we’re in love.
“I’m sorry,” she tells me. “They shouldn’t say things like that to you.”
We’re lying side by side on her zebra print bedding, the rainbow fairy lights she has strung up along her ceiling suspending us in a sort of dazed dream; I’ve always loved these lights. Over time, they’ve come to mean warmth. Safety. A place where I can be myself, be with her, and scream song lyrics until the latest lecture from my father fades from my mind.
“It’s okay,” I say. “I’m used to it. This is just my life, you know? One day it’ll be over; one day I’ll get to leave. And until then, I have you, and my books, and the hopes of a One Direction reunion, so I’ll be just fine.”
She laughs and leans into me. Her face settles into the crook of my neck, so warm, and I can feel her smile against my skin.
She has the prettiest smile I’ve ever seen.
“What time are they picking you up for church in the morning?” she asks.
I groan at the thought of another stifling service on those scratchy pews. Another two hours of my life lost to being told how awful of a person I am, how if I really was good, I’d beg and cry and fall face-down to the stiff green carpet and beg to be made into a soldier.
“I’ll have to get up at seven,” I say. “To shower.”
She breathes in, sweet and steady, hand sliding into mine and squeezing in a reassuring way. A promise. An affirmation that she isn’t going anywhere until the day she helps me move out of my house and we both fly as far from this town as possible.
But that’s still years away and even as I squeeze her hand back, I can’t help but think about the panic attacks and nightmares that have been seizing me with increasing frequency; images of “hellfire” and “damnation” that flicker like flames behind my eyelids, a voice in the back of my head that sounds exactly like my father’s, telling me that I’m going to rot in hell. That I have dark spirits inside of me. That’s what the last lecture had been about: my depression. Or, as they liked to phrase it, the demons inside of me.
It’s difficult to reconcile the darkness that they claim so often to see in me with the light I feel when I’m around her. It doesn’t make any sense; I only feel dark when I’m around them.
My father is a small man, physically, but his ego could move mountains. He was raised in the faith, his father and grandfather each pastors of the church that he now rules over. He has eyes like black beads and close-cropped hair that always looks as though it would be stiff to the touch. He’s quick to anger, and spends every spare dollar on expensive leather briefcases and special editions of Bibles. When I was just a little girl, before I understood what his religion really stood for, and before I realized that I was being raised to hate myself, I was quite certain that my father hung the moon every night; but then I grew up, grew away, and knew that if he did possess that power, he would sooner snatch it from the sky and force it to do his bidding.
He and my mother had met at a special church conference when she was only 15; they were married before she turned 21. A few years later, I came along: the miracle child. A gift from God himself to my parents, who were forced to adopt after discovering they couldn’t conceive children of their own. My childhood was a whirlwind of overwhelming affection, of church services and prayer meetings and Be Quiet’s and Occupy Yourself’s and Don’t Ask Question’s. I learned how to entertain myself, and how to hide my true emotions, just to keep them off my back. By the time I realized the depression and anxiety these behaviors would lead to, it was too late. So I began to live solely for the future–for my future.
I was 16 when I found myself falling for my best friend, a dark-skinned girl who Sharpied rainbows on her Converse high tops and had the prettiest blue-tipped hair, the warmest smile I’d ever seen.
She draws me out of my thought spiral now by beginning to sing softly. It’s a Spanish song, so I don’t understand the words, but her voice is light as air and smooth as honey. It calms me in a way the church hymns never have.
Every moment of my life is spent in this internal chaos: hacking away at the girl I was raised to be with an axe and building the girl I know I am in her place. It’s climbing uphill, it’s swimming upstream, and some days I am pushed back more than I can push forward. But no matter how dark the skies get, I can’t bring myself to give up. To let go.
“You okay?” she asks.
I miss her singing the moment she stops, but I nod. “Sorry. Just still thinking about last night, I guess.” Another lecture. Another night of Angry Father and Disappointed Mother, of tears and shaking heads and Where did we go wrong?s.
All because I wasn’t the happy hand-raising daughter they’d wanted. I know they’d deny it if I ever said it to their faces, but they don’t have to say anything anyway; I can read the disappointment in their eyes. They hate that I’m quiet, hate that I’m so sad, hate that I have no desire to sing on the praise team or compete in Bible quizzing. And I can’t fix any of that, because I can’t change who I am, and I’m unwilling to pretend any more than is absolutely necessary for my survival.
“They want to break me,” I whisper. “Change me. Force me to be something I’m not. I know who I am, but I’m afraid. I’ve seen the way they get in peoples’ heads. What if that happens to me?”
“It’ll be fine,” she reassures, and pulls me somehow even closer to her. She smells like vanilla and crisp spring air and the earth after the rain is over and the clouds have begun to part. I love her so much in this moment, I can barely breathe.
“You’ll be okay.” A parting of pretty pink lips, a rush of warm breath across my neck. “They can’t take you from me. I won’t let them.”
I nod, my cheek pushing against hers, and she starts to sing to me again. The sun has began to sink below the horizon outside, and golden light slants through the blinds on the window and bathes us both in a warm glow. She raises a hand and brushes a stray piece of long hair behind my ear. Her eyes are a kinder version of the moon.
You’re my salvation, I think. Not the one they’ve forced me into since I was a child, wet words that ached with fear. See, love, you’re salvation like rainfall. You’re salvation like looking up at the sky and connecting a new constellation for the first time.
They think they’re saving me, but you already did.
Winnie Grey is an undergraduate student in the B.A. English program at Indiana State University. Her work has been published in the poetry anthology Life (as it) Happens and is forthcoming in Allusions. She lives in Terre Haute, Indiana with family.
Photo by chuttersnap on Unsplash
Photo by Olga DeLawrence on Unsplash