Burn It Down Read online

  I think it was the buildup of shame. Every time he went into my room, every time he touched me, every time he dragged me by the foot, every time he crushed my small hands into his, I felt ashamed. The shame stayed, the shame calcified, the shame became a tumor under my tongue. Years of shame didn’t kill me, but it became a cloud over my head, jolting me with memories about what I could have done, what I should have done, even as a child.

  I was exhausted with the panic and the hiding and the silence. He was drunk and walking crooked. I could hear him getting closer and closer. He crawled toward my bed and I could feel his fingers reaching underneath my back. Something electric took over my body, a little voice whispering “no more.” I kicked with a rush of adrenaline. I kicked him in the eye and he screamed. The screams of the bad man woke up my cousin. He walked into the room and I launched toward him crying, “He’s touching me where he’s not supposed to.” That’s all I could say. The relief in my chest turned back into a boulder as soon as my mother walked through the door. I repeated the same thing to her and she looked over at the bad man. She asked him if it was true. He shook his head signaling no. My mother looked me in the eye and told me to go to bed.

  I don’t know if I can explain how angry it makes you when someone takes and takes from you only to leave behind panic attacks, uncontrollable fear, and an empty body. A ghost. Rage was as natural as breathing. My panic turned into fear turned into weeping turned into screaming. I boiled over into a mourning teenager. After sexual abuse, you have to mourn for yourself. Oftentimes, no one else will. Sexuality was a warped, terrifying concept. My body was a flotation device. I was a cowering brown body, enraged with what had happened to me. I wanted revenge. I wanted to face him and scream at him. I wanted to break him in half. I wanted to humiliate him in front of his family. I wanted everyone to know what he really was. A thin, molding film stuck to my skin. Bile came up my throat when I froze in panic. I was never scared when I became overwhelmed with rage. It calmed me. It calmed me to think that there was space in my head to see bits of his destruction. I was not afraid of where my imagination took me. I embraced it and started writing.

  We arrived home to find water trickling from under our apartment door. My mother opened the door to the bad man sleeping on the living room floor with water flooding the entire apartment. I ran through each room looking for ghosts. I wondered if La Llorona was sending me a sign. She was ready to take me away. Or maybe sea creatures could take me into the depths of their homes. Or maybe it was the horse woman. She was ready to take the bad man.

  My mother turned off the sink faucet and tried to shake him awake. She dragged him outside and he finally woke up. I watched as she embraced him in her arms, telling him it was okay, she would clean everything up. My mother cleaned out the apartment day after day and told us of all the things she lost in the man-made flooding. She lost her stamp collection. She lost a bag of photographs. She lost her favorite high heels.

  I think my mother understands I will never open up to her. I hear about her through my younger sister. I get the phone calls and the texts. Mom keeps sharing posts online like “Family is important. Don’t wait until it’s too late” or “When family goes through life not speaking to one another, the day will come when you regret it. It’s called the funeral.” Mom said she’s looking for your biological father. Mom said she will call you later.

  The first story I ever wrote was a ghost story. The main character, an angry ghost girl, slept on tree branches and attacked lost men wandering through the forest. As a teenager, I turned to poetry. I wrote poem after poem in pencil and watched the callous on my middle finger grow into a round relic. A reminder. I could not undo what happened in my past, but I could write it out of myself, little by little. I wrote about abandonment. I wrote about rage. I wrote about the bad man. I had not told anyone about the abuse after my mother didn’t believe me.

  My mother married a Navy man and the family was sent up to Michigan. We lived on an eerie Air Force base and when the time came, we registered for an extremely white school. During orientation, I waited in the school’s office for an adviser. A girl with bright blond hair sat next to me. I pushed my body the opposite direction from her. There were plenty of chairs to sit in and there she was. She introduced herself and started talking to me about her trauma. Her accent had a twang in it, but she never told me where she was from. She told me she was sexually abused by her father her entire childhood. She had moved in with her grandmother and was excited to start a new school year in a new place. My name was called and I turned to her and waved goodbye. In Michigan, I made a few friends who listened to the same music. We bonded over eyeliner and goth hearts. I never saw the office girl again. I hoped she was okay. I still do. The office girl sticks with me because of how unashamed she was to tell me her story. She blurted it out without flinching. She struck me as hopeful. I was not at the same point as she in the acceptance of my ghost body, but she made me believe I could reclaim it.

  Reclamation takes time. It takes warmth. It takes rage. It takes multiple cleansings. It takes writing under ferocious trances. It takes screaming, even when it feels like no one is listening. It takes scaring those around you with the rage inside your throat. The stories that haunt you, the ones that make you freeze, the ones that were so real but feel like ghosts—tell them without shame. The shame is not yours to carry. The shame is not mine to carry. My body is flesh and guts and dead skin. My body is star stuff and bacteria. My body is mine. My stories are mine to tell and keep. This is my story, in spite of those who tried to take it away.

  A Girl, Dancing

  NINA ST. PIERRE

  I am a girl, dancing.

  In shimmering floor-to-ceiling studio mirrors, my leg traced the half moon of rond de jambe. My body in arabesque was an arrow ready to pierce the sky.

  Some days, I felt like a mirage, my life in constant flux. A new apartment, a new city, twice a year, maybe more, as I turned eight, ten, twelve, fourteen. But in each place, Mom found me a studio and I spent three nights a week in class—jazz and ballet first, later modern, hip-hop, lyrical, all paid for by my dad’s parents. I danced in show after show, memorized thousands of steps and combinations. It was my home in a sea of uncertainty. My stabilizer. It allowed me to locate myself.

  In the studio, my limbs cycled through space in the streaked reflection.

  This motion, I could control.

  My graduate thesis was the story of my mother’s breakdown and death. Toward the end of my program, I met a mentor at a sidewalk café in Philadelphia where we drank gin and tonics. He’d read the three hundred pages I’d written.

  “So,” he asked, “where is the anger in this story?”

  “Anger?” I said. “I don’t know. I mean, I don’t really get angry.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Only a few people have ever seen me angry. There was one period when I was younger.”

  “Yes.” He nodded. “And?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “It didn’t matter.”

  “You have to find the anger again.” He tapped the manuscript. “That’s where the story is.”

  I went home and thought about his words: Find the anger. I meditated. I moved. The anger was there, I realized. It was all over the pages. It was simply in disguise, performing abstraction or lyricism in some sections, diplomacy and empathy in others. For girls like me, anger was not always wild and red and raging. For girls like me, it was internal decay. It was cool blue, icy islands of flat nothing floating on a cerulean sea.

  I am a girl, drinking.

  I was sixteen and squished into a booth between my “cool” aunt and uncle at a cruise ship nightclub. The vinyl had warmed to our bodies over hours of B-52s ordered by Aunt Val. Fueled by the milky shots and many watered-down rum and cokes, I began ranting to my uncle about my dad. I’d asked to borrow $200 from him. He’d said no, but that if I wrote an essay, he would just give me the money.

  “A fucking essay!” I yell
ed drunkenly over the thump of shitty Euro pop.

  “Should have written about power dynamics of money.” Uncle Kent winked, tipping his Corona toward me.

  “That’s not the point,” I slurred. “I asked him to borrow the money. I didn’t want an assignment.”

  “But, niece, why borrow when you could just have?”

  “I know how to work,” I yelled. “I’ve been working since I was thirteen. I needed it for two weeks.”

  “You’re missing the point!” he said.

  “No,” I said. “I’m not missing the point. He has missed the point. My dad has missed—you’re all missing the point!” I yelled, slamming another shot and running onto the dance floor.

  “Fuuuuuuck him! Fuck. Him.” Hot tears mixed with the sweat streaming down my face, my body slinking and swaying to the bass. Catching a glimpse of myself in the wavy mirrored ceiling, I saw a different dancer. A girl with stunted, short motions, someone trying to stay in the lines. A girl who’d forgotten how to flow. For a second, I thought my chest might split open right there.

  No one knew what was going on back home in California. Not really. They didn’t know my mother was sinking. That I was in the depths of erasing myself. Ingesting anything offered to dull the pain of a mother I could not mend.

  I didn’t have the language to tell my father he was concerned about the wrong thing—treating my loan request as a teachable moment on work ethic instead of asking why I’d been crashing with friends and living from the trunk of my ’86 Dodge Shadow all summer.

  All he knew was that I, a lifelong straight-A student, was on the verge of failing. That I’d missed more than twenty days of school that year. That I was un-wrangleable by my mother, who in turn was inconsolable. She’d kicked me out after I confronted her, but not about the things that really mattered. My lashing against her was petty and violent, a litany of everything she’d ever done wrong—easy to chalk up to typical teen girl rebellion. By then, I was drunk or high everyday anyway, empty booze bottles rattling in the trunk of my car, so she cut me loose.

  My father prescribed “tough love” and his go-to, meditation.

  And my grandparents, the ones who paid for all those dance classes? They invited me and the rest of my dad’s family on a weeklong cruise.

  We sipped Dom Perignon on the Caribbean Sea,

  I chugged Cuervo in the locker room before first-period geometry.

  We watched B-rate magicians in the ship theater,

  I drove fast and drunk through the forest, down pitch-dark, windy back roads with my headlights off, staying alive a trick of its own.

  We piled our plates high at midnight buffets with ice sculptures of swans,

  I smoked opium on dirty bed sheets.

  We cracked ten-pound lobsters at a white-sand café in Sint Maarten,

  I smoked crack from a tin-foil trough.

  It was a stunning display of duality.

  When I look back at pictures from that time, I am a ghost, a girl-shell. My normally tan glow a pale, sunken white. My eyes dead in their sockets. But inside I know my stomach was a seething pit, a dormant volcano.

  It was around that time I stopped dancing.

  I am a girl, drowning.

  We were an oversharing, unboundaried, partner-in-crime, spontaneous road-tripping type of mother-daughter duo. The kind you see in indie films and think—if you’ve never lived that way—it looks mildly thrilling, a bohemian adventure, like Natalie Portman and Susan Sarandon in Anywhere but Here. Except what looks exciting on film is more often, in life, chaotic and destabilizing. Dysfunction has its charms, its free-form perks, but it’s only quirky and fun from a distance.

  As a poor single mother of two, my mother’s life was committed to spiritual growth. We chased nebulous gods up and down California, moving from apartment to hotel to motel to log cabin, praying, chanting, and decreeing, fueled by the slim earnings she gathered from odd teaching and cleaning jobs, welfare checks, and child support.

  Enlightenment was her retirement plan.

  When I was twelve, she bought a house, settling finally, in deep rural Northern California. I was thrilled to grow some roots. But, slowly, I began to see that maybe all the running we’d done hadn’t been in pursuit, but in flight. Maybe the constant motion had rendered the darkness of my mother’s psyche fallow.

  She started telling a story, a sprawling, slippery narrative about people who wanted to run her out of town, with new characters and subnarratives springing up weekly with little explanation. I wasn’t sure what I was more afraid of: my mother’s story being true or what it meant about her if it wasn’t. If she was capable of inventing the whole thing, it meant that she—my ride-or-die—was a woman unhinged. She would no longer be simply sensitive or intuitive or psychic or spiritual, but mentally ill. And if that was true, what else in our lives had been quilted from thin air?

  I nodded along to her daily litany, but slowly, I stopped listening. Behind the scenes, I was cutting my losses, scrambling to craft a contingency plan. Maybe she’d known I would jump ship eventually. Maybe that’s what she meant when, after telling me she was suicidal, she added, “I know you’ll be okay. It’s your brother I’m worried about.”

  I didn’t know the word delusion then, but I could sense its sticky shadows. And I began to beat the darkness back, using my limbs as flares to alert teachers, father, grandparents, aunts, uncles, friends, anyone watching. I was trying to tell them with my erasing, my falling, that something was very, very wrong. As I had with dance, I used my body, but this time it wasn’t jetés or jazz kicks. It was rage dressed up in party clothes and a popping red lip.

  Find the anger.

  As a young girl, I’d been well behaved. Demure, if exuberant, always with a “thank you” and a “yes, please.” I was obedient and respectful of grown-ups. Naturally diplomatic, or at least, that’s what I’d been told. Mom called me an “old soul,” and though I didn’t know what that meant, exactly, I tried to measure up to its implications. I couldn’t help or save or leave my mother. So I did what I could, which was listen. My value became in listening, holding, carrying. She poured her stories into me without regard for my capacity. But I could not get angry at her, not really, not with the violence I needed to erect solid walls, because I also relied on her for food, shelter, love.

  So I played the role assigned, urgently swallowing everything that might harm her, including my own rage. The truth is, I quickly learned which conversations and ways of being funneled my family’s love and support toward me, and which of my needs threatened to divert the stream.

  I learned not to tell my wealthy grandparents that I lived in a one-room motel and shared a king bed with my little brother and mother.

  I learned not to tell my father about Mom’s confusing stories because his world was measured by twice-daily meditation, his life aligned toward peace, and my life did not reflect those qualities.

  I learned not to talk to Mom about sunny afternoons on my grandparents’ yacht or trips in progressively smaller planes to their family home in the Bahamas.

  I learned that each of my worlds did not have space for the truths of the other. So I ate those truths and poured my sweet being into the provided containers. I learned to stretch and bend my girl body to reflect what they wanted me to be.

  No one had silenced me, exactly. It doesn’t always happen like that. My quieting was learned and contingent. I get it now: being an old soul meant I was expected to understand things beyond my years. Things I could only perform an understanding of. As the schism between what was true and what was allowed to be true grew too wide, I fell into a blank space.

  A girl, dying.

  For all the years since her death, fourteen now, my story was that my mother was everything: my home, my spiritual warrior guide, my provider, my feminist model, my confidante, best friend, first love. Those things remain true, but she also groomed me to take more than I should. Taught me how to form my body into a clay jar to hold the spillage of her.
I see now this is always happening to girls.

  Girls are carrying too much. We are spilling over, top-heavy and destabilized, but praised for our maturity and adaptability if we take it, denigrated if we do not. Trained not to rage, we work in code, our bodies the medium. We eat anger and quietly metabolize it to keep you comfortable.

  Find the anger.

  I’m angry at my mother for asking too much of me but being unable to ask for help herself.

  At my father for not asking at all. At my grandparents for worrying about how a girl should present herself rather than who she should be.

  I’d been good, see, but it didn’t matter. Because the first time I wasn’t, they dropped me. Teachers turned their backs on me. Maybe they’d assumed it was coming. With a mother like that, they figured. Another broken girl biting the statistically predetermined dust. My family called it rebellion or diva-dom or hormones. They called it anything but the anger that I had earned.

  I’m angry that the language of spirituality, of maturity, of poise, and of grace all contain directives for ladyhood. That they function as encoded suppression. I’m angry that we’ve been taught to swallow our pain to save you. That a girl dancing can become a girl drowning and a girl dying so fast.

  It wasn’t just me. The ones who carried me back to life were a band of wild, raging girls hurting themselves because they couldn’t, they wouldn’t, hurt you. Cheyenne swallowed a bottle of pills because she was angry. Mandy hitchhiked alone up the I-5 because she was angry. Sam leapt from the balcony and hit the cement because she was angry.

  Listen to me.

  Teen girls are not divas or drama queens or rebels with no cause. We are here to tell you something and we are using our bodies to wake you the fuck up. We are brave beasts lighting our limbs afire to illuminate darkness. Burning our bodies, like monks did, “as a lamp for help.” We are half-born forms, prosaic and didactic, arrogant even. We are not polished to please you. We are divining rods, writhing sensory portals that perceive injustice in our fingernails. Hound dogs for hypocrisy. We are young and naïve and wild and our language may be crude, but if we are angry, you must crack us open. Pick us up like a rock and look underneath, you cowards. We will reveal your secrets and your shame. Like extracting a piece of glass long-embedded in your foot, cutting you cutting you cutting you, we must get it out at all costs.