I am my own future.
It’s been some time since I’ve written. It’s been even longer since I’ve truly committed myself to the page. I once enjoyed it the way a raccoon enjoys it’s secret trove of treasure, so much that I’d beg anyone to read my newest thing, whether it was a poem, short story, or some long and twisting experimental tale.
Every time I attempt to connect to that part of me again, and spill forth words that aren’t just my poor attempts at rational opinions but rather those achingly and insisting irrational urges, those necessary dives into such drunken and wild fantasy that when I emerge from those crisp, clean waters I am still drunk and dripping with the hope and fancy of dreams, enough to face the day at least, every time I try, I can’t help but think of my mother.
The taproot to this pine tree, she’s the only substantial connection I have to my past. My father, in my opinion, abandoned her, and because of that I lost most if not all connection to my father’s side of the family. And my mother was no saint or hero to her own side of the family, but to her credit, she was her own mother’s child: Stroke sufferer, schizophrenic (though they say it skips a generation), cynical and bi-polar. It seems as I followed suit too. I wish I could accurately define her, but we all deserve more credit than a few paragraphs from me to round them out. Suffice to say that for this story, she was my biggest critic, and she was my #1 fan.
She bought me my first typewriter, my first Stephen King books, it was a shared love, all of it. I was a library kid, where the movies we could bring home soon paled in comparison to the mountain of magic the books contained, and quickly, the single mother (with a string of violent and abusive boyfriends) and the young, already mentally challenged/damaged child, would bond over books. Stephen King could write about /anything/, and we loved it, devoured it up.
Years later, when my grades were failing and I had someone else’s Dad trying to fix his life by filling in for mine, he took all of the Stephen King books off my shelf and threw them away, “This is why you’re failing. This is why you’re so god damned weird.” Yeah, maybe.
Those were just possessions though, and that truly didn’t hurt me. I was even willing to consider the possibility he was right. Sometimes this guy was right, and he wasn’t violent, my bar was so low that crack, poverty, pills, and emotional abuse were fine, as long as I could sleep without hurting, I had a way out. The part of my story that formed an emotional block when it comes truly expressing myself, committing to the page and inking my blood and tears into something I am eager to show another soul, that part came when she read one of my stories.
It was about intrusive thoughts, and a war vet, and trying to isolate yourself. It was also about cannibalism, but I was fifteen, and my own intrusive thoughts were incredibly brutal. That story had helped me deal, but when she read it, she decided we had to burn all of my writings. Correction, I had to burn everything I had ever written.
Destroying my stuff was a habit, not a punishment. She’d do it to make a point, or because she was angry, or to sometimes also punish me. She hadn’t touched my typewriter, because I got it as a gift after Columbine. Why? Because the day after Columbine, a few kids tried to frame me for putting bombs on the school, and it destroyed my life. See, they were picking on Toby, and had stolen his shoes while we were all walking to the gym building. Me, damaged and loud but not violent, questioning, funny, lazy Kevin. No one ever takes him seriously because he’s always laughing, trying to find jokes, and not doing work Kevin. (It still feels wrong to write or say my own name. I’m sorry.) I see them bullying him, and I tell them it’s wrong.
It seemed like a fact.
They made fun of me, but it was just children, they’re terrible at hurting you with words, so they left. And it’s understandable, to me, I could tell everyone around me was reeling and hurting. So, I got Toby’s shoes off the top of awning, and walked him to gym, we’d eventually become friends for the duration of my time there. However, it’s less than a couple hours before I am called into the office. There’s a cop, and we have to wait for my parents to arrive before we can ‘proceed’.
Turns out, if six kids with A grades, some of them related to people on the school board complain and say I was putting bombs on top of the school, they don’t really have to punish those kids when they find no bombs. They talked about Columbine in the meeting, and my mom tried to defend me, “When Kevin saw the news, he cried.” And the guidance counselor thought that was an ‘inappropriate reaction’.
It was the first time I had ever heard of, or even imagined, kids killing kids. All before that time, I had thought we were on the same team, kids vs adults. That’s what trips to the foster care taught me. That’s what those strange and foreign rooms that you’ll never find again, filled with random kids you kind of get to know teach you, while your mom trades sex for drugs, and eventually you. That’s what being chattle taught me. And when I saw the news, I wept, because no one was safe, and we were /all/ being hurt.
Maybe it was an inappropriate reaction. I got to hear part of my diagnosis, because apparently hearing my IQ would affect me wrong. “Basically, Mr. Sabino, your son is so smart he’s retarded.” All ‘Mr. Sabino’ heard was retarded. All my mom heard was ‘psychopath’. I got a typewriter, a bunch of pills to take daily (which broke the ‘pill barrier’ for my mom. She could now justify giving me drugs, including opioids, in exchange for favors, work, and whatever else. Since I already had back problems, weird bone problems, and constantly complained of pain, what’s the harm, right? With this new avenue of money that is my mental health, and powerful anti-psychotics/street-drugs, she had justifications to arm her reasoning.)
With all of that set in place, messing with my writing was like messing with my therapy, which was my monetary value to the family. My only real worth. I got a lot of false praise (on some good pieces they didn’t get, and some trash I wrote for friends or entertainment) and some genuine praise (on rejects or things I just fucking hated), but rarely did my /writing/ get critiqued by my parents.
Until that one story.
We built a bonfire, my mom and me. Some of my stuff she thought should just generally go, Pink Floyd poster, some of these Elf books she didn’t like (Dragonlance chronicles. Go figures the one time she gives them a chance, she flips to a scene between Cameron and Tika I dogeared), and then the typewriter, every single one of my drawings, poems, stories, all of those Math notebooks everyone in the house hated, all into the the pile. She made me burn the stuff myself, because all of it came down to something vaguely religious.
Any information can be presented in terms of a story when you include the procession of time. DNA is capable of storing information, including our traumas, and even passes them down, creating a hereditary predisposition to PTSD, anxiety, and other mental health disorders. This story can be rewritten, I’ve given it enough time. This is the most I’ve written for others, and though I have tried, it seems I must finish this story, before I can really, truly begin writing the way I used to. This is also the first time I’ve talked about a lot of this with anyone except for my amazing partner, without whom I wouldn’t be alive.
Though my roots are part of my identity, I am my own future.
