Chapter 3

Before beginning this, the most epic adventure I have yet taken, the journey into my past, I need to make a few things clear.

Para que entiendan.

In writing this I am not declaring myself as different, unique, or special in any way. I am not declaring myself worthwhile; commandeering a coveted spot in your consciousness under the title “heroines of note” or some such nobility. I am not declaring myself as anything. I am what I am. Judge for yourself.

But judge wisely.

I am not what I seem. I am not bubbly, happy, audacious and kind. I am not those things. I am only me. And maybe after you read this you’ll be able to classify me.

Maybe it will be harder than ever.

The point is, that this is just what it is. It is not a story of honor or valor or sex or violence or rock and roll or anything else. This is my life. And as much as we try to define what life really means, we can’t. It means something different to everyone who lives it.

Does purple look the same to you as to me?

Does life?

So I guess we’ll start there. According to the all powerful, all- knowing Webster’s New World Dictionary, life is “ that property of plants and animals (ending at death) which makes it possible for them to take in food, get energy from it, grow, etc.”

Am I the only one that finds it odd that something is defined by its opposite? Life is the time when we are not dead. Love is the time when we are not alone. Happiness is the time when we are not sad.

As I lay curled up on the floor in the apartment, I noticed that my insides felt cold, and my outsides felt hot.

Hot like when you lay in the sun for hours, and your face becomes another moon – reflecting and emitting the sun’s energy. If you’re lucky like me, that usually ends in sunburn.

Damn Scottish ancestors.

Cold like when you get used to the pacific. It’s not unpleasant, it’s just… strange. I can feel that there should be certain things.

A heart.

Lungs.

A soul.

I just can’t comprehend that they’re there. Not when everything is searing hot pain. Like when you get into a bath so hot that your body can’t detect its true temperature. I’m talking about the kind of pain that makes you writhe and tear at your hair and scream with agony. This isn’t your average, everyday pain.

This is my personal hell.

It is all encompassing.

As my body pulsed with self-destructing acid, disintegrating and distorting as it went, my mind pulsed with regrets. My spirit with doubts. My heart with hatred. Not of others, but of self.

“Chronic Salmonella” is what they called it.

If my brother had known it was happening, or cared, he would have called it “Victoria cancer”. The disease specific to me.

The truth is, nobody knows what it was. All we knew is that my body was dying. Slowly. My hair was falling out, my intestines were bleeding, and food was out of the question. I was losing weight at an alarming rate. I had lost all color in my face. Skin. Soul.

So there I was. I was slowly being killed. Can you call it manslaughter if it was my own fault? Or is it really what I fear it is: suicide? I knew that something big was coming. Something that would define the course of my life.

If you don’t get better, you might have to go home, she said.

I got so angry I threw a rock at the crumbling wall across the street from the church building. It shattered.

The next morning, I made my decision. Or someone did. The point is, the decision was made. Using the passive voice makes that easier to say.

And I wrote.

"Do you think it would be poignant to note the end of the fight?

After years and years of open rebellion- sticking it to the man over and over again, the fight is gone.

Jump, Victoria.

How high.

Sit, Victoria.

Where.

Study, Victoria.

Okay.

Are missions supposed to break your spirit? If so, then I've already learned my lesson.

So can I go home now?

Like the disobedient schoolgirl, who, after the extra hour of doing lines, goes home with a mind still set on mischief, I went out everyday, determined to do missionary work with my name attached to it.

But now I don't really even feel like my name belongs to me any more. Victoria was a fiery, flirty teenager.

Sister Hart doesn't even seem to fit anymore.

So if those don't fit, then who am I?

I've learned my lesson.

So do I continue for another year, like a horse whipped into submission? Carrying the burden of the very whip?

I suppose that this is what one would call a gradual emotional breakdown. And I'm pretty sure it's not over. But "no one should have to deal with this", right, mom?

You're right.

No one should have to deal with this.

So I won't make them.

After all, I am ridiculous, right?

Let's count the lashes.

President Bird – ever word out of that man's mouth stung.

The wounds never closed.

Sister Hart, you are ridiculous.

I suppose alcohol cleans them, right?

My companionship with sister smith.

That was like burdens placed over the still- open sores.

Illness. That's when the other horses, bridled though they may be, saw how much more my master hates me.

"Did you just come here so other missionaries would think you're special?"

So what if I did?

No one ever thought I was before. It'd be nice, for once.

I have no dignity.

I'm a joke.

People who don't even know me, think they do."

And then it happened.

For the sake of self-preservation, I will refrain from defining what “it” is. All you need to know is that it happened.

And I came home.

Broken, torn, burned through and through. Hating only myself, with no one. Not even one person who could or would listen or understand.

Promise me you’ll never go through something like that by yourself again, she said.

That’s fine coming almost 2 years later.

How do you tell someone what it’s like to bleed internally? To lose what you know, what you love, what you believe and who you are at the same time?

Sometimes I just wanted people to be there. To exist in my general area but not to pay attention to me. When they paid attention, it just reminded me that I existed. And for the first time in my short life, I craved non-existence.

Death.

That I would just explode into infinite chinks of carbon-based matter and no longer have a consciousness. That no one would ever know I did exist. That accountability is the stuff of human folklore. Consequences are a legend.

Unfortunately, I know better.

I wish I didn’t know, I told her that Christmas eve.

Don’t you DARE say something like that ever again, she said. Do you know what He did for you? What he suffered? Don’t you DARE say that you wish you didn’t know. That is selfish and hateful and I won’t listen to it, she said.

I guess a man can’t be saved in ignorance.

But does that explain why it’s so hard? Why we have to crave for, pray for, yearn for death before we really know what it means to be alive?

It also says that life is “the time a person or thing is alive or exists”. So does that mean that I wasn’t alive until I really started to exist? I’m not talking existential here, just…. I don’t think I really existed until I was about 15. What were the rest of those years? Or the time before it?

I was an odd child. People would say “different”, but they meant odd. I preferred my own company to that of others, I read far too much for any healthy child, and I created a world that only included the things I wanted. I don’t think my small self ever comprehended the word “shy”. My mother loves to tell the story of when the missionaries from our church came over when I was about 3 and I came tumbling down the stairs naked. As I handed my Disney underwear to one of them, I asked with innocence neath the tumble of strawberry blonde tangles if he could “turn my bambis outside right.” Blushing, he did so, and I sat right down and started pulling them on, one leg at a time. Haphazardly exposing myself to strangers.

Connections happen fast with me.