High
I was high during my sister and her
family’s five-week visit. Before she arrived, I was a nervous wreck about
how to handle it.
Out of desperation, I visited the
local marijuana dispensary and asked the clerk for help. The middle-aged woman
touted the cranberry-flavored spacey and relaxed Dutch Treat strain of pot with
a 1:1 CBD and THC ratio, as the gummy I needed to take. She said one
gummy was equivalent to drinking four glasses of wine. I could hardly handle
one glass of wine, and I’d never done pot before, but she convinced me to buy
the drug after touting it as her favorite calming medicine. Twenty minutes
after I left the dispensary, I was thrilled the sky twinkled in streaks of diamonds after
I bit a sliver of the gummy.
I learned later that the Dutch Treat
strain had the rare terpene, terpinolene, with sedating, uplifting, creative,
and energetic effects. My next-door neighbor, a purist and daily marijuana
smoker, who worked in the pot industry in North California, where I lived, said
that new studies of terpenes were now focused on strains geared towards healing
or alleviating symptoms for different diseases, which shifted the focus of
marijuana industry into more niche markets, creating more confusion for
consumers who were at a loss as to basic dosage.
Under the influence of drugs, I ran
around with my sister, her husband, and her daughter. I lifted my arms and
imagined I was a seagull, soaring gracefully off the swirling cold pond waters
of the Pacific Ocean during high tide on Clam Beach; I sang my favorite
70s R&B tunes, which played loudly on the Pandora app on my I-phone while I
ran down the rocky ridge hikes of the redwood forest behind my apartment; I
roller skated at full speed for three hours at the rink in Blue Lake; and I
danced nonstop and with no reserve, at the reggae, folk, and hip-hop summer
music festivals we attended.
My eight-year-old niece joined me with
new-found respect while unrelentingly competing with my raging inner
child. She wrote bad movie scripts, which we filmed and acted late into
the night. She challenged me to sword fights with the plastic swords her
parents purchased at the circus, and she dared me to race her down the slopes
of our forest hikes. I accepted her invitation to compete and afterwards argued
vigorously that she cheated when she had in fact won.
My niece, with the Cuban and Irish
ancestry, large hazel blue eyes, and strawberry wavy blond hair broke into
spontaneous Broadway song because she wanted to perform on its stage. she was
wilder and more beautiful than I was at her age. Even though my sister
used her as a confidante to her adult problems--the same way my mother had used
me, a pattern I warned my sister not to repeat because of its onerous burden on
her daughter--Issa had Youtube on her side, an antidote to the confining,
debilitating smallness of being a confidant to a misguided and narcissistic
parent.
Her imagination was stirred with audio
books, toys, and fashion videos. She wrote scripts for home movies and recorded
her own Christmas albums as inspired by others on YouTube. Because
technology had stretched her world beyond the confines of her problems at home,
she had more spaciousness and insights than I ever did at her age, so she
figured me a mix of beautiful and ugly, rich and poor, fun and serious--a
tension of opposites she deduced because I didn’t own a car, but rented one
when I needed it; I shared her beautiful features but was older with grey hair
and wrinkles; and I laughed and played during the day and locked myself in my
room to read, write, and sleep at night. Still, Issa had no clue something was
amiss.
No one figured it out, even though I
looked disheveled-- hair uncombed, skin tone uneven, and eyes half-shut or
dilated from taking a sliver of a bite of the gummy for breakfast, lunch, and
dinner. The others occasionally raised their eyebrows at my
high-octane enthusiasm. Yet they didn’t notice when I started stuttering my
words or replacing them with nonsensical ones: “Can you please pass the
tablecloth?” Instead of salt.
My sister was determined to do what
she wanted when she wanted, and her endless daily to-do lists included
activities from sunup to sundown with a repeat of some of those same
activities, like a morning and night visits to the sauna and whirlpool of the Finnish
bathhouse in town. Her pace was frenetic, manic, and a compulsory repeat of her
daily life in New York City. Not even the roaring power of the Pacific, lofty
height of the redwood trees, or shifting daily weather patterns, from fog to
rain to sun, could convince her to stop and take it in. When I commented
to her husband that his family was a handful, he snidely remarked, “Well, we
don’t have a choice, do we?’ he said.
“You don’t have a choice, but I do,” I
said, as I walked away from him, slammed the bedroom door behind me, and bit
into another sliver of the gummy I kept hidden in my pant pocket.
My brother-in-law was a detached man
with a head of tight auburn curls and squinty and speckled blue eyes he hated
to focus on anything. He preferred silence and spent most of his time
after work listening to professional development talks on political correctness
needed to be a middle school teacher in the highly diversified New York City
public schools; my sister accused him of listening to bureaucratic mumbo jumbo –prejudice veiled as the right thing to say, not do--which played loudly
in their home on Staten Island. Since he was silent most days of the
year, he felt compelled to be lively and interactive on his yearly family
vacations, but even that got on his nerves, too.
I was determined to claim my
boundaries and stake my space in my 350 ft apartment where my sister and her
husband slept in sleeping bags in the living room: I shut and locked my bedroom
door and insisted they leave for several hours during the morning so that I
could get my online teaching work done, now suffering from lapses in memory
from taking too many gummies, including forgetting to return student calls,
grading papers, and holding weekly chats.
When my sister and brother-in-law
argued late into night, both using a whiny, repetitive passive aggressive tone
and stance to get their way about next day’s activities, I played background
brown noise, a rich soothing, air-blowing sound that lulled me into deep sleep.
When she knocked on my door to badmouth her husband, I said loudly that she was
married now and needed to figure things out with him, even though I feared the
angry look in her eyes.
She was a bully, and I cowered to it.
All my life, I was also bullied by my mother, and father, as if being a
victim was my rightful place in the family. To avoid bad words, pushing,
spitting, and hitting, I became a weasel--running, hiding, and lying to avoid
violence. What I wanted was silence, peace, and solitude, a life on another
planet. But, as life on earth would have it, my whole existence became a
loop of victimhood--friends, ex-husband, lovers bullied me, too, and I accepted
it as normal because I didn’t know how to acknowledge or defend my hurt
feelings. Those feelings had been calcified as trauma deep in my cell memory,
further compounded with the political correctness I picked up here and there
until my body and spirit were punctured, hunched over, and defeated enough to
not look anyone in the eyes for fear they would hurt me some more.
That is until my mother left me a
deathbed message/order about how to handle myself for the rest of my life:
“Don’t do what you’re told. Don’t do
what you read. Don’t do what others expect. Don’t worry about being good, bad,
indifferent, kind, compassionate… none of it counts if doesn’t come from your
heart--and most never figure out what’s in there anyway. Don’t worry about God
or the Devil; I’ve dealt with both, and they’ll respect you if you do what you
must. Especially, never flinch at the consequences of your heart-fueled
actions, whatever they may be.”
She could have been passing the
bullying baton onto me, but I took it as a clarion call to erase family
programming and live life on my terms. Not easy! Since my mother’s death
a year ago, I practiced speaking my truth, slowly and cumbersomely. I told the
cantankerous UPS guy to put packages under the awning so that they wouldn’t get
wet in from the rain, and I told the sidewalk activists who asked for my signature
on their paperwork that I didn’t believe in their causes. Some rolled
their eyes, mumbled under their breath, or confronted me for what I said.
I blushed, stuttered, and hesitated while my heartbeat raced and beads of sweat
formed on my forehead, but I looked them in the eyes and stuttered through my
responses. My goal… to dissect, like a neurosurgeon with a scalpel,
the muck from the brain juice that knew only my authentic, true, vulnerable yet
brave self in all situations.
Still, I wasn’t prepared for my sister
and her family’s visit. It was too soon, and I hadn’t yet mastered the
skill of speaking the truth. I tried to talk her out of coming by telling her
it was raining in North California every day, and that there had been
earthquakes, lies. I also told her my 350 square foot apartment was too small
to comfortably house four people for five weeks, true. Still, she bulldozed me
with her plans, insisting that time would fly and that she would be gone before
I knew it.
Pot saved the day, but three weeks
into her visit, I ran out of steam, so that when she mentioned going back to
the bathhouse that morning I refused.
“I’m not going,” I said with no
hesitation, while preparing the stove and pan for the omelets I was cooking for
breakfast that morning.
“Why not?” she asked, her voice tinged
with annoyance.
“Because I’m tired of going
there,” I said, nervously.
“She was quiet, and so was I. As a
trial attorney in New York City, she used silence to make the opposing side
squirm, as I was now doing.
“You go. I need my space,” I said,
stuttering while putting the egg carton on the counter and turning around to
face her.
“From me?”
“Yeah,’ from you,
We were in a face-off like we were as
teenagers when she charged at me, tore my shirt, and pushed me against the
wall; that is before I ran off.
“Bitch, you have some nerve saying
that to me in front of my daughter.”
My niece ran out of the apartment to
get her father who was packing the rented SUV for that day’s activities.
“And you have the nerve calling me
names in my house. YOU have never respected my boundaries or me!” I said,
taking an egg from the carton and flinging at her. When it hit the wall, I
watched the yolk and sticky stuff splatter and run down the wall and brown
carpet in slow motion. “That’s going to stink”, I thought to myself.
Her brown eyes fumed with rage. When
she charged at me, she lifted her arms, closed her fists, pressed her lips,
lowered her head, and held her breath in order to gain speed and momentum,
difficult with her middle-age girth. She looked like my angry father--large
forehead, thick brows, dark eyes, and round stomach—a man who beat up the post
man, cashier, master of ceremonies at the neighborhood parade…. because he
didn’t like the tone of their voice, remark, or God knows what. I never
heard or knew what started the fight. He had always inched up to his victim as
if he was going to tell them a secret before he unleashed a horrifying volley
of fists, which made me keep a good amount of distance between us for the rest
of his life.
My sister came at me in a halo of
light, thanks to the extra sliver of gummy I bit off that morning. Rage, anxiety, and adrenaline built up in my system, so
I faced her down. She stopped hard and almost tripped in front of me before
regaining her footing, pulling back her closed fist, and punching in the upper
arm.
“Ow,” I said before I slapped across
the face. She put her hand up to her cheek, her stare filled with rage, as was
mine. My audacity was unfamiliar even to me. Heat emitted from my skull. My
anger was alive and breathing. I was like a secret agent fighting for an identity
lost on such a life-long covert operation all was forgotten. My heartbeat raced
and face flushed. When she pulled my hair, I pulled hers, too. Our necks were
stretched, backs tilted. I kicked her on the shin. She let out an “ow.”
She kicked me on the shin. I let out another “ow.” Our actions were slow and cumbersomely rhythmic.
“Come on now, come on. Stop it, stop it,” her husband ran into the apartment,
grabbed his wife by her free arm, and pulled her away. “Just stop it
now,” he ordered, giving me the flash of an annoyed look for ruining their
vacation.
I turned my back and returned to
cooking, my heartbeat fast, body limp, heart smiling. After all these years, I
stood my ground, and it felt like a tumorous glacier of correctness started melting,
leaving me lightheaded.
“Let’s get our things and go,” she
said to her husband and daughter. When they were in the car, she screamed
“crazy bitch,” out the window, so I ran out of my apartment with my carton of
eggs and threw them one by one at their car, hitting the back window, trunk,
tire. When she got out of the car and made a gesture to run back at me, I threw
another egg that whizzed past her head.
I stood proudly on my balcony,
throwing eggs at a world I never thought friendly. Not anymore! The world
wasn’t ruffled by my violence; there was enough room on the horizon to throw at
it what I wanted. The sun-soaked sky was a glassy blue, and
scattered clouds moved across it like a school of fish. “Just passing by,” they
seemed to say as the wind pushed them over the tips of the redwoods and into
oblivion. The world wouldn’t contract, lash out, or hold up a disapproving
finger like its human counterparts tended to do; it welcomed my violence, bad
words, and hurt and angry heart, having waited long to receive them.
Into the distance, where the bay swirled
its way to the grumbling Pacific Ocean, I heard in the early morning hours when
traffic on Highway 101 was non-existent, I excommunicated all the correctness
that kept me rigid from cell to soul, dooming my dried-up emotions to that of a
living ghost. I remembered a quote from one of my favorite English actresses, Charlotte
Rampling: “The best remedy for any sort of pain is to let it happen to you.
Resistance of pain, either physical or psychological, is the most painful.”
My next-door neighbor, a student at the local college, stepped on his balcony and smiled. I smiled back as I took another egg from the carton and threw it hard and fast into the horizon like I did when I pitched softball games in my youth. I was a divorced mother of two young adults who recently graduated from college; still, that didn’t figure in my ludicrous, age-inappropriate, and glorious actions.
When my niece turned around to look, I saw the painful expression in her eyes, and I screamed out, “Not, you, Issa,” before blowing her a kiss. Then I took the last egg in the carton and pitched it past my sister’s moving car into a clear, California-blue sky.
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