I spent years trying to deal with things that didn’t make sense, but often told I made too much of things. Knowing the truth today helps, but so much wasted time spent trying to understand things that I knew didn’t make sense but could not find answers for. The experiences that didn’t make sense fall into place now knowing the big lie everyone knew that I didn’t. The big filthy lie everyone agreed to when this all started. My 20yr marriage was a scam, all a setup started as revenge by a cousin that molested me and spent his life seeking revenge not only against me but the sexual abuse and violence he suffered and the Heroin abuse he did to cover it all up.
The porch seems the same on the old abandoned boarded up house my cousins used to rent, but old worn dirty from years of neglect. The door seems smaller, I guess because I was smaller too. We would sit on this porch eating sherbet ice cream from Stewart’s across the street. I would have orange sherbet on a sugar cone and my cousin would have raspberry. By then we stopped going to the New Pool swimming. It wasn’t so new anymore, but all those years I loved riding my bike to the park and swimming then riding bikes home; tan, happy, wanting to spend my babysitting money on a cone from Stewart’s. We're older now and going to the New Pool is for kids. I was 13yrs old, my cousin 14 and her older brother 21yrs old.
The secrets linger in the cold air that pushes up through the broken floorboards that keep me shivering in the night. I came back after trying to make a new start in Maine, but after scammed and assaulted again and denied again the ability to buy my home, I decided to come back to peacefully protest. My ex and his brother decided to sell our home after telling the judge he wanted it. It was Christmas, they listed it on my birthday—their cruelty intense. It should have been mine he never wanted it, but just like everything else that didn’t make sense deliberately making me homeless had been the plan from the start. The wind moves through the broken boarded up windows making strange noises, faint sounds of girls laughing, and the violence that silently demands a reckoning.
I rode my bike everywhere then, so happy after saving up from my summer youth job "CETA" for disadvantaged kids to buy the beautiful root beer color, Schwinn. It fit me like a glove—a second skin. We would wait until the light turned yellow and sail down one of the steepest hills on our way home—freedom and thrill, the joyful days of summer. I felt most alive riding my bike, escaping the violence at home, going wherever I wanted. It seems so dangerous now, what if someone ran the light, but things like that didn't occur back then in the same way that the sexual overtures from my older cousin lacked the dangerousness that later I would come to be terrorized by. I didn't have the words then for what he was doing, he was older, always around yet aloof—an adult. Had I known I would have stayed away from him for good when my mother left their uncle and moved on to her next boyfriend, but here I was talked into being friends again, which was odd because we were supposedly family, but looking back I know now I was never family in the traditional sense of the word.
Sitting on the same porch now; dirty, homeless, and alone, those Summer days seem like a dream. Like watching clouds on a Summer day as they drift in and out then disappear as I try to reconcile the memories. As I try to reconcile the fact I was in so much danger, but really didn't know.
Last summer I gave a stick to a really large turtle, you know how they tell you to give them sticks. I was close to 50yrs old before I realized Turtles can move really fast if they want to and can be very dangerous. I laugh at the memory, but it's that kind of thing that can seemingly be nice, but then you have no idea the extent of the dangerousness of what is going on. My ex bolted into our lakehouse knowing as boys often do about those kinds of things. Here I was giving the turtle the stick thinking how cool it was and doing the right thing, but clueless. We see them up North slowly crossing the road and think they are so slow and yet they can be so fast, take a chunk out of you and mess you up so bad. Memories are like that when we're kids, your so young and just don't have the experience, words, or knowledge to know the full extent of what seems okay, but yet is in fact very dangerous. My ex never told me about the turtle. He in fact never told me about a lot of things, his lies had become so dangerous in my life they almost killed me, much like the Turtle that day. We do really walk by faith, probably a good thing because if we knew how it all would go what then would be the grace of what is love. We would only want to avoid the darkness but thereby not experience the light—things happen for a reason. I was angry after finding out about the Turtle, but as I sit here writing this, the experience of being with the dangerous Turtle and having she or him not sure what it was so friendly was cool, I like to think the Turtle liked me, but it might have taken my finger off. My God why don't they tell people that these Turtles look so slow on the roads, but can move so fast. It's one of those things I guess. I was always stopping trying to save them.
Things were always somehow dirty. These insinuations I was dirty started young. I wasn’t allowed to see my father, family, or anyone connected to my life after my mother left him. She had a new boyfriend right away, my 1/2 brothers born pretty quickly afterward and I was thrust into getting along with all of them. It was my responsibility I didn’t have family, which already implied I was to blame and subsequently that I was somehow dirty because of it. I never understood this sexual undertone as a girl, how I could be blamed for my mother's sex life but I was. If you had asked me back then all I knew was how to try and explain my 1/2 siblings and I had different last names, something people asked about right away and it was always a big deal. I just never understood why it was my fault, but I assumed the blame. My cousins took full advantage of this and not having a family meant not being wanted meant being “dirty.” It was dirty to talk about as if it was my sex life that was up for discussion and not the adults involved. Somehow their sexual decisions became reason to treat me as somehow to blame because after all—I was the result and not wanted. This made me very aware at a young age, sex was never casual—I lived with its consequences all the time.
I went to Stewart’s and got a coffee remembering how it used to be. The fancy little tables for ice cream my grandmother would clean when she worked for them explaining how to ring up customers. My “Gram” so cool in her fancy uniform, stockings, and little white apron. She was a manager, quite the accomplishment for a woman back then, especially one that only went to seventh grade. Everything so clean, so sophisticated—how did I get so dirty?
18% left—my life revolves around how much charge I have left on my iPhone. My life is staying pieced together by my ability to keep it all tethered by the pieces I'm able to keep by making it digital because so much keeps being stolen and ripped apart. I feel like a digital nomad, moving from place to place to find my home—my connection.
I’m practicing writing on my iPhone now like I use to practice typing on my laptop. I'm getting better with my thumbs. Who would you listen to if you only had 13%? I laugh because often I have to make those hard decisions as my charge or connection is cut and I'm searching for another to keep myself going; whether it's paying bills, ordering some food, crying to my digital friends about the nightmare my life has become or needing to research yet another way to make money and put a roof over my head that has become part of the nightmare after my ex deliberately made me homeless. I still have trouble editing. I can't take too long to write anymore like I used to, whether it's my connection time or the fact I'm usually on the go now not knowing how long I will be in one place. I tell myself as long as the words go on the page the editing can come later, but I like to be good at what I do and it's humbling to have my old friend the Grammer monsters take me out. I never thought I could write in school because to me being a writer meant being a Grammarian and after my favorite English teacher from NYC was fired for being so different, I actually learned something that year, I believed I would never write. I was not only too different but really bad at Grammar. I still am after all these years of learning, but after Journal writing for so many years and 20yrs of my journals stolen on purpose, the need to write gets stronger all the time. Now more than ever as I piece my life back together after all the lies with my writing and patiently going through the stories and memories letting go of the lies and replacing them with the truth, which is healing.
My blogging now will finally be all mobile on my iPhone and not just my laptop, so I can more easily write and not have to worry about dragging my laptop everywhere. My writing more accessible will make it easier to write. I miss writing every day like I used to; pen, spiral notebook, and nice cup of coffee—there are so many things I miss lately. I’m still getting over not living in my home. I'm now also getting over not living in a hotel or in my case, I wasn’t living there but staying. My bank account reflecting that hotels were way more expensive than the apartments I rented. As rents continue to rise staying in a hotel wasn’t so extravagant but actually rather cool, but I was still too poor to stay in one other than a vacation, and because I was still looking for a place to live this stay wasn’t really a vacation. I was spending my small retirement and it was in a Pandemic, so having fun wasn't happening even though I tried to have my wine, see the ocean and enjoy having my room cleaned periodically, which was a luxury.
My dream of being like Patti Smith living in the Chelsea Hotel was ending pretty quickly. It was cool while it lasted though. It was so much better than the room I tried to rent, which turned out to be a disaster that I barely escaped with my life. I had thought a college town would have lots of rooms that I could make a fresh start and move forward with my life, but that's not what happened. Being made deliberately homeless sets you up for more abuse, especially today as sexual assaults become part of the landscape in ways that really didn't exist when I was younger. Not that the bad guys weren't around, but they were obvious. The guys you were told to stay away from in the community or when you went out. Today the good guys can be the bad guys and look and act like the good guys—you just never know today. Many are often charming and very nice initially, which is what happened to me once again. Learning how these predators operate helps. This one referred to me as a "Shiksha," which is a whore to Jewish Men. I had no idea and while he was initially so nice and understanding turned out to be a vicious predator trolling Craigslist. I had found the room through "Roomster" an online App, but it takes you to Craigslist and becomes a scam. It’s a pattern lately, things that seem like one thing but are actually another. Turtles, Apps, predators, and Men I think are nice, but in fact, are very dangerous.
In the same way when we’re kids we aren’t told that family can be predators. That family can be dangerous. That what you think and what your told about your family is not the truth at all. It’s like believing Turtles are always slow because you just always see them slowing crossing a road and never seeing them darting back into the woods. Blended families are like that. It became a popular word recently for these relationships, but after having grown up in one it’s more like the Turtle, can seem one way but also violently another.
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