Socks

A few selected life moment coming together to form a mini-memoir.

Socks

               I was twenty years old when my mother finally admitted they had loved my brother more when we were growing up.

“You were always so sad,” she had said,

“I never understood how any person could be as sad as you were, and you were just a little person.”

But she had to understand, of course, because I was born in her spitting image. I was born with her bad blood running through my veins and with her hazel eyes, with her propensity to drown in some self-created black hole of never quite being happy. I was a sad child. That is, if that word “sad” can fully capture the image of a small girl at eight years old perched on the two-story windowsill of a red-sided house, head poked precariously out and looking down at the patchy grass and dirt below, thinking about jumping for what was only the first time. Certainly not the last. Depression like that can wake you up in the middle of the night and leave you gasping from the way it winds its way around your heart and chokes out anything but itself. So, most days you can square your shoulders a bit and hope that the motion distracts enough from perpetuity of the down-turned corners of your mouth.

When I turned fifteen, I was in the later stages of having healed from an eating disorder. It was that year that I started dating him. We had known each other for several years before this, playing around with the pre-pubescent romanticized idea of a crush. He would send me poems that I didn’t understand and I knew he didn’t write, even though he said he did. Somewhere in between start and finish of him and I, fear made its home with me. He would come in to see me at the restaurant in which I worked and he would call me a s**t for wearing eyeliner and he would smile, hands fisted and slow burning hatred alight in his eyes.

“I was going to bring a gun today,” he had said one morning “and shoot myself in front of you.”

“That would have showed you.”

My father thought I was trying to kill myself; he would come into my room to kiss me goodbye in the mornings when I was still asleep, and I would feel his hand gently covering the new red slashes on my arms. I was freshly minted seventeen. I felt as if I was watching the world melt around me, forming itself into something so grotesquely foreign that I wanted nothing more than to run away from it, and it showed. So, I was handed over to the uncaring hands of medical professionals. “Those,” the gray-haired doctor had said, “will never go away.” As if I lacked some basic and fundamental understanding of existence. I had stared at her as humiliation pressed my mouth into a thin line and my hands grasped the edges of my hospital gown and pulled it tighter around my sides. They took my clothes and my shoes away. They let me keep my socks on; tiny, striped with black and red and brand new.

“Have you ever wanted to kill yourself?” One of the doctors prodded.

“The thought never crossed my mind.” I stated, painting on feigned indignation like make-up.

Soon enough, I was freed from that atrocious ten-sizes-sizes-too-big hospital gown and guided to my parents’ car. I ran to my room as soon as I was home, and sat silently for hours. I looked at my socks; dirty from shuffling around the hospital, dirty from the memory of my father laughing as I grabbed the edges of that disgusting gown and pulled it closed to cover my back as I was lead though the hallways with tears soaking my face, and I threw them away.