I could've been born.

A Story by cellardork

The beginning of a story of a girl, who is lost in her own world, in her own skin.

I could have been born 120 years ago into a world that wouldn’t recognize me as human. I might have been a black girl with a coffee bean complexion warm and smooth. I might have had coarse brown hair that fell around my face in tight curls, or I could’ve came into this world as a Jewish child born only to fall in a war that the world didn’t understand and even now most can’t fathom. I might have been a statistic in a history book or a pair of dirty shoes in a pile. It might have been my fate to be conceived unwanted as a result of a drunken one night stand where kisses that taste like apple vodka on the lips of under aged drinkers fumbling in the dark to music their parents don’t approve of. I might have been nothing more but a pink plus sign and a trip down town to a clinic, where people leave their past mistakes behind. I wasn’t though.
I’m instead a middle class white girl; I went to public school in a small town south of Atlanta. I grew up in hot Georgia summers I wore pink sunburnt shoulders and bare feet. I grew out my long brown hair wavy and knotted because I didn’t brush it and no one else did either. I have scars from skinned up knees and thoughtless words, but my story isn’t so unusual. In fact I know so many girls like myself, so many stories told in notes passed in school hallways and whispers on the back of school busses and tears in the eyes of my friends who don’t know why they were born into this life. Who don’t know why they are here, why they have pain. We won’t be statics in history books, we will be lawyers and librarians and nurses and mothers and school teachers to children who will be hurt the way we are hurting and will have thoughts like our thoughts. That’s not true of all of us though, some will be white lilies at funerals and a nightly story on the news, burdens to grandparents and faceless numbers that are owned by the state till our eighteenth birthday where we will be cast out into the world left to our own devices.
My mother named me Carolynn, and then she died for years later leaving me and my two older brothers to be raised by my father. My father is something like a string tied around my finger, a gentle reminder of things that have once been but are not any longer. He has kind brown eyes that wrinkle when he smiles and a loud boisterous laugh that embarrassed me in theaters but now as an adult I miss it when the lights dim. When I think of my father I only remember the good, I only wish for the best, I only dwell for a moment then I blow out the thought like a candle so that the hot wax doesn’t burn my fingers. My father lives in a house down the street from my own, I live with my grandmother. To understand my great grandmother mama kay you would have to have a slice of her pound cake. Her pound cake is the best dessert one could hope to eat; it is sweet and melts in your mouth. Each bite is full of sugar and warm intensions. Mama kay is much the same, she is beautiful with old tired hands and old tired eyes and a voice like an old southern woman that’s been working too long. She is giving when she has none and she is forgiveness when you deserve none. Mama kay like everyone else calls me carol.