Child of the Bottle

  Death is neither friend nor foe; but it can be a companion.   I awoke to the sound of my grandmother simultaneously screaming and crying as well as a loud, snoring-like sound. It was close to midnight in late February of 1989 (I was 13), and I was about to look at death up close and personal. I was in the bedroom with my grandparents and, as I turned the light on, I saw her standing over him in a panic. I moved her aside and felt my grandfather’s chest. His heart was beating, but tremendously fast. I remember saying something to that fact while calling his name and shaking him. But as the moments drained on, reality started setting in: The person who was a father figure to me was dead. For a brief moment, everything slowed down and stopped. I looked at his body and instinctively knew that that body did not contain my grandfather anymore. As time sped back up, my grandmother went into the bathroom and vomited while I called my mother to explain to her the situation...

  One of the greatest ways of supporting isolationism is by idolizing it.   How does an individual cope with the stress of being taken out of one environment and put into a new, completely different one? For me, it wasn’t too difficult: I developed an overactive imagination that became my reality. The move from living with my mother to moving in with my grandparents could have been entitled “A Tale of Two Cities” in which there were very few comparisons between the two. From an unstructured environment where I could play out late and the parties never seemed to stop, to an environment bereft of any emotional expression; unless they were in the forms of outbursts by my grandmother or various racist rans by my grandfather (we lived in a small town where any non-white family was scared away by waking up to burning crosses in their yards in the middle of the night). Of the two, I attached myself to the emotional outbursts and left the racism to my grandfather. It was there...

  The seed planted in the desert may grow, but you may not like what it grows into.   Memory is a funny thing, isn’t it? Some dreams feel like life and life sometimes feels like a dream. Some of my earliest memories are skewed, just like everyone else. But I do remember never having an actual sense of safety. There was always something in the air that permeated underlying tension. Almost as if people were always arguing out of sight and in other rooms. As memory started taking hold, that “sense” turned into concrete experiences. From as far back as I can remember, there was always some form of drug/drugs in any household I lived in. Until I was 9, I remember living with my mother, who found herself in and out of relationships. It was then that I first caught a glimpse of how to perceive relational cycles. In the case of my mother: attract people, pull them in, make them need her, then push them away until they never came back. Rinse and repeat.   I could see this pr...