"Some people never go crazy. What truly horrible lives they must lead."
PROLOGUE
It wasn’t so hard to tell anymore. I don’t mean to be vague. I mean my story. My story wasn’t so hard to tell anymore. I even feel unshakeable when I begin to delve into my horrendous past now. It had taken therapy, counseling, medication, and just about everything else that you could say was the mark of a crazy person. I had, in fact, gone mad. I had gone so far mad that I had begun to construct a cozy cottage in the folds of madness. My story felt a bit like Alice in Wonderland, but I can only say “a bit”. There are differences, and the differences first seem minute, but they become quite major. Firstly, the creative creatures and characters one meets in the (quirky) classic do not come close to encompassing the people in my (also quirky) story. Also, Alice found madness while chasing after a white cotton-tail. I, however, found madness with a strong shove towards the ground; and upon searching for the confidence to get back up, I found a hole into which I fell. And finally, Alice did not believe herself to be mad. In fact, Alice believed herself to be very intact. And not just intact, but she initially believed herself to be above the creatures of Wonderland. Yet I did not only feel the madness capture me, I felt it enchant me. The madness which I found in the free-fall, I greeted warmly. The gentle wind whipping at my neck, sweeping the hair from my face felt like a hug. And the creatures I met were not only beautiful enough to take my breath away, but were mad enough to seem superior. Superiorly mad. They exuded superior insanity that I recognized immediately. Their madness earned my respect, not my fear, not my contempt, not my pity, but my respect.
They were valiantly mad. They were greatly insane in the way that some were overwhelmingly typical. They neither knew time, nor space, nor any stretch of humanity to which I had previously been accustomed. They had no means by which to judge me and found no reason to punish me. They could no more cast me outward than they could help themselves from pulling me inward. They had forgotten these concepts. No, they hadn’t. They hadn’t forgotten them…they’d rejected them. They’d rejected the concepts of rejection and cruelty. The faith they threw into me was conjured up from the rejection they’d felt and experienced throughout their previous lives. And it was when I looked into the eyes of the Mad Hatter and hookah-smoking caterpillar that I felt home, and the things I had always known fell away to the insanity that had embraced me. And the life I knew became the life I had before. My prologue and nothing more. My introduction at most. Alice and I share this: falling down the hole was not the climax of either of our stories. It was the beginning.
ONE
First, I think I should tell you how I found the entrance to this hidden land in more detail. I should explain how it happened. It’s not that it’s overtly important, but I assume you’d like to know. At least, I think it’s likely you’re interested.
It began on a day similar to most of the other days in that lifetime. I was probably wearing a slightly sullen look on my face, probably finding it a chore to blink or breathe. My body felt so heavy back then. My motions and actions were so slow and puppet-like. It took a cause great enough to tug the strings attached to my arms for my arms to lift. I remember slumping down into a chair that late morning in September. I felt particularly weighed down that day. It was the musty air; it was the sunlight that poured into the window and caused me to wince that filled me with less inspiration daily. I remember sighing and watching his large hands as they made each deliberate move. He tried to get me to cheer up as he handed me a cup of coffee and a single fried egg. The two pieces of bacon on the left side of my plate were cold, but I choked them down as best I could. I burnt my tongue on the coffee he’d offered, and stood.
“I have to go. I have an early class.”
He nodded. My dad wasn’t the speaking type.
“I should be home for dinner.”
He nodded again. Further proving his lack of words was his greatest characteristic.
“You need me to get anything while I’m out?”
He shook his head no.
“Are you working today?”
He shrugged, and then reluctantly responded with words, “I haven’t gotten a call yet.”
My dad worked for a construction company, but his schedule was spotty at best. He was never officially hired by the company, so the work he got was rare. This is exactly why we were nearly out of beer all the time.
“Maybe you will. I have a good feeling about today,” I choked out.
“Jasp,” he said through his teeth, “don’t you ever lie to me.”
I smiled at his easy way of reading my lies. “I’m just trying to help.”
“Baby, you were practically born in this house. You know it well as I, and can’t you see that the only way it’s changed is that it’s fallen further apart?”
I walked towards him. He was sitting in a chair—his chair. I leant down and kissed his forehead. He put his hand on my hip and pulled his toothpick from his mouth. He did this once a week, and only once a week. He pulled my face down to his, and he looked into my eyes just before he pressed his lips against my cheek. I waited until his hand fell from my face before I straightened my spine and backed away. This was always the best day of my week. The day my father looked me in the eyes and his southern hardness gave way to my mother’s old southern softness.
My parents were both from Georgia; they’d grown up there together. My dad always told me that they fell in love the day they met. Not the moment, but the day. He had never said more than that, not until one peculiar day. It was the anniversary of my mother’s death—my birthday. My dad had already bought me a cake with ice cream. He even splurged and bought me a leather bound journal. He didn’t explain his gift. He didn’t even smile when I opened it. He just said simply, “I thought it looked like you” the way that most people spoke of a sweater. It was then that he began to tell me how much he loved my mother, and how he thought it was impossible to love someone any more than he loved her.
“But then, I met you,” he said, “and even as you were covered in the horrible things I will not describe to you…It was as if I hated your mother. Because I can’t begin to describe to you the way I gravitated towards you. The way that I had a hard time even letting you go to be washed. I hated that nurse that took you from my arms, and I hated your mother for keeping you to herself for nine months.” I remember smiling fondly at this. “But I hadn’t had time to memorize your features. You know I’m a little slow. So, I walked to your mother, and I lied on the bed next to her. But she looked wrong. She looked something awful. And only a few minutes later, the beeping stopped. One nurse looked at me with teary eyes and mouthed an apology. And it was then that I realized that you were the new woman in my life. My new gal. And I can’t help but be honest to the point of sounding hateful…but you were so, so much better.”
It was that birthday, my ninth, that my dad first began to put his hand on my hip and kiss my cheek once every week. I never knew my mother, but it was those days that I always felt closest to her and her memory.
And that day in September was no exception.
I felt closest to her in the moments that my car was t-boned. It was in her memory that I felt my body explode. It was in her memory that I felt the blinding pain that takes a human from a normal state to what they call a coma. It was in her memory that steel compressed around me, the air bags failing to deploy, failing to protect me. It was broken bones and the taste of blood that sprung me from her memory so rapidly. It was the horrible noise that metal makes when they pry it apart. It was the way that my eyes saw things my mind could not process. Not then, not ever. I met her in her memory, and she walked me towards death. It was the face I had memorized from old photos that I saw. It was in her memory that I died.
It was only minutes after he had watched my ancient car pull away from the driveway that he must have gotten the call. That he must have heard his pulse rising in his ears. That he must have felt a fear he hadn’t felt in years. He must’ve come to feel so helplessly small. And when he saw me. When he saw me, he must have felt so entirely worthless. He must have felt so entirely lacking. Or maybe he felt nothing because he didn’t see me. Maybe he was having an out-of-body experience. Maybe he was seeing the pieces of me, unaware that it was me.
These are the things I am sure he saw:
He saw men pulling my lifeless body from an unrecognizable hunk of steel.
He saw them checking my vital signs, making decisions about my body.
He saw them decide that I was not gone yet.
He saw them move a broken girl with the gentleness they must have forced themselves to come up with. I have never understood the way they lifted me so calmly while their pulses raised higher and higher.
He saw them slide me into an ambulance.
He saw them force my lungs to fill with air.
He saw them thrust their fists against my chest.
He saw them slide tubes down my throat.
He saw them slam shut the doors of that ambulance.
He did not see their success in waking me. He did not see the way that they were able to revive me. He did not see their efforts in making me less terrifying. He never saw them save me; he only saw them take me.
It was in the hospital that it must have hit him. It must have hit him that he was really going to lose me too. And when I say it hit him, I mean, it must have sacked him, tackled him. I was a body. I was the body of his daughter, but I was not his daughter. How could he possibly feel what he felt for the girl I was for that body? For what was left of me.
How could he love the girl inside the body that took two weeks to come back to him?
