DIVORCED PARENTS

DIVORCED PARENTS  (Originally posted on may 13th 2005)

I remember coming back from school when I was ten years old, if my grandma’s house (where I lived since I was 3 years old until 12) was empty and no one opened the door I immediately thought I had no place to live in anymore, I used to imagine my grandparents and uncles and my mother leaving the house secretly while I was on school, so they wouldn’t have to see me anymore. It seems really stupid now but it really terrified me, I just wanted to hold on to something until I could see a familiar face again. After my parents divorced when I was 3, I didn’t see my dad often, maybe only a few hours once or twice a month. I used to spend most of the time alone in one of the rooms at my grandmother’s house, playing with a little keyboard my mom gave me for Xmas, but somehow human mind always manages to do what it wants to do, and in my case it made me feel I didn’t know where I belong. 

 

Everything was confusing and blurry and the only thought of walking in the street always made my stomach hurt. I think I was one of the most insecure persons on earth, in school I always got all the cliché crap about not having a dad or being skinny and a sissy, because I wasn’t good at sports or stupid stuff like that, all the cruel comments I pretended I didn’t hear and all the fights I didn’t want to have made me want to give up going to school. Sometimes I even volunteered to help with the classroom cleaning labors so I could walk home when everybody was already gone and then I was safe from the tough kids.

 

 At home life wasn’t any better, my mom wasn’t around much because she worked all day, and when she was around she was fighting with grandma and then she went upstairs and cried. I watched her silently tons of times, but what’s a 10 year old geek to do about that? The experience of failed attempts to comfort her told me to play the lonely version of seek-and-hide so I wouldn’t become an extra annoyance. Soon I learned to keep everything to myself, if my dad would stood me up on a Saturday morning then I thought, “well, I am sure something important came up”....... every fucking week. When I went over some friend’s house to play I always felt like I was inferior to them, “hey, they have all these things in their lives, and I don’t, can I know why??” I have a lot of friends whose parents are divorced and I dunno what they think, but to me life sucked big time until I was 16, and I don’t know if the divorce had something to do with it but I am sure I don’t want to be a 10 year old ever again.

 

 When I turned 12 we moved out of grandmas. Just me and my mother and I started to notice I felt more comfortable while I was playing my songs or listening to music, and it worked for me, the more I got into it the more I forgot about all the demons in my head. It started to think “ hey, maybe I am not completely a mistake, maybe life is not all about pain and regret, and fear, maybe I can kill these fears.... maybe. I had found shelter in other place else besides inside of me. Maybe I could stop being scared of people. What if I can really stop wishing I were someone else? What would it be like? I went through all kinds of shit and back where I started, and I cannot find the answers yet. 

 

Now, being supposedly a grown-up  I look at my parents, I see my dad and his family and I try to understand how can a man neglect his son in his first years of life, I know it must have been hard for him too, going through all that so young. Every time I go to my father’s house I get the same old crap about my glasses, my clothes, my hair, my piercing, everything, I am never good enough, he says I look like a homeless, but I don’t really care anymore. I see the pictures at his house, with his daughters on the family trips, and suddenly I get this sensation of cold, coming up from my chest, pressing it, going all the way up to my throat, feels like choking, I never had that, then why the fuck do I miss it? I cannot understand it at all. 

 

Mom did everything she could to keep it normal, bless her for that. All this came to my mind because last night I went with my cousins to the town fair, and all the little kids were riding the carrousel and the little train and it reminded me of the day mom took me there and waved me goodbye while standing there alone every time the little giraffe I was riding passed by her side. She used to smile and wave to her little kid, but when I turned my head to see, it seemed a lot like crying.

 

Soundtrack: Antony and the Johnsons_another world