Sometimes I suppose I envied their brokenness. They could say, 'look at me, I'm functioning despite this,' Their this, whatever it was. Like Ellie, with her alcoholic mother and absent father and her cutting. She was something, a cutter. And Craig, of course, with his abusive father and dead parents and mental illness. Jimmy with his useless legs and trauma of the school shooting. Paige and her rape. This is what they had, the event to get over, to get beyond, to move away from. Not that I wanted any of those things to have happened to me. But nothing had and I didn't feel whole, either. But I had no excuses. Sometimes you just need an excuse. 'I'm sorry but I can't. Not today. I'm damaged,' They had something to focus on when they got bored, something to cower away from in their minds, something for their character to grow on. What did I have? Only mind numbing normalcy.
They got to have these extreme moments to submerse themselves in, and they could go as deep as they wanted to. Ellie could conjure up the image of her mother in a stupor on the couch surrounded by empty bottles of cheap vodka. Jimmy could hear the echo of the bullet in the hall, the sound bouncing off the lockers as he ran away. Craig could feel his father's fist connect with his body again and again. Paige could feel that extreme moment of penetration and her 'no', unheard even in the courtroom two years later.
What about me? Normal little Ashley, unharmed, untested. Could I go to school and take a science test after a beating? Could I go to art class and practice drawing figures in motion after being undone by one of my mother's drunken tirades, my arms covered in scabs and sores? Could I plan the entry of my band in a contest after being raped? Could I listen to my friends' problems after losing the functioning of the lower half of my body? I don't know that I could do these things. I didn't know how deep my reserves went.
Maybe all my trauma and troubles awaited me, when I would be able to deal with them, unlike my damaged friends. How well could Craig take his mother's death at 11? How old would I be when my mother died? In my thirties? Forties? Paige was raped before she ever had a healthy sexual relationship. If I'm raped someday by the mythical masked figure in the alley way holding a knife, hopefully I would have had years of healthy sexual functioning behind me, that I could fall back on. They were all too young for these things to have happened. Maybe older people can withstand such things. Of course I didn't know. I was only 16. Maybe things got worse as the years went by, everything lost its shiny newness, everything took on the sepia tones of boredom. Maybe the traumas pile up until you're a nervous screaming old lady in a nursing home.
I wanted a shiny tragedy to make me the center of attention, sometimes. Of course that thought is dark and nearly unthinkable. What would I do without my stable and loving parents? How could I function without their support? I saw how Craig and Ellie and even Jimmy functioned with their parents. Their abusive and neglectful parents, and I saw how they shied away from certain things like commitment.
And I guess we get back to it. Sometimes I longed for an excuse to crawl into myself, to not let anyone in. To say, 'no, leave me alone, I'm damaged, I'm broken, I need consideration because of this thing that happened to me,' When I was little I went to the University with my mom, and they had a war refugee there from Bosnia, a girl in a faded and worn wool sweater and she was brittle thin, like she hadn't eaten enough protein, like she'd lived on cabbages and roots during the war, and her neck was so slender, and a door slammed or a book dropped and she jumped. Sometimes I wanted to be like her, beautiful and cracked, like a chipped Ming vase, I wanted something I couldn't explain.
I wanted the same validity that Craig and Ellie had because they had suffered. Craig's dad beat him and that made him real. Ellie cut herself and that made her real. What made me real? What said I was here? I was loved and cherished, I was taken loving care of. No one drank when they should have been caring for me. No one threw me into walls and hit me with belts. No one shot at me down the long hallway. No one took all my yeses for granted and ignored the last no.
In this damaged world my health was a liability. Would I come to expect continued health and prosperity when that was unrealistic? At least Jimmy and Ellie and Paige and Craig knew what to expect. People hurt you. People went out of their way to hurt you. People would catch you up in their alcoholic insanity, their loss of the temper, their violence and brutality. People would cause you to become crippled in whatever fashion, physical or mental or both, and hobbled they'd send you back into the world with a better understanding of it. I had no understanding, I feared, but I glimpsed something terrible just over the horizon, something nameless eating all of our good air and gobbling the oil and scorching the trees. Something that blighted the crops and dulled the senses, something that couldn't be stopped, reasoned with, or even clearly seen. I felt a diffuse fear, and unlike my friends, I had nothing concrete to pin it on. I sometimes thought that if I had a tragedy I'd find one moment of relief.