A/N- My first CJ fic. I've been wanting to try and intertwine her personal history with some of the neighborhood's real life history, since both are quite turbulent. It's a bit rambly, I know. I'd love some suggestions as to how to improve it and make it more interesting/original.
Don't Look Back in Anger
God, you know, he always comes up with something. All hail the head shrinker. The bellhop who hoists my emotional baggage as I check in and out of the Breakdown Hotel. This time he's decided that all my memories revolve around trauma in some way.
And I'm not saying he's wrong. I mean, I break my life up case-by-case the way school kids break it up grade by grade. And okay, I had a rough childhood, even before my mother died.
He asked me for my earliest memory. Now, I can remember snippets of my toddler-hood, but the first complete memory was my first day of school.
It was 1974. Both of them walked me over to St. Brigid's School. Most kids were kept home, even the Catholic school kids. Some did it as part of the protest, some just didn't want to let their kids walk the streets with all that was happening. I remember big yellow buses, the kind I saw on TV. I'd never seen them in person. Boston never used them until then. Kids, the older ones, and their parents, lined the streets. Throwing rocks, chasing the buses with baseball bats, Malatov cocktails exploding in their wake. I was five. It was scary, but there was a carnival atmosphere, too. There were rows of policemen on motorcycles, just like at the St. Patrick's Day parade. "Here we go, Southie, here we go!" "Hell no, Southie won't go!"
As I waited to cross the street, Dad holding one hand, Mom holding the other, I watched the buses go by. I felt small in my plaid jumper and knee socks. "I want to go home." My father squeezed my hand. I saw a dark face peering out a bus window, blood pouring down the side of her head. Our eyes met. She held up the big rock that had hit her, wounded her. She glared at me with the kind of hatred I'd never seen before. I was only five.
As the last bus passed we began to cross. The people who had lined the streets poured into them. Shouting, throwing things. The cops streamed in, some from the motorcade abandoned their motorcycles. They leapt at the people in the street with their clubs. The people and police fighting each other. Cops, like my father, beating kids and mothers. Pistol-whipping them. Clubbing them. We were caught in the fray. My mother grabbed my hand, dragged me down H Street back to our house where we saw my father battling with the others on TV. Every news station in the city was showing hell breaking loose two blocks away.
I never made it to school that day. It felt like the world had gone insane, but I found out it was only my neighborhood. Years later they'd do op-ed pieces on the busing riots and the new, integrated South Boston. But all I knew at the time was that people were hurt and bleeding and cops like my daddy were hitting kids in the street.
And, of course, my mom would be dead five years later. No mother to protect me, to drag me home when it got dangerous. The memory of cops fighting kids, my dad caught in the middle, the memory of that bastard Malden holding my hand as he walked me into DSS, my father downtown in handcuffs. Who can blame me for turning out a bit guarded? Does that mean my whole life was trauma?
You know, Lily and Stiles are always after me to let go, to move on. They have their theories as to why I'm like this. And everyone else writes me off as moody or complicated. But they don't know what it's like to be older than your mother. They say the biggest tragedy is when a parent buries a child. What about when I child stares 35 in the face and realizes she's outlived her parent. From now on there will be no precedent. The next birthday celebrates what she never had. The rest of my life will be measured by the years she didn't live.
Lily, Stiles, Garrett, none of them have measured their lives in semi-annual tragedies. So maybe they can observe me and maybe they can see me self-destructing. Maybe they can tell I'm waiting for the proverbial other shoe to drop. But until they've spent their first day of school hiding from a race riot, until they've outlived their mothers, until they've lived with the specter of mental illness and murder hiding just around the next milestone, how can they say to move on?
I'm not traumatized just because I've got some baggage. I've had good times. I have. I just choose not to ignore certain darker aspects of life. All lives, not just my own. And I don't want pity.
I just want to hold my mother's hand, to have her drag me away from a world gone insane. To just sit with her and watch hell break loose and television.