Kaleidoscope Thoughts

Trigger warning: this story contains subject material that may be upsetting such as sexual abuse, substance abuse, suicide/self harm.

I have never been good with beginnings. Maybe this is why things panned out the way they did. Maybe it’s why I left without any hesitation.

On a Monday afternoon in late August, I filled up my gas tank with every dollar I had, threw all of my clothes in the backseat of my Monte Carlo, and started driving west. I had not had a cell phone in six months so I relied on a map I found at a gas station, stretched across the passenger seat. Against my better judgment I had spent money on a Slim Jim, the result of an intense craving I’d had for days. I was trying not to think too much about that, along with the scrape of nausea that had ached for days.

The Monte Carlo had not been insured in months either, and had spent all of its time parked in my aunt Carla’s garage, where I had been living previously. Neglected, while I whittled away to nothing in the great halls of the Grant County Rehab. I had fucked up and overdosed. I had just found out that day that my ex boyfriend Jacob was cheating on me. I always measured my drugs right, but that night I had added just a little bit more, giddy with the thoughts of Jacob finding me dead and knowing it was his all his fault.

Instead it had been my mom, the worst possible option if I had been given a choice of who was going to find me face down on Carla’s living room floor, foaming at the mouth. She had been carrying Narcan for a couple of years apparently, or that’s at least what Aunt Carla told me afterwards. “She had to after…” She gestured towards me, never shy of her thoughts.

“Well, I didn’t need her to. I have it all under control.”

The statement was laughable in the dim lighting of my hospital room, and so my Aunt Carla laughed.

My mom had refused to visit me while I was in the hospital, but I knew that her and Carla had talked when I saw how serious Carla looked then. “Amber, honey, this has to stop. You’re only twenty. Don’t throw your life away like this.”

She squared her shoulders then, looking at me. It felt like a challenge and so the next time the nurses asked me if I wanted to look over a pamphlet for rehab, I said yes.

I didn’t feel as confident about it all though on my first few nights there, curled up in bed, feverish and delusional, my head feeling like it was full of quicksand. A nurse, a stranger named Lorena, pressed her arms around me and I begged her, God, my mom, anyone for relief. It felt like my soul was exploding the way a star does, from the inside out, a collapse happening deep inside of me.

I called it the Reckoning and talked about it to everyone, and how I had survived. I knew a lot of the other women there had been through withdrawal, too, but I didn’t care. They stumbled around the halls like ghosts in their gowns, uttering nonsense, cheeks hollowed out by meth. I knew I was better than them. I was proving it by enduring rehab for the simple purpose of proving a point.

I was diagnosed with bipolar disorder while I was there by an old, white man with white hair who worked in an office the size of a storage closet. There was a harsh burn in the air, as if someone had scrubbed the floors and walls with bleach every morning. He asked me too many questions about my mom and so I started making up stories about her. I spent an entire hour fabricating a long and thoroughly detailed story of my mother’s short time working in a circus and how I had to do my nightly homework on a train, the smell of hay and lion piss in the air.

His name was Greg Holland. He told me to call him Dr. Holland and so I obviously had to call him Greg. Sometimes I felt bad, fucking with this old man, but he made it easy. I had always had confidence in having the upper hand, and this was more of the same.

Occasionally, I would consider leaving rehab early, bored with the same routine day after day. But then I would think about Carla’s disappointment, and maybe even worse my mother’s “told you so” she would deliver to Carla as fast as possible because my mother has never once trusted me to do anything good. I spent a lot of time in rehab thinking about my mother and how much better my life probably would have been if I had had a mom who believed in me.

Tough titty, I guessed. I was always getting the shit end of the deal. That’s what my dad always said. He spent years getting the shit end of the deal, my mother being the worst of it all, and then I was born and the curse moved on to me. He said he hated it, and maybe I should “pop one out soon” because he was tired of watching me always fuck it all up. It was really hard to watch, he made sure to emphasize to me, sucking on a cigarette and sipping from his beer, built in accessories for him.

I’m not superstitious or anything, but I made a vow then to never have a baby. What did I know about babies anyway? Screaming, pink things, always needy. I had never really been around any babies, except for my friend Jennifer’s newborn son Cole, but he had been taken by CPS a few months after he was born. I saw Jenn at a party a month later grinding on some guy, not at all phased by the loss of her son.

I had tried before to remember if there was ever a time that I actually loved my mom, and I really could never think of anything. I was sure that when I was a little girl I probably admired her, probably modeled myself after her in some way. I had probably spent nights cuddled up next to her when struck with the flu, and hugged her after blowing candles out on my birthday cakes. But there had always been a huge blank space in my head where my childhood should have been.

“Traumatic events in childhood can cause that,” Greg Holland told me one evening. The room was cold and rain was pelting the small window. I picked at a hangnail, feeling bored.

“Well, I don’t remember anything traumatic, Greg,” I allowed his name to linger in my mouth for a moment, aiming to make him feel uncomfortable. “How can I be traumatized over something that I can’t even remember?”

I shrugged my shoulders in a way that allowed my hospital gown to slip down one breast, the top half of my nipple peeking out. He scratched something in his notepad before adjusting himself in his seat. I liked to think it was because he had an erection. I smiled at him, feeling powerful. He snapped his notebook shut. “I think that’s enough for the day.”

I spent weeks after that dropping my eyes in what I hoped was an alluring way whenever I saw him in the hallway on the way in for group sessions, slipping my gown down below my shoulder, tossing my hair near him so he could smell my Johnson & Johnson shampoo. I laughed at all of his jokes and always made a point to casually touch his arm or wrist. It was a game to me then, something to help me get through the day. If I couldn’t seduce an old man, what good even was I?

I ate less during breakfast, lunch and dinner, sliding bits of my food over to the other women when we weren’t being watched. We weren’t allowed to have any mirrors, but I could feel myself slimming down. I plaited my hair every night so it fell around me in soft, dark curls. I practiced sucking on my lips until they were puffy and red, to give the resemblance of lipstick.

It only took me seven weeks of trying. I was near the end of my six months. I decided during a pointless conversation about my father that it was then or never. I reached up and deftly popped the button on the top of my gown, letting it fall completely down around my waist. His room was still cool and my nipples hardened. I shuddered under his gaze, heat pooling in my stomach.

He ran a hand down his cheek. “Amber, you realize this is inappropriate behavior, right?” I could see though, the way that his breathing changed, and I knew I had won.

“I’m going home on Monday, Greg. I just want to have you, just one time before I go. Please.”

He came apart with my words, rushed across the room to me, his hands hot on my chest, his breath warm against my neck. I lay beneath him, my head spinning with the power of it all, adrenaline surging. I even came to my surprise, even though I had been taking antidepressants all through my stay there.

I allowed him to finish in me, thinking of my father’s curse that was now mine. I imagined a baby growing inside of me, slick and plump, shifting against a tide upside down to be born into a life where it would always have to suffer getting the shit end of the deal. I guessed that the first shit end of the deal for our child would be having a creepy, old psychiatrist as a father.

I thought of our sexual escapade all weekend, riding a high like never before. Who needed drugs? Drugs. I hadn’t actually planned on quitting, just long enough to prove something to Carla and my mom, but maybe I could get a job at a strip joint instead. Live the clean and sober life for a change. Maybe I would have a baby and I could rent an apartment and I could hang up curtains and fix big, fancy dinners out of a cookbook that I could eat with my baby. I could manipulate old men on the weekends and make bank. An entire future spanned out around me, the possibilities endless.

My brain had always raced in this way. Tumbling, rolling, spilling over with the infinite expanse of whatever may come, what was yet to be. I felt like the future was a tangible thing, a bit of clay, begging to be shaped. The only shame was knowing that I could only choose a singular path with no way of knowing if I would find happiness or regret at the end of it. I felt like a bit of the world had been uncovered for me, a way of living that had never occurred to me before. I sat with the color of it spinning in my head, pumping through my veins.

The adrenaline did not last the entire weekend, though, so naturally on discharge day, when Greg Holland and Carla came out of the admin office looking equally disturbed, I knew I was probably going to buy drugs again. Maybe not right away, I reasoned with myself, a pregnancy test would be needed first. I had not even paid attention to my periods in rehab, letting them come and go at their own discretion.

“Carla!” I pumped as much enthusiasm as I could into my voice. I was excited to see her, she looked good and had cut her auburn hair into a bob. She wouldn’t meet my eyes though, and headed out the door quickly before me. I turned around to wave goodbye to Greg Holland, but he was already gone, into another room. I followed out after Carla, stepping out into the heat of August, closing my eyes to the sun. The air smelled of asphalt and the heat pressed its fingers all over me. We had been allowed outdoors time in a small courtyard encased in the rehab, but being outside in the parking lot was still a sudden shock.

Carla noticed me standing in the parking lot and ushered me to her car. We rode home with the windows open, the summer air heavy with humidity. She turned the radio on a couple times, changed stations, and then flipped it back off. I knew that the silence wasn’t a good sign of things to come. Carla had been a lot of things, but she had never been quiet.

I thought more about drugs, the way you may think about an old lover. I thought of all the ways they had hurt me, but that was insignificant when compared to the intensity of the nights when I felt like I was dying and then they saved me.

She pulled into the driveway and shut the car off. I took a deep breath, steadying myself for whatever she wanted to say. I waited, the deep silence burying me.

She still hadn’t spoken after a few minutes. I thought of the look on both her and Greg Holland’s faces. “Carla, is this about me fucking the psychiatrist?”

Her eyes flashed to mine. “You fucked your psychiatrist?”

I felt a weird desperate feeling, scratching at my insides then, and I tried to swallow my panic. “I think I actually should buy a pregnancy test.”

I could literally see the anger light up on her face. “That’s… that’s just, absolutely ridiculous, Amber. What?”

“Wait.” I held a finger up. My insides felt like they were boiling. “Hold up. If it wasn’t about that, then why were you pissed off? You’ve been pissed off ever since you picked me up.”

“I wasn’t pissed off. I was upset. I was going to…” she trailed off, bit her lip, stared out her window. “I need you to find somewhere else to live. I know you just got out of rehab and that it feels super unfair, but I can’t have you overdosing in my house again.”

I felt the sting of sweat on my skin that always rushed across me when I got mad. I narrowed my eyes at her. “Well, gee, thanks Carla. I mean, I’m sober now, but good to know you have faith in me staying that way.”

I was really sweating by then, the sun pouring directly into the windshield. I moved to open my car door and she grabbed my other wrist. “Amber, I need you to find somewhere else to go tonight.”

I pulled away from her, not bothering to be gentle. This is another thing I shared with my father. I felt angry and intense all at once, a hurricane striking land. I rounded the car, and watched her flinch when I got to her side, felt a bit of that power slam into me again. “What’d that bitch say?”

“Amber -”

“No, Carla. No. I know this shit is coming from my mom. What did that bitch say about me?”

Carla started crying. “It wasn’t her. I swear -”

“Shut the fuck up.” I enunciated every word clearly, keeping my voice low. “You are a fucking liar, Carla. You are fucking lying to me. What did that fucking bitch say about me?”

Carla shoved past me then, a flash of red hair. I ran after her, but had to dodge a set of keys. “There’s for the Monte! I want you to leave!” Her scream echoed before the slam of the front door.

I shrieked for a few minutes before I noticed some of the neighbors watching from their windows. And then I loaded my clothes up into my car, grabbed my emergency $140 I kept under my bed, and then took off to the gas station to buy gas and a Slim Jim.

I spent most of the drive wishing I would get into a car accident and Carla would know it was her fault when the police showed up at her front door to notify next of kin. I imagined the look on her and my mother’s faces, the self-hatred they would wrestle with for not having helped me more.

It was miles later before I remembered needing to buy a pregnancy test. I pictured the cops holding my mother. “Ma’am, I hate to tell you this, but she was pregnant, too.” She wouldn’t survive knowing she had killed her first grandchild. I dropped my hand to my stomach then, feeling nauseous. What if I was running away west with old Greg Holland’s baby in my uterus? I laughed aloud at this thought.

I pulled over at a gas station and dug around under my seats for spare change. I was able to find a few quarters and nickels and before I knew it I had a handful of change. I kept my eyes down when asking for the pregnancy test and the bathroom key.

The gas station bathroom was filthy so I did my best to squat over the toilet without touching it and peed on the stick.

While I waited, I allowed myself to imagine it. A baby. Half Greg Holland’s sure, but half me. Would it have my eyes? My smile? My dad’s and then my own perchance for bad luck?

Would I be a good mother? I glanced around the gas station restroom and realized, probably not. A baby, a cursed baby at that, would be fucked with me as a mom. I grasped the test, feeling breathless, and flipped it over.

Negative.