Bits of joy
I can remember times without fear. Sitting in a garden full of flowers, a butterfly on my palm, and later, on scorching afternoons, Disney Fantasia playing on a static-y TV, my nose almost on the screen, desperate not to miss that part where Bugs Bunny plays a piano.
Flowers. Animals. Music. Those were my things. My bits of joy.
That was early childhood.
Later, 10-year-old me begged for a dog, a cat, piano lessons, ballet lessons, roses – a paddock full.
No roses - my mother did not like them. No ballet lessons – I was too old. Everything else? Dad hummed yes, no, yes. A spotty dog, a moggy, a dusty piano, and one black finger - when I swiped across the top.
Armed with a school library book, I taught myself to play. Fingers stabbing the keys so hard the vibration echoed down the hall. Play well, I was told. Or it will disappear. Raised in a we-believe-in-all-things-paranormal family I believed the piano may just levitate away, from lack of use.
So, I played. I played well.
And, I will never forget the pride in his eyes, as he lowered his newspaper, just an inch. “That’s really very good”, he said. Just once. The only time he was ever proud of me.
In the evenings, on a sibling roster, by window light I fed the dog and the kitten. The smell of meat jelly and fish so strong that I spooned food fast.
The world was still okay-ish.
But, that year around me air wrinkled, twisting into something new.
Unseen, somewhere in my father’s psyche an inner war was bubbling. And one day the wrong side won. The monsters under my bed turned real. My memory of love, shattered.
A little girl, I did not understand this new world with its flashes of rage, eerie silences. Random punishments. And a bed-love which was icky, and which would not let me go.
At night, I traced curtain flowers with my eyes in semi dark, and in the day, I hummed a made-up counting song. They calmed.
Rarely, I saw a butterfly.
He hated me, he said. Lost interest in the piano. But defiant, I still played. A stolen hour before he came home. I did not want to make him mad. No more than I already did.
Outside our house no one wanted to see my sad, but they saw some skill. The church, the school – they wanted my music. So, now a teen, I played. A bit of joy in a world I no longer wanted to be in. At night, I still found flowers.
There were no butterflies, so I imagined them floating just beyond sight.
Then, an adult, one day I was free. Physically. Not from hell – my monsters, decades on, in even the pores of my skin. They never go, but I think they tremble sometimes at the sound of piano music, the flowers in my garden, my lunchtime butterfly. Long awaited, white light specks on its wings.
They shake, those monsters, as I write these words. They struggle inside me, hammering and scratching in their dark hellish place, each letter dripping my pain. They rip at me.