STEPS

CHAPTER THIRTEEN Danger, Danger!

Astounding, my survival those first years after the devastation. Alone with my secrets; resisting to the constant pressing need to smash my old car into a pole or a tree whenever I sat behind the wheel. Eyeing my father's sleeping pills and musing about how peaceful it would feel, to nod off. Stop being. Yeah, not waving but drowning. A madness. My brain churning out reasons to stop trying, relinquish hold and finally reach an end, serenity. My mind black with worry, shame, remorse - too fucking dark - yet living the roles of daughter, sister, and God, hardest of all, mother! How did I do it?

More so, how did I withstand the loss of my writing? How am I living now? Thousands and thousands of pages gone, emotions, reactions, conversations once so meticulously recorded. Gone. Those magnificent utterances deemed trash? Did someone read a few pages and fail to understand,or gauge their significance? Rather stuff them into garbage bags and send them off to rot in landfill? How did one do that, find it so bloody effortless to trash another's life?

Never as lonely as the moment I accepted they were really gone. Getting our belongings back from storage, unloading bag after bag, box after box. Opening each one, a cycle of hope and disappointment until the last was emptied. Whoever I had been on those pages, whatever had touched me, I could never reclaim any of it. The memories still inside but hell - even now - sometimes I feel without the supporting documents, nothing has been real. Those memories made up. Stories I told myself.

Maybe I considered this apt punishment for my own callousness. Heaven and hell existing here, and sins punishable here, within one's living. I once dared trash a life. This then the appropriate retribution - my own life trashed - everything a circle, goodness and evil equally meted out.

The ongoing struggle to define who I was now. Who could I be? My now-gone utterances once gave meaning, determined me, set me apart. Made everything bearable because see, I could exorcise all pain. Remove it from myself and keep it separate from me, confined on paper. I could likewise record any emotion and claim it for my own. I did feel - see - here existed the proof describing it! Those revelations long decomposed in landfill. The emotions gone too, no validation left. All proof stolen from me by this cruellest of acts.

Irony here too... Keeping my writing in metal cabinets in the garage, assuming they'd be protected there from a house fire. Safer outside, away from me... I punished myself often, imagining the person who decided those cabinets held useless trash. Pictured over and over a middle-aged bloke, beer belly extending over low hanging trousers, scratching his arse with one hand, a random page held in the other. Frowning, failing to understand the jumbled words, the expansive, obscure words I loved which he could not grasp the meaning of.

I often visualised the precise moment he picked up a large black garbage bag and with a shrug, started to stuff everything inside. Pile after pile. Folders and notebooks, diaries! He never properly looked at it. Just crammed everything into bag after bag.

I saw them though, thousands of pages, dozens of notebooks, leather-bound journals tossed into heavy plastic bags, lined up until the last was full. The walk, carrying a bag in each hand to the wide skip at the end of the drive... Tossing them in - repeating this over and over. I watched the last one thrown on top, then the fucking ignorant man having a coffee-break. Over and over, repeating the mechanical procedure.

Had to be a man, I reasoned most times. A woman reading a page would have understood. Maybe felt some connection with the words; if she'd ever loved, if she'd ever faced loss. I was certain I would have, had I come across somebody else's in those same circumstances. I'd have considered the writing sacred.

It didn't help, imagining those final devastating moments. Someone picking me up, having a brief look and deeming me unworthy; dumping me in the refuse, with the other useless, broken things. Why didn't my words scream out? This bothered me too. Why didn't they rise up, flooding the mind of whoever held them, leaving no further room for doubt? Ensuring they survived - placed in the keep pile. Were they insufficient? Was I insufficient?