HOSTAGE

     It was early in the morning, a week before my 18th birthday, and I was sound asleep when I heard my mother calling on the phone. She rarely called me and if she did, it was to yell at me while asking where her TV remote was even though I was never home. I knew it had to be serious, so I answered instead of letting her call reach my voicemail.
    "Hey, mama. Is everything OK?" I asked. My voice was filled with a raspy lull as I wiped the sleep from my eyes.
    "Hi, mijo... I... I don't know how to...to tell you..." the pauses between her words gripped me with anxiety as anguish overcame her voice.
    "What's going on?" I asked as I flung off lethargy and cloaked myself with angst. I will never forget that day. That was the day none of my questions could ever be answered. My age melted from me like hot wax on the side of a candlestick. 9-year-old me was left naked, wandering in the purgatory of my mind, for the rest of my life.
    "It's... it's your father. I'm sorry. He... he's..." as her voice trailed off into a hum, I became beside myself. Not in an erratic way, but as if I was literally sitting next to myself; half of me feeling emotionless and the other half was imploding with everything and, somehow, nothing at all.
    The first time I met my father was at his funeral.
    Memories have a way of defining our perspective and sometimes justifying our decisions. Unlike animals, our memories become distorted over time; they are no longer complete facts, but an autobiographical fiction, like a fresh picked cotton ball versus a lint ball of equal size. From a distance, you couldn't tell them apart, just like a memory partially excavated from your hippocampus, the details are blurred, and without further digging and restoring fallacies, those memories are enough to fill gaps you didn't know were missing.

    When I was younger, the only memories I had of my father were of photos that didn't include me, and stories from my mother that hardly seemed real; they felt like they never dug themselves deeply enough to grow into anything meaningful. My mom had a neat habit of telling my sister and I horror stories about our father, simply referred to as "Ronni". Our life never knew him and although my childhood was brightly aware of his absence, it never bothered me until those gaps made themselves apparent on the other side of a sign labeled, "Rite of Passage". I'm not sure what our mom's purpose was for telling us those horror stories and I often wondered what my life would've been like never having heard them. Maybe I would've filled her days with questions about him, what does he look like? Is he funny? Was he good at baseball? How tall is he? Or maybe our mom was simply telling us the truth about life rather than peeing on our heads and telling us it was raining. For me, it was always raining, but I happily jumped into the puddles—no shirt and no shoes. For my sister, it was always raining urine.
    My sister isn't much older than I am—about a year and a half—but she absorbed the world differently than I had growing up. Teachers loved my sister; she not only followed direction, but she managed to exceed expectations in the most creative ways. I was always jealous of her and how effortless it seemed for her to think outside of what was asked of her. She'd highlight the border of an empty image in a coloring book with a marker and then use a similar colored crayon inside of the image. I don't know why that amazed me, but it made me feel insecure about my thought process. I used to drive my first-grade teacher nuts with coloring assignments. If the point was to cut the image out, then why would I need to stay in the lines? My logic figured that if I colored outside the lines, then I'd be done much quicker without the stress and anxiety of fearing the borders. I witnessed some of my peers crying from coloring outside the lines by accident and I had no desire to feel that way, so I hurled myself in the opposite direction. Without knowing it, I was afraid to feel less than the landing I was already standing on—I was afraid to disappoint myself—and based on my father's history, as breathtakingly detailed by my mother, I was already predisposed to torment myself and everyone else around me. Even so, justified logical reason empowered me and it motivated me to be absurdly different.
    Over the next couple of years, I became oddly comfortable scoring against the grain as the Ronni stories settled onto my skin, like water on the surface of a Spanish moss plant. The tiny gray scales of the plant trap water until the plant can absorb it. The first time the stories reached the marrow of my bones was the day that my mother told me I was just like Ronni. I must've been about 9 or 10 years old and the only other memory I had about that moment was being outside of my abuelita's house. I can't imagine that her outburst wasn't warranted, however the weight of her outburst wasn't the last time that arrow purged the spirit right out of my soul. There are only so many times that your spirit can get dislodged before your soul doesn't care to put your spirit back where it belongs. No one leaves all the arrows in, because if we did, we would all look like porcupines. Instead, like everyone else, I pulled them out one at a time. Some took longer to unearth than others, as some arrows became buried in my skeletal system or entangled in my digestive, cardiovascular, or nervous systems. The worst pain of them all, is when a small dart traps itself in the respiratory system. They tend to linger and gradually collapse your lungs, like a nail in a tire. And even though my mom wasn't responsible for firing all the arrows, she was responsible for the one that started the barrage. All that to say, arrows and darts alike, they all come out and I was left with holes in my body, like a sheet of quarter-inch basswood from a shotgun scattering spherical projectiles. Over time, I learned how to clog the emptiness the only way I knew how to stop from bleeding out.