Chapter Text
The summer i moved to America with my family, I was ten and my older brother, Cooper, twelve. I didn't want to leave my original home but my ma said that this was an ‘amazing opportunity’ and we could have a ‘fresh start’. My da went along with it, purely because this new house included a large shed that was assigned to him.
We had a dog when we first entered the house because I remember seeing a wiry grey face bound up and down the echoing empty halls, nails clicking on the wooden floorboards. He was my best friend in those first few days. Cooper sulked on the ramshackle porch outside while my ma busied herself with the delivery vans and my da watched baseball and drank beer.
I was given a room at the top of the house, an airy space that smelled of candle wax and dust. The window was large though old fashioned and I was able to push it open, showering the roof outside with splinters of paint, and sit on the sill to look at the stars. I figured out quite fast that I could actually sit on the roof as it was flatish and covered in thick tiles. The dog would sometimes sit on the sill inside with me and I would rub his curly fur and watch for birds on the road.
The dog died two weeks after we settled in and was buried in the back yard between two stooped apple trees that were part of the orchard back there. When I didn't know how to say that I hated the feeling that the dog was gone, I crawled into the old wardrobe that was missing the entire back panel, and punched the plaster until I felt better. It took fifty two hits, a sprinkling of plaster from the three cracks I made in the wall, and a hell of a lot of tears.
My knuckles took a month to heal.
After that I hated crying. Why did salt have to cause sadness when it was combined with good things? I didn't mind the sea or saltwater and they were good.
Instead of crying about the dog, I explored around the neighbourhood. I found trees to climb and places to wield music like machete through bushy plants.
I never felt like I had a heart until I was eleven years old. I thought my bones were filled with cement and that made me heavy in spirit, even though my ribs nearly always pushed through my petal-thin skin.
However, a day after my eleventh birthday, Mike Tiller from next door asked me why I had an accent. I tried to explain that America had not produced me as an eagle. I was a hare or an elk with an accent of hills and dark seas and a culture that's so rich it's like biting into cake.
Mike had listened to my poor explanation and nodded, ‘you sound cool’.
I carried that in my chest for a long time, the compliment bouncing off my ribs.
I didn't find anyone that liked me enough to hang out with me from when I was ten right up to when I was fourteen. At middle school, kids avoided me and threw glances and words at me like spears, sticking to my clothes. I stuck it out through lunch in the bathroom and gave chinese burns to anyone that tried to laugh at me. The teachers would write only one thing on my report card all throughout the years: ‘should speak up more’.
I was a quiet kid but maybe I was just quiet because I hadn't found the right people yet.
When I was fourteen I squandered my teenage years. I spent them on life, living because I deserved it. I dyed my hair pink, then red, and then neon green. I arrived late to class more times than I could count.
Late nights in a field counting the stars, climbing trees to try and stimulate flight, like I could fly up and north. I loved rivers, flowing dancers of beauty. They ran fast, fast enough to match my heart. I spent days wandering over rocks dipped in sunlight and moss, my ankles permanently burnt from concentrated rays of light. Sometimes I would swim and lie on my back and steal pieces of the sky, the colour of a world globe.
When I was fifteen I jumped into the river and arrived soaking wet at a party of a boy I didn't know the name of. I danced under smoke and artificial light, drunk from diluted whisky and plain living. I kissed a boy behind the garden shed, tasted the fruit on his tongue.
I remember the silver party tops that spun light like a disco ball and the sequins littering the floor. I would wake up the next day with glitter on my arms.
During the summer when I was sixteen I would ride my bike on the abandoned road my house lined, the asphalt hot enough for no shoes. The pedals scraped my feet. I fell numerous times and my knees grazed then scabbed and bloodied again.
The air was the same temperature as your skin in the evening, and if you listened hard enough you could catch the snippet of music floating across the open fields from the big cities.
On days like that I wouldn't come home until late, until people snuffed out lights and slept with windows open. ma would leave the porch light on and my window open. I would sleep on the roof with a blanket and a view of the surrounding countryside encased in a sun that wouldn't stop shining until eleven.
The sun disappeared sometimes and with that it brought rain, heavy or sometimes mist-fine falling like lace over the house. When it was both i would walk down to the convenience store in the ragged little town and buy oranges, four for a dollar. My feet would begin to get steadily damp but not cold.
The oranges doused in fresh rain tasted of free living and sharp happiness. I would eat them and the skin on the walk back up.
Opposite my house, was a kid who'd read outside in a line green deckchair. He looked like a lunatic, rain pouring off his hair, the book so heavy with the excess water that the words sometimes blurred but he'd read like it was seventy-five degrees out. I'd always toss him an orange and he'd wink at me from his one good eye, the other milky with a white film of cataracts. His book varied from day to day, one time it was war and peace, the next a biography of Napoleon but without fail he was always there.
When I went back to my house, wet and smelling of citrus, my ma would towel me down and leave me by the fire while she painted her nails. When i was dry and ma’s nails were varnished with cobalt and burgundy and prussian blue, pa would pick up his guitar, me, my banjo, ma, her fiddle, and cooper his accordion and we would paint the room with music notes to rekindle the fire, the light and to soar into the sky to live among birds.
During those years, I was so much anger wrapped up inside a person; a storm riddled with expectations. I guess I never really learnt to control the anger, I just held it until it felt malleable enough to push away.
When I was sixteen I survived with myself.
The summer I turned seventeen, I fell in love.