The Comma Struggle

I BEGAN TO NOTICE how it impressed boys when I drank as good as or better than them. I noticed that I had a special power that my brother couldn’t put in his shadow when I used my body to speak instead of my words.  I began to notice I wasn’t the prettiest or the most popular or smartest or most talented at the best at anything, but I was good at being awkward and not fitting in with anyone, and sometimes that earned affection from someone interesting.  I began to notice I was my sister’s little sister until she went to college and had her first baby, and I was my brother’s little sister until he graduated from our high school, and then I wasn’t sure, so I became Billy’s girlfriend and then someone else’s girlfriend and someone else’s and so on unless I was the party girl who was anybody’s and could keep up with anyone but still graduate from college with a solid C average and hold onto an endless string of adequately paying jobs in customer service where no one care...

I AM FROM my mother, who is from her mother, who was hidden with her mother in an attic when she was learning what it was to be in this world. I wonder how much of that DNA passed to my mother and then to my sister and my brother and finally to me. I’ve felt a visceral fear of abandonment since I was a baby, but I was always well cared for, too much so sometimes, due to how ill and tiny and sensitive I was. Is this DNA where it comes from? I am from a house with quiet murmurs and secrets that I don’t really understand yet. A family that looked and still looks lovely and loving from outside, but uses over-sharing and personal traumas as weapons in conversation. I am from the ether. I am from lonely winter days and endless summer ones where we played hide and seek and green eyed ghost as a neighborhood. I am from Billy Martin’s cologne and the sweetness of Southern Comfort burning my throat as I flirted with anyone who was interested in a girl with a hole somewhere deep ...