Friday, May 24, 2013

Dust

As a somewhat younger man, I gravitated toward home, like a dust particle pulled in by some magnetic force to an ostensible safe haven that instead harbored the potential seeds of my destruction.
Recently I related to someone, matter of factly, some nuggets with respect to that environment: drug dealing, violence, alcohol.... The response? "Man, I thought I had a fucked-up childhood."
I was so much older than my 11-year-old when I was his age, and, while watching him and his friends develop, I sometimes have to step back and take a breath and remind myself what the world looks like to an average child, one whose frame of reference isn't so skewed.
That said, I've thought recently, likely prompted somewhat by my mother's death, about why I found myself so inextricably tangled in the orbit of home. My neighbor's mother even admonished him once to hang around the house more, like me. Considering the age gap between me and my siblings, I grew comfortable spending time alone, mostly occupying myself by devising sports-related games. And with the occasional joint or scotch or gin or whatever. Considering how suffocating and domineering my mother tried to be, the lack of oversight confounds me. Her paradox. Partly that stemmed from a generational perspective, I think, but, in turning a blind eye to the drug dealing and drug abuse, she afforded me an entree into a more sinister environment.
My brother who sold the drugs never could escape my mother's orbit for long. I managed to at least physically distance myself. At her viewing, he sat a bit apart from us, dressed like a pauper, blamed by my other brother for culpability in my mother's demise and estranged from me because of too many hurtful episodes. He speaks oddly now, as if maybe he has brain damage from one too many pills or reefers or drinks. Or maybe one too many punches to the head or falls to the sidewalk. I did have to identify him once as he lay in a coma, after all. He wasn't aware of that until I told him, as my mother lay dying.
But anyway, that was the environment, and it took me longer than I would have liked to extricate myself from what had increasingly become more and more about them.
Even as an angst-ridden college student, I sometimes would leave the dorm and sleep at home, like a rabbit surrendering himself to the rattlesnake. I suspect a combination of factors bore responsibility, such as my anxious and depressed self's desire to find a familiar place. Plus the psychological effect my mother had had on me since birth. I retreated to that house the night before I entered the clinic for electroconvulsive therapy, like a homing pigeon somehow programmed to fly into helicopter blades. For a stretch I would drop my dog off there on my way to work so they could watch him. I'd pick him up after work and train him in the backyard and eat there.   
I remember, as a child in that house, slapping the couch cushion and watching the dust particles float along on the shaft of sunlight that streamed through the window. Maybe we're all like that, dust particles floating along on a river of sun streamed through a window.
And there's no place like home, where the heart is.
A song: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wa2E6w4wt6c
An article: http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2013/05/22/why-suicide-has-become-and-epidemic-and-what-we-can-do-to-help.html