You are perhaps seven years old. You are awake now. You can hear the voices out the hall in the kitchen, even though the sliding door is drawn. You get up and pad out of the hallway, toward the door. There are two grownup voices there, behind the door. You know the voices, but you still can't recognize them. They're behind there and they're being frightening. They would say they're talking about grownup things, but even though you don't know the words, you can hear in the tones exactly what their hearts are telling each other. They're supposed to love each other. You know that from school. You know that from your friends. You know that from the way they act when you're around them. One of them has heard you now. There's a silence scarier than the yelling, and then the heavy footsteps over to the door. How strange it must be, to have noisy footsteps like that; can't they help it like you can? The door slides open, and you say the one wrong phrase you could say. It's what you want. It is also, unfortunately, the only one they are unprepared to deal with. It's the phrase that tells them every time you say it that they're arguing in futility. You can't know this, of course, and they both know that you can't be expected to, but it bites them so deeply all the same that they are suddenly as upset with you as with each other. Because before you said those damning nine words, they could cling to this hope that they had. Cling to this hope that you're still all a normal family. Cling to this hope that after the yelling, after the pain, the heightened state that makes the affection so much more real is just as good as the real thing. But having said them, you are now the doom-bringer in the guise of a child. You are the destroying angel with the face of a cherub from Boteccelli. So when you say "Why do you have to fight all the time?" The response comes sharp and fast as a punishing whip. "Stay in your room please." And "This isn't about you, darlin'." So you pad back to your room. You try to read your books, but the tears don't stop coming. You can't understand what you did, or why they're angry with you, with each other, and it hurts so badly. Flash forward to now, where you're standing in your bathroom, half-naked, clutching a pair of scissors in one hand, and all you can hear with your eyes squeezed shut with the water running from them anyway is the sound of your own voice, so different now, talking about someone you're sure can hear you across the miles. "i promised. i promised. i promised. i promised. i promised..."

Welcome to The White Room.

Courtesy.

- posted by Third @ 8:57 PM