The Pursuit of Staying 

She didn’t know the meaning of the word surrender, it’s what divided us on each side of the screen door to our one-bedroom apartment. When I lived in New Jersey throughout high school, the three of us were cramped into an apartment the size of a single dorm room; the kitchen and living room were in the same area, and the bathroom was one separate room. She would sleep on the couch while Jack and I would share a blanket on the floor with miscellaneous stuffed animals and pillows to keep us comfortable. I’d watch Mom’s body rot on the couch like an overripe pear. Flies that buzzed around her piles of dirty dishes were birthed from her ability to gorge; Mom wasn’t fickle about licking every dish clean. I’d watch as her eyes danced around each meal, mouth agape with each cut and slice of her unwashed knife a testimony to her ruthless cadence. Mom would ingurgitate until her gullet was meaty and bloated, she would eat without care for congestion; she would eat without concern. But if I even tried to pick up one of the rice cakes she’d have me eat, obscenities would fly between her unwashed teeth. She had me on a diet that kept me between 99 and 105 pounds for most of my life; it was how I always lived, so I thought it was normal. Being Type One Diabetic as well, my mind will always be a flurry of carbohydrates, fats, and calories. 

When I picture Mom in my mind, she’s forever asleep on her couch with a dirty dish or two in her lap; miscellaneous pills scattered on the living room table serving as attractive distractions to her. In seventh grade I’d watch cigarette smoke snake its way in and out of her lungs, and when I squinted hard enough, I could almost see the fine line between her high and her tense vexation flickering with the filter’s last embers. Puff, burn, puff burn. To know Mom is to know that the lighter sparking against the dart nestled in the slender crack of her pointer and middle fingers always leaves her in a syrupy cloud of resentment. Like an old man who knows he’s going to die by lung cancer, by his own hand, Mom would smoke like she had a right to it. Growing up, I learned that drugs never solve anything you’re running from. 

As children my younger brother and I would cling to Mom like branches wrapping around a wired fence; as time went on and Jack learned to bear fruit and flowers around her outbreaks, I was convinced by everyone around me that I had thorns- that I was a weed suffocating my family. By senior year of high school, CPS had visited our houses upwards of 20 times, and I ended up graduating with a 1.8 GPA. I hated that CPS didn’t do anything for my younger brother and I, but what I hated even more was how they weren’t doing anything to help Mom. To know a wolf is to know that they bark and growl, but to know a wolf is to recognize that it’s the only form of communication they understand. 

The Summer going into high school when Mom moved out of Dad’s house and into the apartment and finally got a job after putting off employment since I was born, I’d had enough of the drugs. In my eyes, it was a time of transformation. There’d be no more fighting, no more of her leaving in the middle of the night for a couple weeks without telling us to get away from Dad, and no more drugs. I took her cigarettes and her pills and her needles I knew she’d been hiding (and where), and I threw them all away. I knew she could do it, I believed in her, even if it was just one day, I knew she could go without the highs she’d chase. But in her withdrawn state by the third day in the apartment, she had me backed against the cold white sink of our new bathroom.   

“I’d rather have CPS take you away than deal with your shit for one more second.” The sweat glistening on her forehead was a reminder of what I’d done, and she was so close to my face that I could see my trembling reflection in each drop. Mom ended up taking my diabetic supplies, and left me locked in the apartment for two days with only 25 units of insulin (Type One Diabetics go through 50 units per day). 

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In order to grow from the adversities I faced while living in New Jersey, I taught myself to surrender in pursuit of becoming palatable. To surrender is to collapse in the honeyed arms that vulnerability opens to the faces of those that worship its sweetness. The world will rush to show its splendor to people who honor every peak and depth that comes with being molded by course hands and harsh words. I would rather have gone through my life leading up to college four times over than to ever be considered as bland- as someone people feel they couldn’t confide in. The word leaves hot coals rotting within myself; my gut a fireplace fueled by my distaste for the mundane. Because of this, every mirror that I pass burns with my desire to grow. Each time I rise in the morning I meet a better version of me in each fleeting reflection, to linger at a mirror means stasis. 

I’ve surrendered myself to the world in pursuit of experiencing the rawness of it all. Through this I’ve found an appreciation for every moment, living instant to instant in full. To know me is to know I am a writer, and that after I die, if the doctors harvesting the meat of my liver and kidneys find them swollen, clogged, with unspoken words, then I will have died a Goddamn idiot. To be a writer is to live and experience unedited- and I wouldn’t have it any other way.  

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Tight. Ridgid. Wirey frame. Every mug in his inventory smelled of stale coffee, vanilla ChapStick, and sweat after a morning run. But if you were to dig past the excuses that he’s just older and stuck in his ways, you’ll find his anger burning slow, burning unrelenting. Unlike Mom, who has lists of mental illnesses as crutches for her verbal abuse and neglect, Dad will never be pandered to by my sympathy. Everything I’ve touched and held dear, he’s found a way to ruin with his seething. He’s had five wives from the time I was born (eight total to my knowledge), and each one he’s had convinced she’d stay with him forever. This behavior has led me to have seven older half-siblings, four step siblings (for now, his current wife has lasted the longest and I’m hoping she’ll stick around- but I always wish that, and it hasn’t happened yet), and one ‘real’ younger brother. Josh, Sam, Sean, Val, Jewels, and Amelio all went no contact. Peter has been going in and out of going no contact; before I joined him in Maine, my younger brother and I had only seen him every couple of Christmases despite growing up with him. All four of us- myself, Jack, Mom, and Peter- knew that Dad sent me to college in Biddeford, where Peter resided in nearby Portland for ten years, in an effort to impress his newest wife with how close he could be with his children. Dad has left three or four different families in ruin for a multitude of women, and because of that, none of my no-contact siblings want anything to do with me or my younger brother since we’re the youngest. If you’ve ever had people who you’ve never met resent you for something out of your control, it’s a pretty yucky feeling. To my dismay, Peter moved out of Portland this past Winter break, and I’ve found myself alone again since my younger brother goes to college at McGill in Montreal. Anger may drive Dad, but greed is his motive. Crimson and dull from years of churning resentment, he’s the only person I can say I hate- and I’m sure if my half-siblings let me get into contact with them, they’d agree.  

Throughout high school I’d help Dad cook dinner, not uncommon as he’d angrily consume the kitchen in a nightly rage and an iron fist. I never let my younger brother cook with us, I made sure he always had somewhere else to be or something else to do during dinner so that he didn’t have to see what I was left to deal with in Dad’s wake. One time as a freshman in high school, I realized Dad was about to lash out at one of his wives, Nelida; I told him I’d make dinner with her, using the excuse that I’d be bonding with her.  

I loved Nelida. I loved the way her house smelled of sazon. I loved the coquito she’d make during Christmas time for Jack and me. I loved the way her hair was in a neat, short bob even when she’d just woken up. I loved when she’d cook arroz con gandules and asopao de pollo. She had so much hope in her heart that it overflowed into my own. Where Mom rotted like an infection I thought I’d succumbed to, Nelida taught me that my thorns could be useful, that I didn’t have to be considered a flower to be part of society. Over the eleven months they were together (a record of sorts), she taught me how to braid hair and had me do yoga with her in the mornings to wake up. She went to the same church that all my friends did, and over New Years she had Jack, Peter, and me make vision boards together. Nelida had dulces tipicos laying around a house that was rich with art; and she always had Puerto Rican music playing, especially after hurricane Maria ravaged her hometown of Toa Baja in San Juan. She’d kayak with me whenever I wanted to; and most importantly she understood, unlike any adult I’d met up to that point, what it meant to be vulnerable.  

But that night when I tried to cook with Nelida, Dad was in a frenzy. He refused to let me be alone with her and she left with Jack to go for a walk after I suggested one. I didn’t want Nelida to fully see what our father was when he was in a rage, and I definitely didn’t want Jack present. It was selfish of me to ask someone so pure to stick around, I only let people close to me see the carnage of what he left of me- but not Nelida. I knew she’d leave if she saw it, she was strong and sure of herself in that way.  

I tried helping Dad by making dinner with him, he wanted to replicate the way Nelida would cook but he didn’t know how to blend love and passion into his food- only anger. Peter taught me that food is a science best shared; it’s one of the only marriages of art and science- and more importantly, it connects people. But Dad’s food was bland. Bland, every time. His cooking was artificial. To Dad, it was just a chore and an excuse he used to paint the hills of my ribs in hues of blues, tinges of yellows, purples, and blacks.  

That night was no exception, after Nelida and Jack left, he told me:  

“Colette, when you boil pasta, the water needs to be freezing cold when you first put it in the pot.” Dad never called me Coco. He said it was a stripper name, and that he hated when Jack, Mom, Peter, or my friends would call me Coco, too.  

Now, Peter owned a restaurant in Portland for a pretty long time and has been cooking since before I was born. While he moved out when I was five, what I do know to be true, is what Dad told me was a fucking lie. I’m sure he said that as bait to start an argument, which he did often back when I lived with him. I thought he was joking at first and laughed, watching as he poured water he’d kept in the freezer into the pot. I turned on the fire, he put the pasta in, and everything was fine for a couple minutes while I waited in silence. I thought what I’d done was normal, but when he let me tend to the water and came back to see it boiling, his anger overflowed down the pink of my throat.  

A thousand things I could have done wrong ran through my head when he grabbed the knife. Maybe he hadn’t seen me turn the knob so that the stove was on. Maybe he just wanted an excuse. He held my arm over the boiling water as I watched him dip the knife into its froth, bring it to my arm, and leave it there for a couple seconds. I didn’t struggle. I didn’t make a sound. I couldn’t, I was paralyzed by him. He screamed necessities into my face as the smell of metal and the sizzling sounds of burning skin on my forearm assaulted my nose and ears. I looked deep into his eyes and thought the one thing that would act as my own ceiling for years to come: 

I am never getting out of this house.  

For a very long time I was unprepared for last goodbyes, as people are, because no one ever plans for them. Despite my best efforts in keeping Nelida from seeing who Dad really was, he still cheated on her. He cheated on her like he had with every other woman he’s been with. It was then I told myself she’d be the last adult I’d be unprepared for leaving me. It felt like I had ended on a cliff hanger that left me looking out on an ocean of questions I’d never have answers to. I won’t shy away from admitting I’m still wary of adults and their tendencies to leave. Despite this, I quickly learned that no matter the amount of distance I put between myself and another person- nothing prepares you for people to leave, anyways. Instead, it feels as if I’ll be waiting my whole life to see them again. There’s a saying that goes “there are people who go and people who stay,” but I know better as the one who stays. I have also surrendered myself to hope because of this, hope I will find people who stay like I do.   

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“You think I’m disgusting.” I remember breathing the words out with an air of acceptance to them. The word had been branded into each wrinkle of my brain by my parents, each of the ten letters of the word D-I-S-G-U-S-T-I-N-G had been plastered over fingerprints I’d been forced to identify with. In middle school, the word had been braided into my hair by friends with the audacity to tell me Dad’s house smelled, and it wasn’t long before I started getting bullied by people who didn’t know what it was like to live with him. They didn’t know what it was like to drag myself home to a house that was falling apart because of black mold, water damage, dog urine stained into every carpet, and an abusive father. They didn’t know what it was like in high school to have to choose between going home to Mom’s cramped apartment, one of Dad’s wives’ houses where I never felt fully comfortable, or his house that had fallen apart over years of neglect. Even when I did try to get out, CPS failed me, and my parents kept me chained like a dog.  

By the third time I called CPS in seventh grade, I’d figured something out: No one was coming to save me.  

I called them after I came to school with a minor black eye and pavement burns down my arm into my back. My Dad had punched me in the face and dragged me out of the kitchen, down the concrete steps the night before. When the CPS investigator- fresh out of college- sat Mom and I down after interviewing Dad about what happened, she told us to “cut him some slack,” and that he’d been dealing with “so much more than [we] could comprehend.”  

In high school I’d recalled CPS coming to interview us all after my hips had been bruised in preschool, and asked Mom if he’d always abused us.  

“Oh yeah, your teachers tried to intervene a couple times.” Mom admitted flatly, her focus pivoting between the Real Housewives and the fudge her coworker would make for her from time to time.  

“And you didn’t let them take you, Jack, and me away from Dad?” I’d been baffled, a lump of hot anger rising in my throat. “Well, you wouldn’t put your pants on, you deserved it.” I watched Mom snort a laugh from her nose and shake her head as if to say I’ve always been a chore for them to deal with and that I should drop the topic. After years of feeling insane over the abuse and being told it wasn’t happening by my immediate and extended family, I’d realized I wasn’t crazy. For the first time in seventeen years, I tore into her. Every raised hair on my neck could have made a brush in which I’d write paragraphs upon paragraphs of the abuse they put me through. But the only place that got me was the darkness of the bathroom she’d locked me in for the rest of the night.  

After Mom moved out of Dad’s, she didn’t care anymore and started using openly. I’ll never forgive the seventeen-year-old boy in my grade who thought it was funny that he was selling to her. Larry Kennedy. Even his name tells you he’s a shit-bag. He’d taunt me through blue eyes that had only known a loving upbringing, and when word spread and the school called CPS about it, an agent had the audacity to tell me I was “too old for foster care,” and that I should “wait it out” until I turned eighteen.  

I say all of this because it’s when you open up to people, it’s when you surrender yourself to being vulnerable, that you truly discover the power in doing so. I’m an English major and have kept my ground at this college despite that for one reason– I will write until it takes me places New Jersey could never fathom; I want to write an autobiography.  

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I met Veer Davda as a Freshman in high school during robotics club, and my heart jumped off a swing straight into pavement when I had anticipated woodchips. Even then I knew that we’d never be together, he was my best friend for a very, very long time, and that was not worth sacrificing. Over these past six years I’ve been doing what I’ve taught myself to do: preparing for someone to leave.  

Even though I will follow in caution’s footsteps, I choose to believe there are things that motivate me to carve my own path. I’ve learned that I will stay in the pursuit of hope, others will leave in pursuit of their own endeavors, and that both of these paths are okay. Men kiss with sharpened teeth intending to bite and bruise anyways, but for the longest time I couldn’t help but think Veer would never do that. So, when I finally let the whims of our lips give way to love; it felt as if my skin was made to feel every sinking inch of his teeth if he wanted to hurt me; as men do. Veer was all tongue- he was in robotics with me after all, did you really think he’d ever learned how to kiss a girl? But if he ever chooses to grace my flesh with such an unpredictable muscle again, I will no longer be afraid of what he’s capable of doing to me- even if that means he’ll leave again.  

When I got a call from him a few weeks ago, I realized I’d spent a miracle that only occurs once every twenty years on us kissing this past Winter break. I wasn’t prepared for him to leave. I realized, once again, that I’ll never be prepared.  

I’d listen to Veer talk about his home life a thousand times, and I’d sleep on his couch after I’d show up to school with burn marks and bruises. Despite Veer knowing everything about me, I regret not telling him the one thing I’d protected from him: Over the six years I’d known him, I fell in love with a 5’6, scrawny North Indian boy with a crooked nose and bangles that rebelled anything masculine his parents had wanted him to wear. I wish I could smash the fucking glass door to his house down with no regard for the lacerations I’d be left with so I could shout in his stupid face about all the poetry I’d written about him over these six years. The glass stuck in my skin would leave scars- my medals, monuments of open favor carved, bruised, and consecrated into the vulnerabilities of my flesh- proof of my love and permanent impermanences on my conscious and body; they’d be proof I’d stay.  

When I speak his name, within my mouth’s reverberations of each stretched syllable, there lay baren a prayer to God that he’ll be mine. Even now I want to run my tongue over his teeth to see if he’d let his guard down enough to whisper my name just one more time– but maybe pining over someone for six years just makes you crazy, my parents did always tell me that I think in extremes.  

But maybe to be vulnerable you need to think in extremes; you need to tell people you love them even when you know they’ll leave.  

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Surrendering to other’s vulnerability allows for a new perspective on the amount of salt in your own wounds you’ve kept unbandaged. When I told my best friends in college, Kevin Campbell and my roommate Arden Caley (wonderful couple, I’d spill blood for them), about Veer, there was catharsis. 

When I met Kevin our freshman year and Arden as a sophomore, I decided I was right about something: it’s important for people to strive to surrender themselves to other’s vulnerability as well. The first time I’d opened up about the abuse, and the constant CPS calls, and my living situation in middle school and high school, I was a wreck. You have to get through being a wreck to see the other side of things, it’s how the world works. When you let others pick out each grain of salt, but are also willing to do the same for them, you learn to bandage your own wounds. I want people to know that they’ll never be met with derision from me. I want to wrap them in gauze and medical tape, to let me be there for them.  

When I’d drag myself down to New Jersey over breaks at the beginning of college, every mountain I’d summited was turned into a seabed by my parents. I was sitting with Kevin once when we were Freshman when I’d admitted how “when I come back up to Maine, it’s only disdain that keeps me motivated anymore.”  

“Disdain for your parents?” 

“No.” The word fell from my lips like I’d been rehearsing it. “Disdain for myself. Disdain for who I see reflected in the mirror.” From that day on, I convinced myself that’s only true when you don’t let people know your weight. For so long I’d acted like everyone doesn’t have their own weight, that I was alone in my experiences with abuse and neglect. While we may never be able to fully understand each other’s pain, we can recognize the flavors of hurt it leaves all of us with, how it sits on the tongue unable to be swallowed, and how hard it is to talk without choking on it. To know the taste of pain and the weight it leaves on the mind is enough to give way to vulnerability. Comfort in knowing pain is enough. 

To this day, Mom and Dad’s actions will stay by my side until I die, and through every argument they’ll be there, telling me to yell until my throat is raw. Because of the constant CPS calls and conducted interviews and derision from a family who told me I was making it all up, I will always see the world from a perspective of dissection. For a very long time it felt like people were trying to analyze and probe me because I saw myself as an indigestible liar; and I felt the same about other people- that I had to analyze them and probe them to truly understand why they wanted to be around me at all. For so long I expected my parents to change, to surrender like I have. I’d lay in wait like a dog, adhering to every one of their needs and longing for the day they’d come to their senses like I had so long ago. That longing turned to resentment, I’d find myself praying for the day I’d feel big and scary enough to stand up to someone as small-minded as them. I’ve realized that even when I leave for my classes in the morning in Maine, I’ll never leave the house I grew up in New Jersey.  

But I’ve also learned that the only way to defeat something that lived and continues to live inside of me unwelcomed, something that beats at the base of my spine and lurches in my throat when I eat, is to overcome it with understanding. Through understanding comes the ability to surrender to others’ vulnerabilities- judging is the worst thing you can do for yourself and others. For so long I was set on escaping the abuse I’d been through, but now that I’m in college I know I never will. Being at UNE has taught me how to experience the world’s rawness through nourishment instead of punishment. My anguish for my parents has given me reason enough to keep going; when you live in a bell all you know are the ringings of chaos, when you live in a tunnel all you know is the continuous trudge hoping there’s an end. Living to survive makes you that much more appreciative towards those who are vulnerable- even if you have to get up and create that vulnerability yourself.   

Now I understand the patience that pain has taught me, and I’ve utilized its ability to let me surrender to vulnerability. I’ll choose to believe that I’m meant to be here in pursuit of hope, in pursuit of surrendering, in pursuit of being a listener and opening myself to the world, and in pursuit of staying.