“Oh please God!” I was shaking, I was trembling, my heart rate was accelerating at a violent speed, I was sure that I would have a heart attack at any moment.
“It isn’t real. I’m not that bad. I’ve made mistakes but this isn’t going to be one of them!” I screamed the words vehemently at myself, the words ricocheting like bullets through the tiny, enclosed interior of my car. I hurt my throat yelling the words, as if the pain of screaming could somehow erase the two pink lines slashed across the loathsome white stick in my hand.
I was living in Hawaii – paradise – and I had recently learned that being single was fun. I had discovered the joys of reporting to know one, being accountable to only myself, sleeping when I chose, seeing who I wished, going as I desired. Single life was intoxicating and gratifying and I had decided I would never leave it behind. But then I peed on a stick, shoved said stick in a bag, tossed it into the passenger seat of my car, and drove out to a hidden spot of rocky beach.
“I’m not pregnant,” I whispered to myself. I pulled the stick out of the bag, turned on an overhead light, read the dreaded message in those two lines, and listened as outside my car, the waves came crashing down.
~ ~ ~
My entire childhood I was perceived as the black sheep of my extremely conservative, mild-mannered, church-going family. There were twelve of us counting my parents. Two were authoritarian and the other nine were obedient, peaceful, willing to except rules at their word. I was rebellious, eager to break rules and promises and rush into the dangerous surf that was life outside of my protective family. They were content on dry land and I wasn’t content unless I had nearly drowned in my mistakes.
At eighteen I fled the shelter of my home, enlisted in the military, got orders, hopped a plane and flew far away from Arkansas to the wild, loose-hanging, tropics of Hawaii. Here there were no critiquing eyes or ominous stares of judgment. Here there were no rules or speed limits or lifeguards; there was only exhilarating freedom the likes of which I had never known. I picked up a cigarette, I picked up a boyfriend, I picked up profanity, and I picked up sex. I picked up the pieces of all the rules I had so gleefully shattered and dumped them into the oceans of the world.
Arkansas had been my prison for seven years. With so many children my parents had whisked us away to the Bible-belt state, declaring “It’s our job to protect you!” They moved us down miles of winding, dry dirt road, isolated from the influences of the world, secure from mistakes we could not take back, ensconced in the simplicity and good intentions of a small, church-going community. “At the end of this road I can see anyone and anything coming,” my dad one day said to us. I wonder if he ever looked down the road and saw me going.
I spent those years running through the woods, inhaling clean and pure air; I dove into crystal lakes and chased the slithering roads to wherever they would lead but always, always, I was a landlocked ocean, roiling and quivering to be set free. I was desperate to break the surface and make a new way.
Hawaii gave me everything I wanted and I gave it everything I needed until I found myself, heaving and turning, at the bottom, caught in a tide of my own doing, with no choice but to swim with the current or be dragged forever under.
~ ~ ~
“But I don’t want to tell him!” I pleaded with my best friend. The thought of telling the guy I was sleeping with about the pregnancy was more terrifying than the pregnancy itself. To tell him would be to open myself up to commitment. I didn’t want that! But what if he did? Ugh! Shudders ran through me. Too bad my best friend was also really good friends with the guy I was casually seeing.
“You tell him or I will,” she said. “It’s only fair.”
I hated her and her self-righteous sense of fairness in that moment but the look in her eyes dared me to test her resolve. Fine. I would tell him and pray he took off.
I was a mess by the time I got to his place. Mascara ran down my face in blackened streaks, troubled inlets of the night time ocean, pouring over and revealing the feelings in my core at that moment. He was thrilled to see me, then worried.
“What’s up?” His voice was hesitant.
I took that horrible stick and flung it on the ground in front of him. “That’s what’s up.”
He took one look at it and broke into a grin that would make the Cheshire cat envious. He was thrilled? I was shocked. Wasn’t it supposed to be the other way around? He was supposed to be pissed and I was supposed to be free to go my own way. But no, he smiled like I had handed him heaven and another wave tumbled down on me.
~ ~ ~
I broke all the rules growing up; I took them and I tossed them aside like unwanted clutter when I moved away from Arkansas. I tried but there was always, gnawing away at me, the nature vs. nurture of my upbringing. I was raised to do the right thing by other people. “There are times you don’t come first,” my mom would say to me again and again, her eyes serious and demanding. “Sometimes there are bigger aspects in play than your immediate desires and feelings,” my dad would add when I found myself so wrapped up in me that I forgot there was a whole world out there. These things were ingrained in me, nurtured in me. And yet, these things are also a part of who I am.
Like an ocean before a Tsunami – calm but deadly and ready to overtake underneath the surface – these things pulled far back and then crashed up inside of me in that moment he smiled so beautifully at me. They siphoned up and flooded over into my mind and pressed my desire down, down, down. He was grabbing me, hugging me, spinning me around and I was dizzy and the world was spinning and, oh God please don’t let this be real! But it was real. It was reality in him leaning back, looking at me, “If it’s a girl, can we please name her Emily?” Now I really couldn’t breathe. I really was drowning and I couldn’t find my way back to the surface because now there was more than me.
Now there was a man who wanted this baby so badly. Now there was a child forming that would one day want a father. Now there was a man willing to be a dad and now there was a child who would one day wonder why I stole her chance to have a father who had loved her so dearly from the very first moment.
~ ~ ~
A month later, I walked out of a courthouse with a man who was acting like he had won the lottery and professing endless love to me. I smiled woodenly, nodded in false happiness, and tried to stay afloat.
He told everyone. I told no one. He called his family. I never once mentioned it to my family. He raved about how wonderful being married to me would be and he drove me to the beach. He took my hand and asked how I was. I looked at the ocean, wishing I could run into it and swim far away from reality. I looked at him.
“You know I don’t love you,” I said quietly.
He smiled tenderly. “But someday you will,” he spoke confidently. And he said it in such a way, with such conviction, that for the first time since it had started, I didn’t feel the wave that came crashing down.
I was sixteen - I think. Or perhaps I was fifteen. Age is somewhat an irrelevant subject matter to me now that I have passed my dreaded age of thirty. I'll stick with fifteen as I have a problem with even numbers.
Fifteen and a pension for travelling and seeing anything besides Arkansas. That was me. Always me. I dreamt big and lived small. Until the day my father announced he would be taking me and my four siblings or veritable age on a road trip to see the Grand Canyon. The Grand Canyon! I was ecstatic! I had only ever seen pictures of it in books and on post cards. Yes! This was going to be the highlight of my spring!
A week later, accompanied by my dad and said siblings, we loaded into our dusty old van, waved farewell to my mom and five younger siblings, and began the drive that would take me out of the country wilds of Arkansas! This was very important to me at the time - leaving Arkansas - so I mention this again and again. My brain was swamped, no, consumed with this through my teenage years. I loved every second of the drive. I plastered my face to the window and squealed silently in delight as we passed the first state line. I drooled in wonder as we passed through the badlands of Texas, the liquid gold and rose sunset melting into the broken horizon. I reveled in the freedom of not being under my mother's eye (to say we clashed as I grew up would be an understatement.)
Finally, there it was. That magnificent blue sign with the half sun of yellow and orange rays welcomed me to Arizona! It wasn't long after that we arrived at the Grand Canyon. We knew we were close more than an hour before we reached it. In the distance, far ahead, seemingly at the end of the flat stretch of grey we drove on, there seemed to be a thick, black line marring the unbroken expanse of flat. We drove and drove and still, that slithering black line stayed ahead of us.
"That's the Grand Canyon," my dad announced. I remember I unbelted and spilled over the seat to crouch behind his seat and take in the darkness that was my light. It was magnificent even as nothing more than a broken and blurred line. It grew darker and darker as the sun set and yet, somehow, the Canyon ahead of us defeated the night and was visible through it. I loved this place already!
It was pitch black and late at night when we finally stopped. There was a small cluster of rustic, wooden cabins in a horse shoe layout on the side of the road. A dirty sign boasted "Canyon Lodging! Free Ice!" At the time I remember thinking that free ice was an odd advertisement for lodgings. My dad went in to purchase us a one room cabin and returned. "The old timer at the desk says we're only 15-20 minutes from the Rim," he told us. We had been driving nonstop and were mostly excited. I say mostly because I was far to amped on excitement to feel tired.
Still. We found our numbered cabin and spilled out of the vehicle, ready to stretch our cramped leg muscles. I was ready to - good gods; what was THIS? The night heat of Arizona hit me like brick oven. I always assumed nights in the desert were cold, or at least semi-cool. Apparently, at this particular time of year, the very random year we decided to head to the Grand Canyon, an intense heat wave was blistering the area and all within it.
Sweat immediately broke out on my forehead, I mopped at those repulsive, salty beads in a disgruntled attempt to save my very unfortunate teenage skin from yet another acne breakout and tested my ability to breathe in the thick air. My siblings seemed fine but then, I have always been the odd quack in the family that cannot handle heat over 60 degrees. In we went to the one room cabin. Air conditioning was a tiny box in the window and it was off. I remedied that and stood before the cool, stale air, flapping my shirt furiously, trying to stay dry.
"It's not that hot," scoffed my brother James.
I glared but that was all I had the energy for. My excitement and adrenaline had been drained by a heat sucking Vampire named Desert Heat Wave. The good news, I told myself, was that tomorrow would be better because we were going to get up early in the morning and surely the early morning air would hold a kiss of relief from the heat. I thought of the ice maker I had seen on the way in to this lodging area and my mouth salivated at the thought of crunchy, icy goodness going down my throat and lowering my core temperature. Then I thought of the teens I had seen in the distance as we pulled in and immediately my mind began conjuring up an epic romance.
I was a lover and a writer at heart. I could see it then. I would ask to go to the ice machine and fetch a bucket of ice. On my way there I would ensure I passed by the group of teens I had spied. One would notice me. The handsomest one of course. He would approach me as I scraped up some ice. "Hey," he would say with a dazzling smile. I would respond with a half smile - slightly mysterious and not overly interested. My aloof nature would surely intrigue him and then-
"No ice, just get to sleep," cut in my dad's voice. Apparently I had asked to get ice and not even realized it. If my face could have fallen it would have but the heat had already dropped it as far as I am sure it could go at that point. There would be no midnight desert rendezvous for me; only the incessant heart that the rickety air conditioner could not touch. With a sigh, I flopped onto the tiny, scratchy, olive green couch. I didn't sleep much that night. Visions of a cool morning, swimming in a pool of ice and the reality of what felt like burlap scratching my sweaty skin kept me company until dawn.
To Be Continued...
B.
Branded, blemished, backwards, brilliant, belligerent, bested, bitten, bitter.
All words that are B. I prefer to think of these as the backbone, the beginning, if you will, of what I am saying. All Black Sheep have a B and they all have a beginning. Mine is bitter and yet I belligerently insist I am brilliant which is so very backwards. I have blemished myself to the point I am branded and I now know that my ignorance bested me.
L.
Liar, ludicrous, lamented, lame, lethargic, laughable.
The second step towards the perfect black sheep of the family and they are all words laughable in their irony when searching for acceptance. It is ludicrous to think that I could be so self-lamentable that the liar I had become was nothing more than a lazy and lethargic step towards isolation.
A.
Askew, asked, ambitious, annoying, agonizing, apathetic, astray.
How did conditions of life go so askew? I was asked this and wondered at my annoying delusions. Had I become so apathetic to the joy around me that I preferred to spend agonizing days on the outskirts of family? My ambitious resolve to be different had led me astray.
C.
Cornered, clever, covered, collided, coined, creepy, crazy, callous.
I find in this step I have cornered myself into telling the truth which has collided with my reality. I am not clever, I have not coined the term 'different' and I have covered my mistakes and the knowledge of them with callous actions, creepy delusions, and crazy hopes that someday the Black Sheep will be a good thing.
K.
Keeper, killer, kind.
I am the keeper of wrong in my own little world, never noticing that I have become the killer of kindness from others around me. Were I kind I might have earlier called off this self-destructive behavior. I was riddled in the head and did no such thing.
S.
Selfish, solitary, silent, simpleton, seduced.
How did I not recognize sooner that the selfish acts with which I perceived made me different were the very acts that left me solitary in a silent world? I did not know because I was a simpleton, seduced by my own over-inflated sense of self.
H.
Help, holler, handed, hole, hectic, helpless, hopeless, higher.
At some point on our roads to self-destruction we have to recognize our helplessness and our whispered cries for help. I had to. I had landed myself in a hole of my own digging and handed myself the shovel to bury myself. My mind was hectic and my soul hopeless because I forgot to look higher than my own misery.
E.
Escape, enigma, everything, Everest.
When I finally looked I knew I must escape. The thought of finding more than my own wallowing was an enigma with which I was unfamiliar and it took everything in me to climb the Everest of my shame.
E.
Endings, egregious, empowerment, encouragement.
Endings for a Black Sheep such as myself are the beginnings to empowerment that I had long since thought I left behind and would never find. I had committed egregious acts against those who loved me most and when I acknowledged this I found encouragement that had always been waiting for me.
P.
Prize, priceless, peers, perfection, past, penance, portrayal, poignant, purification.
After years of running and fighting and hating and whining I find that things I thought I was winning were no prize at all. What was priceless and what I had been seeking were the things so poignant and sweet that when I embraced them in the form of acceptance (self and otherwise) the purification of self-loathing that came after ripped away my past with a perfection I never knew before. A portrayal of the Black Sheep is hard to do, there are so many things, but this was my beginning and my end.
The military, namely deployments, breed a sense of constant exhaustion that is akin to an insomniac trying to find sleep in the Alaskan sunlight months. The military is an entity unto itself and devil be damned they will get their pint of blood from you and then some before they notice the haggard and hollowed out eyes, staring vacantly or the stiff limbs stumbling to stand upright. When on home turf, the military is much more relaxed and sleep is just something we have and we have enough of. While on foreign soil, however, sleep because a rarity we search for but rarely find.
Northern Japan, in the winter, when the snow drifts are piled as high as my shoulders, and the light, stringy and weak, makes a pathetic attempt to break through the tightly cloistered, grey snow clouds that coat the sky. Everything is sleepy. The trees are constantly tilted over, just enough, to imitate a worn and weary thin man, with no energy to stand upright. On the streets, the tires of vehicles moves sluggishly through piles of half melted slush, emitting a noise of lack luster affect, whining o be returned to the comfort of a garage where it can rest. I am here, in this drifted white and grey world, surrounded by the crisp essence of a world soundly asleep but struggling in dreams to remain so.
My barracks, the building in which I am roomed with the rest of my company, sits four floors high, a beige and dull building that fades tiredly into the background of winter, the dingy windows staring vacantly across the world, seeing, but seeing nothing. From the fourth floor I wake in the early morning, the world still quiet and dark, and my eyes grit with an exhaustion that runs bone deep. I have slept for five hours, after working a sixteen hour shift, for what I think is the forty-fourth day in a row. I am not positive of the number of days I have worked these hours but I know it has been going on for over a month now and time is blurring with fantasy now. Still, sleep is for the free and I signed my being over to the military more than four years ago.
I slither my body from the comforts of my warm cocoon and half crawl, half stagger, half fall to the tiny bathroom I share with four other women. An hour later I am bundled in an Eskimo like parka, my dark blue uniform, and steel toed boots and am dropping my self down four flights to emerge into the icy pre-dawn air. I have a half mile walk to the hangar where I work. Half of a mile is nothing. I run five miles daily. The difference is that when I run in this frozen world I run on a treadmill. When I walk to work, I am plowing through waist high snowdrifts. Each step is a push of muscles that, by the time I reach my work, has left me huffing and cursing and begging for my bed again. But there will be no sleep. My day has started and I will not be seeing my bed again for at least sixteen more hours – and I still have to walk back through the drifts to reach my bed.
Coffee is supposed to spike my metabolism, lift my energy, and shoot me through with a dash of adrenaline. Spurts of up and go in a 8oz mug of brown, steaming liquid that burns and alerts my senses as it flows down my throat. Coffee used to work. I am up to three pots a day now and it doesn’t tough me. I am still burnt out, lethargic, vaguely aware of my surroundings and clearly aware of the fact that my body is responding to my commands slower and slower each day. From the drawn and haggard faces around me, I know I am not the only one. Several of my co-workers and I pop caffeine pills from time to time but even those do not help very much.
“Candy!” Julie bursts into the tiny workspace, her voice a frantic high pitch, a clear indicator that she too is nearing the end of her rope. She waves her arms around, fists full of candy. “I have candy! Sugar should perk us up.” We have been at work for a little over ten hours now and she dumps a small pile of the sugary toxic hope in front of me.
“I hate candy,” I grumble. “But at this point I am willing to try anything.”
Seven pieces and two hours later it hasn’t helped. Julie has crawled under a counter with sliding doors and pulled the doors shut behind her. Her soft snores break through the steel and wood barrier from time to time. I am staring at the last two pieces of candy in front of me. Pixie sticks. Blech! I have always disdained the artificial, powdery grit in the little orange and pink and blue and red paper straws. But I am a little delirious right now and there is a flight coming in soon and I have to be on top of things.
“I wonder…” I cock my head to the side, an exhaustion induced idea rattling into my mind. I pick up the Pixie stick and peel off the top. “Maybe? What the hell? It’s worth a try.”
No one is around. I carefully dump the sugar into a neat, straight little line on the desk in front of me. I search around. Paper is too big and I am too tired to rip it. I smash my nose near the line but that only gets powder on my forehead. My coordination dies several days ago. Aha! I have some cash in my wallet. I fumble through and pull out a dollar. It takes several attempts but I finally get a sloppy roll. Another hasty and sneaky glance around. All is quiet save the muffled snores. Bust or nothing, I think to myself and lean over the line of Pixie dust.
I made it halfway down the line of sugar with one sniff and the door to my shop opened. From my hunched over position I glance up and see, dear God why? my Commanding Officer and the Command Master Chief staring at me, mouths slightly open in shock, eyes wide, from the open doorway.
There was a shocked and silent standoff. I know I am supposed to stand at attention and yell, “Attention on deck!” when the CO comes in. I am screwed. I know it. This looks bad. This is moronic and yet my sleep addled brain had told m it was a good idea. Yep. Bust or nothing, I think again. I am in it now, might as well finish. With my free hand I hold up a finger.
“I’ll be right with you, sir,” I say. One last snort and head sweep and the line is gone. I drop the dollar and snap to attention, yelling the cursory words that are required.
The duo in the doorway continue to stair at me. The CO’s mouth opens and then closes, opens and closes again. He is a fish dumped out of his bowl and he is confused because what he has just walked in on does not match the world he runs. I wait, stiff backed but knees trembling and a bubble of insane laughter threatening to spill out of me at any moment. The last snort of sugar did me in. Snot is running from my right nostril, tears are leaking profusely from my eyes and my nerve endings are buzzing like a live wire.
After a moment, the CO makes up his mind, “Petty Officer Praught,” he says and something trembles in his voice, a moment of hilarity he fights to cover. “I would ask but I think this is one of those times I am just going to say ‘carry on’ and walk away.”
“Sir I can explain-” I begin but he shakes his head.
“No, no,” he answers. “Please don’t. I just remembered something I have to do.” His mouth is twitching wildly now and my eyes are blurring from the sugar induced tears running out of them. He turns and hurries away. The CMC stands a second longer, eyeing me dubiously.
Finally, she says, “Once again, Petty Officer Praught, you have left me wondering what I am going to do with you.” With that, she too turns and strides away.
I wait for the door to swing shut before collapsing in my chair, peals of laughter pouring forth, scrambling for a napkin to wipe my face.
From under the counter, the sliding doors creaks open and Julie peers out. “Was that?’ she asks.
“Yes,” I nod, still laughing.
“What did you do?”
I hold up the wrapper. “I snorted a Pixie,” I gasp. “Sleep was gone and I snorted a Pixie!”
