He sends me a message on Facebook that’s all about how I used to be an office aide and I smiled at him in art class and we went to the bowling alley. All I can think is that I bet he’s fat and smells like a weinie wagon nowadays. If I’m wrong about the smell, I’ll bet I’ve never been right about anything in my life.

He hasn’t included a picture, but the message is the long sort, and a glance at his profile shows that he never uses pictures. He lives in Terre Haute. I remember going there to race go-carts, riding in a big van with the other troubled youth, feeling the hot hands of the newest boys, thinking it was love every single time.

None of us girls ever got along unless it was long enough to call “Slut” on another one of the sluts we knew. Thinking back, I bet we could have unionized and been playground powerhouses. Instead we glared each other down and stole each other’s boyfriends.

I remember being an office aide, too. It was first period and I had to walk the entire school, grabbing attendance sheets and looking boys in the eye long enough to make them feel something strange before looking back down at my shoes. One boy would get angry over this and I always had a feeling he’d be the sort to push me down in the dirt at a county fair, getting corn dog mustard on my knees.

But this kid, I don’t remember him at all. I ask him for a picture, and he sends one; sends his senior picture from that year. There’s nothing in his face that brings anything back for me, and I read about the date to the bowling alley. “You kept playing with my lighter, like you were obsessed with fire or something”, he writes. “You sure did have the brightest smile.”

I kick this around a bit and decide against accepting his friendship request. I delete his messages and go on with my day. Later on I’ll try to remember the name of that other boy- the scary one who’d mouth nasty things to me that made me want to cry. Later on I’ll look that guy up and see what he’s been up to the last 17 years. If he’s not in prison, I’ll be a bit let down.

She wore a garbage bag to my classroom the day of the Halloween party. It was the big, heavy, black sort that shone and crinkled when she walked. None of the other parents wore costumes. Her hair was like twigs, dirty blonde with twinges of green where she’d tried to bleach it. She’d said once that when she was giving birth to Anthony, my cousin, her water broke and it was green. I pictured it the same green as those parts of her hair, the same way I could envelope my whole brain in the same kind of black shiny water as the color of that garbage bag.

There was a constant anxiety hanging heavy over my time in that house. I remember so much of it; have talked so much of it through in therapy sessions. What I missed talking through in therapy usually finds it’s way out of my mouth late night, laying in arms, a spark of a thought about a dog giving birth and eating it’s babies, or something will make me think of spending a summer in bed, writing sentences every time I broke a rule I didn’t know existed.

A few years after I lived with Dan & Gina, my aunt and uncle on my mother’s maladjusted side of the family, I was in a foster home that similarly enjoyed the Public Square style of chastising a person. They’d have the offender stand before the entire family and they would berate, list your crimes, demand that you explain yourself. I would stand there and I would stare past all of it, and I would think “I’m not here. I’m not here. These are not my toes. This carpet doesn’t exist. I am nowhere. I am nothing. These are not even my thoughts, because I have none.”

That foster family came to believe that I was possessed. They were Catholic freaks who seemed to keep finding themselves guardians of all sorts of possessed children. To hear their stories, you would think Satan was the case manager, because there is no explanation for the number of kids who came through their home who somehow became inhabited with an evil spirit.

The only spirit in me, causing me to go cool, grow still, stand for as long as I needed to in order to bypass their bullshit- outlast the madness and not be broken, was the same spirit that had learned how to endure anything.

I was seven.

My aunt used to lay me on the hardwood floors. I was seven when she started to do this. I mention that because when I think of seven year old children, I often consider the amount of misery a person would have to have within themselves in order to cause this level of sadism to be directed at a child. Once on the floor, my freckled nose pointed toward a plaster crack, she would put a shirt into my mouth. Then she would take the buckets used to fill up the fish tanks, dirty plastic, heavy buckets, and she would pour the water slowly over my face, and it was like I was drowning.

You don’t die from most things, and some things you wish you would. I can recall panic attacks as an adult where the loudest though in my head was “Enough! Just stop living already so that this can be done.” And a panic attack, that’s within yourself. You have to grab yourself by the arm, make yourself breath, relax, be okay. Or, you could just take a xanax. But another person isn’t within you, and you can’t grab them by the arm when you’re seven and their arms are that far above you.

When I was 21 my aunt and uncle found me. They called me and we small talked about my cousins, about the house, about my kids. And then my uncle got me on the phone alone and told me about Vietnam and being a prisoner of war. He talked about the tortures he endured, and how those things stay with a person, making it impossible to ever really come back from that.

For over a year the punishments continued, increased, got more intense. There were beatings with a leather razor strop, there were mental games, making me dress in a diaper and goo-goo gaga and drink from a baby bottle in front of the neighbor boy I had a crush on, there were more instances of water boarding, there were three days of making me stand in a corner, kicking me when I’d fall over from exhaustion.

And I remember that time in shades of green and in black, and I remember hiding in the bathroom, overdosing on tylenol because I had read about a kid dying from it. It did nothing. But laying there on that floor, knowing I wasn’t going to die from a thing, not knowing the word torture as it applied to my uncle and his war, only knowing that this would not kill me,I knew that in order to not break completely, I had to do something. I found a way to stare until I didn’t exist, and I would think “I’m not here. There is no me. I don’t exist. I have no thoughts. None of this is real.” until I stopped thinking all together and I really didn’t exist.

The last time I talked to my aunt and uncle on the phone, my aunt said “Every time we see a news story about an abused kid, we think about what we did to you, and we’re sorry.” And I didn’t know what to do with that. I said “That’s okay.”, because what else could I say? “Well, I don’t have to see news stories to remind me. It’s always there.”?

As an adult, after years of therapy, I learned to stop disappearing myself any time I felt like things were about to get hard. I learned to be present in those moments, to accept that stressful things aren’t all going to be as terrible as the tortures endured in abuse. It’s difficult, though, because I react so strongly to every single thing that happens. I liken it to needing to cut a grapefruit when the only tool I have is a chainsaw. Every time there is any situation, no matter the size, my usual tool is so powerful that it can destroy what could be a good result.

It was an act of extreme strength that lead me to invoke the ability to meditate myself away from a thing that would have driven me mad otherwise. And lately, I have felt life testing me, have wanted to replace the sound of the doctor talking about the courses of treatment, the nurses in hasmat suits putting poison into my arms, the nights of aching, the arguments over the phone with billing departments, the fucking loneliness, with that same dark space of not existing. But I haven’t, and I won’t, because it actually takes more strength these days to be present. And I have never taken the wimpy way out before.

See, my uncle was right when he said that those things that happen stay with a person, and he was right when he said you don’t come back from that. You don’t come back; not ever. Instead, you go someplace else. It’s just that the place I chose to go has a a much better view.

I’m currently working on a really great project funded by The Andrus Foundation. We’re in the research phase of developing and piloting a technology based program to help children who are aging out of the foster care system develop the life skills they need to- well, to not have shitty lives after they reach adulthood.

Pretty damn cool, right?

But as I work on this project, of course, it brings up all sorts of memories for me, and most of those memories are pretty dark. My foster care experience is one that I speak of rather openly, because I think it’s important. People need to know what foster care is really like, and they need to start looking around at those gaps in our socio-economic system to see who, demographically, are stuffed into the dark, hidden places. For example, here’s a bit of news you may find interesting. In LA County, the largest demo of our homeless population isn’t veterans. It’s foster kids.

I could go on for a long time, quoting foster statistics and regaling you with tales of some of the awful homes I lived in, but the more I think about it, and the more I look around me at perfectly reasonable people in my life, the more I am baffled that more people aren’t foster parents.

See, I know a lot of healthy, well adjusted, wonderful, caring, intelligent people. And for some goddam reason, those aren’t the people who are taking in foster youth. Those people, instead, are the ones who say “Oh, I don’t have the chops to be able to take care of an abused kid.” Those reasonable people are reasonable enough to understand that in order to properly care for a child who has likely already been through so much is going to take a lot of work. And those are exactly the sorts of people who could be wonderful foster parents.

I get it. The kids are challenging. I was challenging. I was a pain in the ass. But I could have really used a few good influences.

Just. Think about it. Become a foster parent, already.

I used to fear water, or rather, I used to say I feared water. I didn’t really fear it, though there was something about murky lake bottoms and fish bold enough to graze my goosefleshed legs that grossed me right out. Still, I overplayed my fear of water for years, claiming I was psychic and knew how I’d die; claiming that because my father had drowned at 21, I was afraid I’d drown as well; claiming that in a former life I had drowned myself; claiming whatever seemed most interesting while hugging my own arms and making a show of my fear.

Having moved a lot, I could reinvent fears based on convenience. Moving in the summer usually kept my fear of water at bay, with the opportunity to do hand stands in pools during the stickiest midwestern days guiding me to not only not fear water, but to be a mermaid; to lay in the bottom of pools with all of the air pushed out of my body until I was still as a stone, looking up, watching the way the sun turned into three suns through the chlorine kaleidoscope. In those cases, I always picked other things to fear- the dark, the basement, thunder, loud noises.

What was I, after all, if I had nothing to fear? Everyone seemed to fear something, and I had noticed that when they did, they were loved for it. They were loved through it. They were hugged and teased, then protected from it. If they faced their fears, they were hugged harder, even if they came out shaking.

My son, Trast, has real fears. He fears roller coasters, heights, and anything medical. He fears pain, discomfort, and seeing his own blood. And I have a hard time understanding him, because I have had very few honest fears in my life other than spiders, and not being loved, for which I would do anything.

Yesterday Tim and I went to the ocean. We drove down the Pacific Coast Highway, gathering pools of disgusting as we waited in lines of traffic so slow that I daydreamed of rollerskating past all the cars, shaking my short shorts and holding a flower. He just kept telling me to be happy, it was going to be a good day, but I couldn’t feel it yet. I’ve been so angry lately, anyway, and I wasn’t feeling down with his whole “Look at us! Tim and Nikol! Off to do whatever and be spontaneous!” idea.

And then we got to the ocean, and I can’t imagine anyone has ever not felt the way I feel when I’m next to the Pacific. I never get used to the moment of realization that I am so very small; that everything else is so very large; that I have nothing worth worrying about, as the moment I first look up at the perfect spot toward the back of the sky where you realize it seems to have no end. I imagine, had I lived in a time when people thought you could fall off the edge of the earth if you swam far enough, I would have thought, “Sure, stupids, but that’d take you only forever.”

Photo by Joshua MacLeod

When you first feel the water, standing at the edge, as the waves barely touch your toes, the first reaction is to make your way back to the towel and forget the ice water. “It’s cold because it comes all the way from Alaska.” Tim tells me this every single time we’re at the water. “Yeah, but come on! Didn’t it have time to warm up a little?” That’s how I always respond. Things with him are like that. I always know what to expect with him, and I have needed something like that in my life forever.

The waves knocked me over this time. The moon was full and the tide was especially strong. Even if you “stayed low” the water seemed intent on pulling you into it and pushing you down. I started to laugh underwater, imagining what it must have looked like to see my bald head, growing back blonde baby fuzz, one moment above water, and the next gone. I don’t suggest laughing underwater to anyone.

I sat in a shallower area, but the waves kept pushing my head back, filling my nose with salt. I thought about my teen years and my fabricated fear of water, and I thought of how, so long as I kept telling myself it was the truth, I could almost convince myself of anything. Just yesterday morning I decided that I loved doing dishes. I know that by the end of the week, I will be downright cheerful about washing them. The brain is like that. You can tell yourself anything and make you believe it.

If I think about the things I fear right now, I haven’t changed all that much. I still fear that nobody loves me. I still genuinely won’t go near a bug. And I fear being blind folded. That seriously freaks me out. But more noteable is what I don’t fear, and what I have never feared; a thing whose lack of fear has lead me to another kind of fear altogether. I don’t fear death.

Since the moment I knew I was alive I have never feared death. Through any spiritual incarnation of my beliefs, even when I believed there was a hell, I didn’t fear death. I have been near it, I have sought it, I have wondered about it, and I have never felt a moment’s fear about it.

I fear Pelham, who is only five, not having the goofy stories of times we spend together; not being around the very spirit of all that I am that makes others shake their heads.

However, like any proper egomaniac, I have feared life without me. I have feared Trast, already one of the most amazing men I know, continuing to be amazing but without our banter. I have feared Ayden and I never getting to the point where we can say “All those years of butting heads were pretty funny now that we look back on it.” I fear Pelham, who is only five, not having the goofy stories of times we spend together; not being around the very spirit of all that I am that makes others shake their heads.

And I clearly see the parties I’m not at. I clearly see the dinners I don’t cook. People are there. They are eating, happy, smiling. These are people I love, and I am not there anymore. There’s Tim, at the beach, and the water is cold. “This water is cold because it comes all the way down from Alaska.” he says. And whoever he is there with says “Oh.” And I am nowhere. But everything else, like the ocean, keeps going so far that you can’t even imagine where it ends.

Dear Santa,

So, first I wanted to say that I am still confused about the time when I was a kid and you brought Stanley Bean some presents, and we even saw a news report telling us that you were in the area. You’ll recall that on Christmas Eve of that year my brother and I spent our time caroling at a nursing home, and because I figured you’d want me to be extra damn awesome, I even let that one really scary woman who reminded me of a Skeksies touch my face. I was frightened, Santa, but I knew I needed to act right.

The thing about Stanley Bean is that he never ever brushed his teeth. He was a pretty rotten kid, and he got in trouble at school all the time. So, it was confusing to me when, come Christmas morning, despite the fact that I was so fucking well behaved that I regularly got three M&Ms for good behavior while my classmates got two, you didn’t give me a damn thing. Maybe the M&Ms were my year long gift, like playing annuity in the lottery, but had I been presented with the option I would have chosen a Mr. Microphone and some brand name cereal.

I’m grown up and aware that Stanley had a difficult home life, which caused him to act out at school to try to get attention. I don’t begrudge him the Christmas presents he got. However, I do feel like you owe me a few.

I would like very much, Santa, to be in amazing shape by March. I got some free personal training recently, and it occurs to me that I would benefit greatly from having the face of a trainer in front of my, begging to be punch, in order to motivate me to keep my shit together and do 20 reps instead of- well, instead of no reps at all.

And it’s not just for me, Santa. I want this for you, too. I want you to not have to make your elves knit me larger sweaters, and I want you to stop all of your fretting over my health. Plus, if you do this, I will totally send you pictures of me in a bathing suit. I’ll send them in an envelope that says “Heating Bill” so Mrs. Clause doesn’t get nosy.

What do you say? Help me get in shape? Wouldn’t it make you so happy to see me happy?

Holiday Best,

Nikol

She was tidy. I’ll give her that. If anything was important to my mother, it was semblance of tidy, neat and proper. It made little sense to me, because I had gone for so long without being bathed that I once had a splinter in my bottom for several weeks (from the see-saw) that I could no longer sit down, it hurt so bad. It hadn’t been noticed because no adult had asked me to bathed or bathed me. Her cleanliness always came in sprees, and always with blame laid on everyone around her. But my mother wanted people to know that we were important because she kept things clean.

That’s why she decided that all of the carnies needed a bath. And that was why she covered the seats of Honda’s camper with plastic bags. She was taking us all to the lake and we were going to “skinny dip” ourselves clean. A skinny dip made me think of Lick’Em Sticks. Those sticks were vanilla flavored, and any time I got the honor of buying them I’d suck the sticks and let my baby brother eat the colored sugar packets.

I was expecting something wonderful and vanilla the day that we went skinny dipping in the lake with the carnies. My mother had worked so hard to keep everything clean that I expected she was in a good phase right then. Even when Danny had begged to stop to pee, she had told him to hold it in and he had listened. This was serious. Obviously. Danny never listened, always just doing what he wanted. This time, though, he held it. We both knew that if she was doing right, it was time to be proper.

The lake itself stunk like cabbage. I dipped a toe in and was laughed at for being “dainty”. At age five I still thought that being laughed at was all wrong. The only people who had laughed at me were the ones who snuck into my room late at night. Sometimes they laughed at my brother, then hit him.The shame of laughter was the same as the shame of pain. So I wanted to stop anything bad that may come and I swam in that cabbage stinking lake.

I had heard about people getting worms. Getting was still my word for acquiring. But I had heard that some people got worms from lakes, so I was suspicious of the people around me, as if they had come to this spot to acquire the worms. Instead we acquired their dinner.

It happened like so: Mom and Honda, they were swimming. Mom and Honda, they were kissing. They were close. They were naked. I was naked. She was far way. Mom and Honda had their eyes closed. Everyone was screaming and Mom was screaming and Honda had his tongue in her mouth. Mom and. Mom. Mom looked like she was hurt and I tried to go help her. Someone grabbed my arm. Someone else made a joke. Everyone laughed, but I was afraid. She said, “She can’t see nothing” And then my mom was mad. And then someone screamed and held something in the air.

That’s how I came to know about turtles.

This was a snapping turtle, I was told. Could bite my toe clean off.

On the way home, my brother Danny peed in a puddle on the floor of Honda’s camper. We went back to where we had set up and I stayed a while with the carousel horses, looking at their teeth and wondering if they could bite my toes clean off. At one point my mother stepped out, calling the others to join them for dinner. I was hungry, but I felt old right then. Too old to go chewing at a thing that might find me under the water and be interested in my toes.

It didn’t matter, though. When Danny went running to the camper door to eat some of that snapping turtle (they all came out saying it was like sausage) they just smacked him in the face so he came crying to me, anyway.

That’s when I told him what I told him about the clouds.

When I was a little girl my mother shacked up with a dude who managed a carnival. I remember that his name was John Honda, but he went simply by his last name, causing me great confusion because he didn’t ride a motorcycle at all. Honda had himself a camper and it was bursting with sacks full of penny toys. Keeping my eyes on those toys I decided it wasn’t in my favor to make any arguments toward him changing his name to John Winnabego.

The summer after I turned 5, when my brother Danny was almost 4, we hit the road with Honda and my mother to become carnie kids. My brother was to run the goldfish bowl booth with mom, but they decided that I was old enough to run my own game. While Danny seemed fairly thrilled to be the caretaker of all of those fish, I worked my stomach into knots over the thought of such responsibility.

Age Five

My game, The Toss Until You Win (you can’t lose, only a dollar, step right up) was constructed in under a day out of some raw 2x4s we’d found along the highway. Honda, shirtless with a tool belt and a beer, explained the intricate genius of the game, with the crappiest toys on the easiest pegs to circle with the plastic rings. People would toss rings until they won. They’d pay a dollar. We’d make a fortune. All I had to do was get them to play. I hated everything about it.

Days would start in Honda’s camper, my brother and I pouring Sugar Smacks and Frosted Flakes from individual boxes straight into our mouths, further coating our unbrushed teeth. If we’d just hit the town, there was set up. If we’d already set up, it was straight to work. We always left a town at night, so we never needed to worry about breaking a site down when the sun was up.

Days at the carnival were boring and blurry, deep fried and stinking of WD40. My Toss Until You Win booth didn’t make the fortune that Honda had predicted, and he was always on my case to lure more paying customers in. I’m the kind of woman who feels bad about summoning a waiter at a restaurant. I was the kind of child who felt terrible about summoning seemingly nice people to waste their money on a game I knew was all a scam. Plus, I was pretty sure I wasn’t supposed to talk to strangers, yet there I was all day long in new small towns across the midwest trying to get strangers to talk to me. Backwards shit.

My most memorable customers were a man and his son. I was standing, quietly, watching people walk past and hoping they thought I was just a statue. When this man saw me he stopped too fast and his son ran into him. I wanted to laugh, but I knew it would be rude. Plus I was pretty sure he thought I was a statue and that was why he was starting, so I held very still. They approached, and once he asked me about my game I figured the statue gig was up, and ran through my rehearsed lines.

If I rocked this look now, I'd be queen of the hipsters

As an adult, I think about that moment a lot, trying to place myself into the role of that father. My child and I are out for a night of fun, and a little girl no bigger than my son stands in a booth that all of a sudden seems bigger than the whole world and in her lispy five year old should be playing fairy princess right now voice, she recites “Toss Until You Win. You can’t lose. Only a dollar, and You can’t lose.” And maybe I’m reading that situation wrong, and maybe that man felt nothing. But I choose to believe and hope that he was one of the good fathers and that seeing me made him feel more protective of his son. I hope that each time I said, “You can’t lose” it was like a gypsy blessing to both of them, and I guess I hope that because at least then I wouldn’t feel like such a jerk for taking their money.