Adopted
I once asked a friend what pain was. She attempted (albeit, she was no master at description), and after five minutes of listening to her drawn out explanation, I just nodded my head and pretended as if I understood two words that had left her mouth since I’d made the mistake to even ask. Why did I ask? Because I’ve never truly felt pain before. Well, at least not that kind of pain that authors manipulate into award-winning novels with heroines and heroes with emotional scars deep within the trenches of their heart.
It’s not as if I don’t know what a knee scrape is like or even what it feels like to be dumped by the most attractive boyfriend. Those pains, though, wasn’t that infamous, overwhelming, all-consuming, older-than-time-itself kind of hurt. I didn’t feel it scorch my soul, touch me in the darkest parts of my inner self. It was surface, superficial, just there. Just a moderate drag of the heartstrings that emotions pulls into play.
I didn’t realize how fortunate I had been not to feel those harsh tugs that resulted in endless sorrow, tormenting thoughts, and an edge of bitterness. It was luck, I suppose, to have gone so long untouched by the hands of fate. I guess there has to be a time to be unlucky—for that luck to run dry, the rivers to overflow with something different, more poignant and memorable, despite how unwanted those shattering memories may be.
It was in the look she wore: eyes narrowed and looking anywhere but my eyes, forehead creased, cheeks flushed with emotion, and lips pressed tightly into a thin line. It wasn’t a look I was familiar with; it almost looked uncharacteristic on her aging face, but I knew enough to know it meant business—what’s more, it meant trouble was at the floodgates, just waiting to spill over in some dramatic display of anguish.
“Honey, we have to talk,” she said in this reluctant tone that reminded of the one she used when she tried to have that “sex” talk with me when I was four years younger.
“Yeah?” I asked casually—trying in vain to appear light, to keep it light, to make it light because I knew it was anything other than.
“Today—today we had a visitor,” she stuttered.
“So…” I remember asking, completely unaware at the importance of some random visitor.
“It was your mother,” she whispered so inaudibly that I barely heard her.
I think I told her to repeat herself. Demanded that she do it. Because surely I hadn’t heard what I thought I did. Surely I just had some water in my ear. Something. Anything. Anything to pretend that that moment didn’t exist, that it had been some blip in reality.
And when she did, it felt like everything under me collapsed. The foundation that my life had been built on had crumbled into dusty bits and pieces, mere fragments of a life I thought I lived. Based on truths I’d taken for granted—based on the knowledge that I was living with my birth parents, that the people I called Mom and Dad were really, Mom and Dad.
They regaled stories of my birth. My fucking birth. They told me how pink I was, how purple I was, how incredibly small and perfect I was. They wouldn’t know—they didn’t know—they couldn’t have known because they weren’t there. They were somewhere else, with someone else, as I came soaring into the world by my real mother—the one that didn’t want me enough to keep me, but fell in love with the idea of passing me off to a pair of strangers.
It was as if they had gone to the baby store to purchase me from Mother Nature. They stood in a neat little line, talked shop with knowledgeable employees, and paid such a cheap price for my future—nothing. They paid in paperwork of secrecy, confidentiality; letters and words, documents to secure their parenthood and my utter and complete unawareness. A spider web of legal lies and binding ties, the only person trapped in it is the person it hurts the most—me.
Simple papers to silence my mother, bury the truth, and satisfy my selfish “parents.” All their ducks in a row, everything taken care of and put neatly into order.
Except that I should have known. They should have trusted in our family, our emotional ties, to tell me the truth. To tell me where I began. Tell me why I had blue eyes instead of green or olive skin instead of fine, pale skin. Who created me, who went through nine months with me within them, who brought me into this world. The fact is, they didn’t. And they wouldn’t have.
My real mother trampled into their lives; intruded into their perfect, picturesque family of three that they’d manipulated and molded into the shape of their dreams. Had she not, they’d keep up the lovely façade they’d been weaving for the past seventeen years. They’d have continued until someone blew through it, , tugged it from its post, and discarded it in a tangled mess of stick strands.
It amazed me that that short phrase “It was your mother” could destroy everything I had built my life on. I was lost. Completely, absolutely, tremendously lost between what was real and what was make-believe. What memories of my childhood were counterfeited concoctions of my adoptive parents? What memories weren’t? Who do I believe? The parents that had me hook, line, and sinker into believing my fairytale childhood? Papers that spelled it out in black and white ink on crisp sheets of a contract?
I remember I trembled. I remember collapsing on the nearest chair and shook. I didn’t cry. It was as if everything was numb. There was no heart wrenching pain. Everything eluded me. As the words sunk in, emotions started pulling at my heart, tugging harshly, wrenching torturously at my very soul.
Betrayal, anger, hatred, loss, confusion.
I was drowning in emotion. Fumbling with the intensity of each—I felt betrayal burn a hot trail up my throat and anger permeate my numbness while loss plagued my heart and confusion framed my state of mind. My heart was collapsing under the weight of it all—I finally began to understand that complicated feeling that every good author makes their protagonist feel at some point in the course of the most dramatic of novels.
I could touch it when I hastily wiped the tears that blurred my vision, hot and wet between my fingertips. I could smell it in the new perfume that hugged my real mother, like a cloak of newness, unfamiliarity, that swelled and flooded my nostrils. I could taste it in the acidic disgust that danced across my tongue from deep within my stomach. I could see it in papers seventeen years old, see it in the legal procedure made tangible; typed and initialed, signed and dated.
But I could feel it in the hollow in my chest, the part where your heart lies. The part that felt empty, scorned, cast aside. The part that was ripped into these frayed shreds of meaninglessness. All those memories from my life, tainted by a darkened cloud of fear. Fear of the untrue. Fear of the true. Rains that slaughtered the fondness in them; rains that reminded me of the tears I felt myself cry, that I held back, that I poured inward instead of outward.
I could feel it like a punch to the gut—it was crisp, sharp, and well-delivered. It sunk and floated. It created and destroyed. It changed my future and altered my past.
I thought it to be such a simple emotion. A big fuss over nothing. It was just pain.
It was just the first little of hell after hugging the gates of heaven. The ones I had been wrenched from, pushed away from until they were but a fading memory. A distant dream in a long series of nightmares that had somehow pervaded into reality. My reality.Back to original writing index
Author: zines@aol.com
This is an original work of fiction. All rights are reserved by the author.