It is the year 2004, and I am strapped to the floor of a city bus in a purple wheelchair called the Chariot, headed across Evansville to the mall to do some Christmas shopping. The landscape outside the window is November gray. Soggy. Yards are more mud than grass; houses look drab and tired. I don't know if it's just the light that makes everything appear dilapidated, or if everything in this section of the city really is falling apart. It's a back street. I've never been down it. I've never been down a lot of the streets in Evansville, and my traveler's soul gets the best of me: despite the drab scenery, I can't stop looking. If I were younger, I would press my face to the glass and breathe an 'O' with my mouth to look out of, like a small, secret eye recording everything and storing it for later, blink, blink.
The houses press themselves close together, flank to flank. Some have a walkway between; some do not. There isn't enough room. A person must either exit the house using the front door or circle back behind three houses, traipsing across muddy, squishing lawns. I have never seen this crowded phenomenon before. In the houses I grew up in, neighbors were not meant to be seen or heard. "Next door" might mean walking a mile. In the city, next door could be reached from your porch if you had a long enough stick. I thought about looking out my bedroom window at night and seeing nothing but the ribs of my neighbor's house. I decided that when I bought a house, it would not be a set of conjoined triplets. It would have a yard, and trees, and a fence, and neighbors. Lots of neighbors.
To me, the hustle and bustle of the city has always meant safety. Realistically I know this isn't true: cities have more people in them, and more people means more crime. But I like noise. Distractions. The sound of busyness. When I lay down my head at night, I actually welcome the sound of cars passing by on the avenue. In the winter when it snows a particular lot and no one can get out on the roads, the absence of tires on asphalt creates a silence so deep it presses on my brain. I long for the 12:05 train to go by, for the bells to ring at the college. I listen to see if the street sweeper will make it out. Sometimes I'm still awake at 4 o'clock when Housing Authority maintenance crews come to clear the sidewalks and the parking lot before the old people get up and the crippled college kid makes a go of getting to class, and only the noise of their shovels scraping along beneath the snow can relax me enough to fall asleep. Without some kind of noise from the outside world, I suffer a wild, nerve-pinching sense of abandonment that feels like a hole carved out of my belly. I have been this way for a long, long time.
"I'm going to go away and leave you. We're all going away, me and Matt and your dad. We will leave you here all alone, and no one will come to take care of you, and you will die."
I don't remember the first time she said it, but I know I was young enough to believe it with very little convincing. Why should I not believe her? I knew very well the side of my mother that would not mind hoisting my brother onto her hip and simply walking away from me. She used to threaten to leave me in stores and alongside strange streets in strange cities. My mind's eye had no trouble at all picturing her abandoning me in the middle of the night. As for my father, what proof did I have that he wouldn't leave me, too? I had watched him walk away often enough. It could happen. It might happen. It would probably happen.
For this reason, I did not sleep. If there was a light on in the house but I couldn't hear anyone, I just knew that somehow they had tricked me: they had manged to sneak away from me unnoticed, and had left the light on to make me think they were home so I wouldn't get out of bed and come looking for them till it was too late. They weren't going to come back to take care of me, and I would be all alone and then I would die. Every night, I stayed awake listening for a footfall or the creak of a stair or a whisper, something to let me know I wasn't alone in the world. Every night, I cried.
When the house grew dark and quiet, my imagination would kick into double overtime. Every shadow was a bad man coming to get me. Every creak was a murderer sneaking up on me. Every glint in the window took on features and became a face staring in at me, waiting for me to fall asleep so the person belonging to the face could come in and kill me. Some primal instinct drove me to seek protection in my blankets: I would wrap them tight around me, layer upon layer, until I was so swathed in blankets I could barely move. I would leave only my head poking out, to scan the room for danger. I wanted to see it coming and meet it with claws. Danger would not get me without a fight.
I am now twenty-five years old, and I still haven't grown out of this. During the day, I'm fine: danger doesn't stalk me anymore. I know how to fight with purpose now; I took lessons from the man I now call Dad, in his library or in his basement. He'd come up behind me and put his arm around my neck in a mock choke hold: "Alright Tif, what do you do?" He taught me how to fight from a wheelchair and how to fight from flat on my back on the ground. He made me a set of Filipino fighting sticks, painted them purple, and taught me how to wield them with painful, disarming force. He gave me a recipe for pepper spray. Thanks to him, I know I can defend myself well and victoriously if I have to. But somehow that knowledge fails to comfort me after dark. After dark, I become a paranoid 8-year old and experience compulsive desires to check the closets for bad men with knives. Danger is real to me: I have seen it. I have felt it. I can smell it, and it can smell me. And darkness hides danger, and darkness cloaks me in abandonment. I am forever wielding off the darkness.
The lamp in my living room has a 7-year bulb that will probably only last me four years, because it stays on 24 hours a day. I have lived here for four summers now, and I can count on one hand the number of times I have turned it off. Rain or shine, noon or night, that lamp burns. In the winter, I keep the shades drawn so that I don't have to watch the sun set and anticipate the oncoming darkness. I keep that lamp on and let night surprise me when it will. If the electricity goes out before the sun does, I head for Dad's house long before evening arrives. If my lights are out his lights are also out, but I don't mind candlelit shadows as long as there are people I trust around me. Those rare times I have had a partner, I have slept in the darkness curled around her body like a comma, trusting her solidity. I just can't do it alone. If the lights go out after darkness has already fallen, I streak for the hallway like a programmed explosive and sit in the light from the generator until electricity is fully restored. I'll sit there all night if I must.
I rarely sleep in my bed, though I have been making more of an effort at it these days. Usually I make the rounds of spots in the living room: a few weeks curled up on the love seat, a few weeks in the recliner, a few weeks on the floor. This amounts to: uncomfortable, uncomfortable, and extremely uncomfortable, but the security factor is worth the trade. When I do happen to sleep in the bed, I always put my head at the foot and sleep thus, upside-down. This is to be closer to the doorway should I need to launch a defense attack. Also, I set up a barrier of junk in said doorway: 1 very noisy beaded curtain, one manual wheelchair, one old oscillating fan. Every nighttime noise in my environment is carefully recorded and then located before I lie down. Thanks to a blind eye I have the hearing of a bat; anything amiss will wake me immediately. Heaven forbid anyone actually surprise me while I'm sleeping. I'll kill the bastard in 3 seconds flat, before I even realize my feet have hit the floor.
I have tried to cure myself of my fear of darkness through logic, reason, and even force, i.e. exposure therapy. Sometimes I turn off the lights and make it back to the bed and climb in and cover up before I can't take it anymore; sometimes I can't even drop my hand to my side before my heart is beating in my throat. Every once in a great while, I will take a particularly strong sleeping pill and force myself to turn off the lights mere seconds before I pass out cold. What I need, I think, is a life partner: someone who won't mind spending night after night with my cheek against her spine, until finally I trust her presence enough to let go. I can just imagine advertising for that on chemistry.com: "Wanted: One dark haired, dark eyed lesbian who knows how to cook, likes grumpy, cantankerous cats, and never, ever, ever has to get up in the middle of the night to pee."
Maybe I'll buy a body pillow and curl around it like a comma. That's just pathetic enough to work.
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