Observational Comedy
Nobody is ever going to tell you the truth, if they can help it.
They tell you that people simply fall out of love, suddenly, neck-breakingly,
Instead of saying that your father is an adulterer and a coward,
That he’s leaving you and your brother alone in the house
With the windows unlocked so he can crawl back in around morning,
Cleaning up the beer bottles around the couch just before you wake up,
As you’re oversleeping through the loneliness digging in your stomach like a knife,
On the nights he lets himself pretend he doesn’t have a family to save.
Nobody is going to tell you that your mother has a laundry list of mental illnesses,
And that’s why she spends so much time sleeping in your bed so you can’t,
Curled up in your pink comforter and piles of stuffed animals like the child you should have been,
So much time sleeping alone in their bed, surrounded by piles of trash and empty prescription bottles,
Waking up only for birthdays and holidays as if she were there to witness the time that slipped away,
As if she were the one who had been cooking dinners and helping with homework
And everything else you learned to do alone,
As if she knows how old you are and what month it is,
As if you still remember what it is to have a mother,
As if you are not a child left to pacify a woman going through a psychotic breakdown.
Instead, on one of her better days,
she promises you that she won’t let him gamble away your college fund,
Sitting you down in those little plastic chairs at the preschool where she works
As she draws a diagram of Daddy’s Disposable Income (that’s you),
Coloring in a bar graph of how much he loves you versus
his addiction, his mistresses, his gluttony, his willful ignorance,
And you always seem to lose.
You understand that this is deadly, viciously serious,
That your mother is likely holding back tears as she explains it to you,
But the absurdity of divorce papers spelled out in blue crayon
Makes you choke down laughter.
Nobody tells you that money is tight,
So you have to take it upon yourself to not ask for things,
Convince them not to buy you ice cream,
To hide your Christmas gifts in the closet until next summer
So they don’t have to give you any more,
And even when the danger is gone,
you still save every dollar as if you could pay the mortgage with pocket change,
As if you’d have to leave suddenly in the middle of the night
And find somewhere safer.
And now your mother refuses to talk about money with you in the room,
Because she tells you it’s not your responsibility,
But nobody else seems to care like you do.
Nobody admits that your brother has anger issues,
So he crashes freely though the walls
As if he could tear this house up by the roots
And build something sturdier.
Instead we end up stepping on broken glass in the kitchen,
Cracking our teeth on the manic screams your mother taught him,
And quietly patching the holes in the drywall when it’s over.
Nobody says anything as you watch him
Spiral through bad grades and bad crowds,
Weeping openly, desperately, childishly,
when he finally runs out of curse words,
Before vomiting death threats and suicide confessions all over the dinner table.
It is so fucking obvious when he starts using, but everybody tells you
they didn’t see it coming,
And they pretend they don’t see him relapsing
Every time they catch him with coke up his nose in the basement,
Stealing money and shitty whisky,
Crashing your mother’s car at midnight,
Falling down the staircase drunk like some sort of bad metaphor for a backslide.
Overdosing in his bedroom two nights before your big calculus test,
And nobody wonders why you still goddamn aced it.
Nobody tells you what he’s on.
Nobody tells you about the acid.
Nobody tells you about the cocaine.
Nobody tells you when he started doing heroin,
Not when they find needles in his backpack,
Not until you wake up to him not breathing.
Instead, before all this, he told you the first time he smoked something,
And you pretended not to hear him
Because he never spoke to you anymore,
And this might be the last thing you ever really know about him.
Instead, after the fact, everybody just talks about forgiving him,
Because we are family no matter what,
Because this is the last rehab, the last time we will ever have to ask you,
Because you not cooperating could be detrimental to his recovery,
as if you alone could have stopped this,
Because you’ve finally given up on trying to fix them,
But no pressure, but you are a horrible, cruel, heartless bitch,
sorry excuse of a sister, of a daughter, if you don’t.
Nobody mentions the fact that he was the only person besides you who
ever understood what went on in this house—
And you mean what really went on, not the surface-level bullshit you
all tell people—
Nobody mentions the fact that he really only seemed to like you when
he was high,
The fact that you still cried happy tears when the ambulance pulled
away, banshee sirens wailing, singing
That he might never come back.
Instead, even when he is gone you still find bottle-green glass
embedded in the walls,
And you forget a time when you could sleep through the night.
Nobody tells you that your mother hid recording devices around the house,
Listening to them late at night when you were asleep,
Listening to herself cry,
Listening to your father tell his other women about the family he’s
running away from,
about you and your brother,
Listening to every new confession that we are one really screwed up
bunch of people,
Instead, she described that time she was date raped in college,
And every time her father hit her,
And other deeply personal fucked up stuff you’re probably too young to hear,
And like her, you still listen,
Because there is not much else you can do,
Because you have always been her witness,
Her emotional support dog, her surrogate mother,
And you don’t know why, but you still feel watched in empty rooms
And you are cautious of the few, small things you do manage to say out loud
Nobody tells you why they forced you to therapists,
Dragging you to a psychiatrist to be ignored by doctors who seem
afraid of you instead of afraid for you,
And diagnosing you with disorders everybody already seemed to know you had,
Well, everybody except you,
And nobody tells you the things that might have saved you until it’s
too fucking late.
Nobody tells you what’s wrong with you,
They just keep telling you over and over,
That there is something so wrong with you.
Nobody listens when you won’t stop pleading that there is something
actually wrong here,
Because this is not really about you.
This is about humiliation.
This is you being dragged through the street in a barrel of nails,
This is the lesson your family has to teach you about going against them,
This is a reminder that you are not normal, you are not better than them,
You did not make it out of this unscathed,
And this will be the hill you choose to die on
After you decided that you just wanted to die.
You didn’t tell anyone when she slammed your head into the wall and
bit you on the arm
Because you fought back after she threatened to give away your dog
As if he weren’t the only thing in this house left with a heartbeat.
Instead, the police told you it was your fault,
That “physical discipline” is legal in Maryland.
Instead, your father left you alone with a woman you told him you were
afraid of.
Instead, your therapist, the one you stopped talking to,
was the only one to ever defend you to her,
Because clearly, bad things happen when you try to defend yourself.
You didn’t tell anyone when he shoved you so hard you fell into a tool
shelf in the basement
Because you made a bad joke,
The kind of joke he made all the time,
Instead, you just stopped hugging him because it felt like being held down
Like he used to do when you were little and talked back too much,
Like it was just something you figured would happen eventually,
Because his love could be negligent or overpowering,
And your father has your brother’s temper,
Because your father has his father’s temper,
And you will never on your life have his.
Instead, you learned to never cry in front of anyone
Instead, you lied to them about the million ways you hurt yourself every day,
And you never tell anyone the truth, if you can help it.
Instead, you stopped saying, “I love you,”
And nobody tells you that someday, you won’t know how to anymore,
Because nobody ever told you what that word meant.
And you may hate yourself, but you do not hate yourself enough to
believe them when they tell you they love you.
You just pray that they’ll stop.
Nobody tells you that you are just a hurting child.
Instead, you understand on your own that children are sponges,
And you squeeze out every horrible memory you can wring
From your dishwater brain,
Hoping to forget,
To not think,
Not listen
To the familiar feeling of stabbing yourself to cut his nose and her
smile and their eyes out of your face,
To the nightmares that wake you up to panic attacks at 3 AM
To the unspoken fact that there is something horribly, heartbreakingly
wrong with all of you.
And nobody, nobody bothers to tell you, anyway, because they all already know.
.
I Am Not A Mirror
…Everybody tells me I look just like you,
……and I wonder if that’s when you started saying I needed to lose weight,
………That I should take better care of my skin, my hair, my act,
………Whitening my teeth because you thought I looked disgusting,
……But still learning to smile with my lips sealed around the shame,
…As you measured our heights, hips, weights,
Telling the doctor that I couldn’t possibly be anorexic,
But complaining you haven’t eaten in two days,
…asking if I lost weight whenever I came to see you
……Because you gained five pounds that week.
………I started hunching over when I grew taller than you,
………Growing my hair out after you told me your mother made you cut yours short,
………Ripping you out of photos of us so I wouldn’t have to wonder.
……I don’t remember when I stopped calling you “mom” inside my head.
I think it was around the time when I decided I wanted to die.
After you left, I wondered if I took your place in this house,
…Overdosing on ibuprofen for stress migraines,
……Leaving paint splatters up the walls in insomniatic fervor,
………Learning how to survive him by doing everything you should have,
………like I had to become you to escape you.
……Sometimes it feels like you resent me for no reason,
…Snapping from loving and desperate to screaming the most horrible things at me,
Telling me it’s pathetic and attention-seeking when I cry like that, twelve years old and sniffling quietly
because you threaten to take my dog away when I unload the dishwasher too slowly,
…Saying I’m heartless when I don’t comfort you when you’re sobbing violently at midnight,
……Repeating over and over that there is something so wrong with you,
………With a hollow kind of hate in your expression
………That I don’t understand until I catch a glimpse of myself staring at my reflection the same way
……And I think to myself, oh, shit.
…your life is my life,
…Your monsters are my monsters, your psychotic breakdowns were my childhood,
……Your illnesses are my prophecies,
………And maybe I did have a mother in between manic episodes and divorce proceedings,
………In the birthday parties before police visits,
……Family dinners without broken plates all over the table,
…Even though we don’t eat together anymore,
you are still fishing shards out of my memory,
Splicing my brain like old film tape
…Taping over everything we pretend didn’t happen,
……But you don’t stop after that and I start missing days and months and years.
………And even if I don’t remember, sometimes it hits me like I’m dreaming wide awake.
………I blink, and I’m there again, and I don’t remember any of it happening, but I’m reliving it.
someday I will get your voice out of my head,
And someday I will get your voice out of my mouth,
…For all the times we promised each other that I would be nothing like you.
……But right now, I wish you wouldn’t look me in the eye when you tell me you love me,
………Because it always seems like you’re talking to someone else.
© Sara Humphries
Sara Humphries is an artist of varied mediums. She draws inspiration from the dark and uncomfortable.
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