Landing on that one decrepit wooden step was always the risk.
One misguided footfall and my parents would awaken to derail my nocturnal plans. Such was the downside of harnessing liberty as a teen while living in an old home on the precipice of one hundred.
It never occurred to me that I was not in every way deserving of these post-curfew flights, nor did I believe that I was doing anything wrong. This was a matter of survival and a necessary step in eradicating the invisible and loathsome blob of animated nothing that had sought custody of my self-regard for the entirety of my nearly- fourteen years.
However, this was a new game and while it may have taken a cross-country move to improve my standing, I now held the cards - a purgatorial flush where the presence of sin ranked equally with hope and guaranteed me a draw. Certainly, it was a gamble but in the heat of the game I chose to ignore all threat of punishment and creep silently out of the house to meet the boy who saved me.
He was three years my senior and his early interest in me was predicated on the false belief that I was nearly sixteen. Months later when I revealed to him my true age, it was of little consequence. We were committed to one another with the shared and rabid impetuosity of a dark adolescence that was crumbling under its own depravity but still innocent enough to believe in the lofty pledge of true love.
It didn't take much to sweep me into blind collusion. I had sworn off my treaty with loneliness and was done being bolstered up by the knotted veneer of being different. The need to belong to a person or peers outside of my family was all that mattered because at that age my worth could only be measured against the fine distinction of choice. Who would choose me? Would anyone? Ever?And to this end I traded my Catholic-school-girl decency and severed all ties to the worthy aim of being holy.
Sneaking out of the house became routine. So much so that by the fall of my fifteenth year I was hospitalized for a month with Pneumonia and Mononucleosis and under some concern in the first week that I might not even survive.
Still, no amount of self-inflicted suffering could convince me of the danger in the lifestyle I had adopted. I had a boyfriend. A loyal one who called me every night, loved me every weekend and took me to places with pills, pipes and powders that were so otherworldly my body could not follow.
My body had other uses.
Within weeks after our family’s summer move from New York to Kansas City the rumors began. In the typically defensive wake of the 1970's Midwestern clannishness, the sudden presence of a prematurely-voluptuous, blonde-haired interloper could mean only one thing: I must be a slut.
By the time classes began in the fall, the reputation that would follow me throughout high school was sealed and all I did to deserve it was step off a plane.
Ironically, this unwholesome notoriety preceded even my first kiss by a good ten months.
Yet by the advent of that kiss and after months of abiding school-hall taunting, prank phone calls and exclusion, taking that next step seemed a fait accompli, and the benefits that were proffered upon proof of loyalty trumped all hesitation.
True love would accept nothing less.
True love demanded sacrifices.
True love provided refuge.
I dressed for school dances like everyone else but while my classmates whirled under colored lights to the awkward throbbing of local bands and made plans to meet for pizza after the dance, I was folded against the ignominy of sin in a fetal clump as I hid on the floor of my boyfriend’s car while he signed for a room at a crumbling truck-stop motel in a neighboring town.
Now, in addition to the entertainment value, getting high became a necessity providing a buffer against the fear, guilt and shame. So did the treats: the promise of a burger and a movie, candy, Crackerjacks, or novelty toys purchased at 7-Eleven on the way to the motel.
These became my rewards for a loyalty well-proven. But until that last gasp of evening when they were mine, I was a quivering, disembodied hull pining over a Disney-colored innocence that would never exist for me again.
Those were the early years. The tip of the iceberg, as they say. Declivity would soon become my specialty. Fortunately, so would survival.
Of course, I grew up and I moved on, but the tendency to see myself merely as one whose every favorable gain comes at the feet of deplorable compromise is hard to shake even after time and the wisdom of age have softened the memories.
I thought I had long ago put the worst of these to rest, but when my son was arrested for the last time and sent to prison, the purveyors of my darkest recollections put on quite a spread; a banquet of remorseful expurgation in my honor - an invitation that in all good conscience I could not refuse.
Now, as I again taste the bitter morsels of these ancient misdeeds with a clean and healthy palette, I search for forgiveness – and for the wisdom that can only be earned by candid appraisal.
So don’t mind me.
I’m just pushing through it like everyone else.
In the end it will all be for good.
It has to be.
I will not accept anything less.
