The People Behind My Eyes

In therapy we talked about the entry where I said losing Captain is like the pain of losing my brother.

If I remember correctly my sister’s room didn’t really have a theme but the theme of my room was mallard ducks accented with trees that if moved around too often dropped all it’s leaves and died. My room was extremely clean. I stayed in it as often as possible. I also stayed home from school a lot so I had plenty of time outside of the room. I stayed home to care for my brother while my mother went to work and my sister to school. I missed so much school that I was warned I had to earn back missed days by good attendance or I’d be expelled. It wasn’t the first time nor the last that I’d have to earn back missed days.

There are many days a person wishes they could take back, erase and never have to feel like they are the worst person to walk the face of the earth. I suppose in many ways I’ve intellectualized the pain of this day to a manageable level. I’ve gone over it so many times in therapy that I’ve lost count. The short of it is, I thought I was dreaming about a child crying. I woke to find it was my brother. I walked down the hallway and my sister stood in the door way of my mother’s bedroom looking at my mother in horror. The mother held my three year old brother down with one hand and beat him with a dowel rod with the other hand. He was naked and red. After a short while he wasn’t screaming anymore. The mother looked up at her two daughters in the doorway and warned that if we didn’t go back to bed we’d be next. My regrettable but understandable reaction was to turn and go back to bed. I put a pillow over my head so as to muffle his groans. He wasn’t even crying anymore. The very next day I called the police to have him removed from the house. I didn’t want him to grow up like my sister and I were going to grow up. So they took him. The little boy that I thought was butt ugly at birth but grabbed onto my heart was gone so fast. I really thought losing him was going to kill me. It was horrible.

Shortly after K was taken I had this idea to paint a picture of a woman growing from a flower. I was 15 years old when the painting I called Grow Into Peace was mentally sketched. Not until a few days before I turned 37 did I actually put the sketch on paper. Why now? Because losing my dog really does feel comparable to losing my brother. I felt/feel responsible for both losses so it makes sense the sketch would be so strong in my mind again. Instead of it staying in my mind I decided to put it on paper.

The reason I called the police to have K removed was because he needed a chance to grow up safer than his two sisters. And the reason Captain was put to rest was because I didn’t want him to suffer. Those two explanations seem reasonable but it doesn’t take the pain of their loss away.

This sketch has only been on paper for 3 days but soon I’ll begin to put it on canvas because I too need a little peace..without having to die for it.

About the sketch: Her hair is caught up in the wind and meets the horizon. One arm is actually the flower she’s growing from while the other is a separate unopened bud. She is of course faceless, nude and grouped in threes. I seem to have a thing for a group of three. There are 3 distinct flowers in this sketch. There’s the flower she’s coming from, the flower at the end of one hand and the flower growing to her side. Flowers don’t spread their petals open at night but these do. They grow because they will it, not because conditions are ripe for it.

Joan of Arc

Grow Into Peace-Thursday, August 28, 2008-3:48AM EST