Member-only story
Proof of Life — Day One
At lunch one day, I stopped myself mid-sentence when I felt my teenagers’ open-mouthed stares. I had just run my fingers across the kitchen table and told them that was finally able to remove those white stains from hot serving dishes and cloudy condensation rings from glasses.
They looked at me exactly the way I used to look at my mother.
Incredulous. Confused. I’m never ever going to be like you. Who takes a perfectly good Saturday to look up DIY methods of getting heat stains out of furniture?
I instantly remembered being 14 and thinking my life is going to be so much better once I get out of here. Whatever here was. This house, this family, this school, this body, this town, this country.
At 14, creativity helped me deal with the chaos inside of me and within my family. I drew, I painted, I wrote. I took ballet, jazz, tap, and modern dance classes. I spent hours every week in that dance studio for 12 years. The combination of order and repetition together with emotional expression was comforting. I choreographed dance numbers for family members’ birthdays and taught my little cousins. I kept journals — each page a collage of pictures and horrendous poetry, messages from friends and notes from crushes still faintly smelling of cheap cologne, sugar packets from cafes, movie ticket stubs, postcards I received, stickers I found funny.
I re-arranged my room every couple of months. With my Opa’s help, I refinished the wooden floors in my bedroom and wallpapered the bathroom. Then I covered every inch of those walls with posters of Paddy Kelly and chalk drawings that rained colorful dust with every breeze. I made elaborate birthday cakes and intricate holiday decorations and fugly clay pots. I dyed my hair red, black, blonde. I didn’t care (that much) when it turned out orange. I cut instantly regrettable bangs. More than once.
I made things — sometimes they were just mistakes and sometimes they were things I’d turn over in my hand later wondering how that had come out of me. I tried things, often with unexpected, unintended, unwanted results. But I’d done a thing and watched it go somewhere and that was enough.
