#TooLateNow

Photo copyright Aji, 2015; all rights reserved.

April tenth, her thoughts filled with death and taxes.

She learns from Twitter that it's something called National Siblings Day. It only registers because people in her timeline are posting photos of themselves with all of their sisters and brothers.

It hits her that, over the course of a half-century, there are no photos of the all of them together. Not one.

She mentally hashtags it #TooLateNow and moves on.

She's been doing that her whole life: forcing acceptance, compartmentalizing to keep it accepted, and failing that, at least to keep it forced. There's never been any other choice.

#TooLateNow.



Ripped from their culture and traditions; stripped of their identity; divorced from their extended [and not-so] family; forcibly removed even from some immediate family. No links, no ties, no allowances, no permissions.

No happy whole-family photos to mask the reality.

It wasn't surprising, in retrospect.  When you're not a person, when you're property, those who hold your title can do as they will. Of course, she was expected to behave as though she were a person: even in toddlerhood, she was supposed mostly expected to be a perfect facsimile of a grown-up, an adult in miniature. Always obedient, unfailingly polite . . . and, of course, that best-of-all-worlds for everyone else, seen and not heard.

Still, she couldn't be actually adult, even at the point at which she was arguably close: She must be infantilized. Dating wasn't even remotely a question at any kind of normal age; as a first-grader, she was punished for allowing a boy to put his arm around her shoulders as the two of them and two other little girls walk abreast down the sidewalk outside school in a show of innocent camaraderie. She'll never be old enough to have a boyfriend; not really. She cannot go to movies, or out with her friends, either (but what friends, anyway? and that was the unironic, wholly unaware response). Dancing? The devil's work. So, too is the way everyone else dresses: No tight jeans (nor even properly fitting ones, in either width or length, because the old too-short ones are still perfectly serviceable), no miniskirts (nor even an inch above the knee); in adolescence, not even a bra until two years after every other girl in class wears one. Bras mean breasts, and breasts (like shaved legs) mean sex, and if they pretend that none of that exists, she'll have to stay a child. 

It's why they insisted she call them "Mommy" and "Daddy" even into high school, and in public, no less, despite the fact that her older siblings were using "Mom" and "Dad" as a matter of course by age ten or younger.

It's because she drew the straw marked "Youngest," and thus because she became the one they refused to recognize as fully human. She was a child, which meant she was property, and always would be, no matter her age or accomplishments.

#TooLateNow.

Half the time, it seemed, they couldn't remember her name; he in particular called her everything else, famously including, once the name of the family dog. But she didn't exist for either of them except as an extension of their own existences, indeed, as a problem as much as anything else, no matter that she was the most obedient child she knew. Terrified into it, in fact, not merely because of what would ensue at home but on pain of the flames that would surely await her one day. 

Still, her brain would not shut off, and at times, her mouth would not shut up. Mostly, it was entirely innocent: repeating what was said in her presence, asking for clarification, wondering aloud. A smack, a slap; struck in the face, across the mouth, a violation so intensely personal she won't even grasp its significance for another forty years. perpetual groundings, weeks and months. Whines and rants and screams and spankings, where the violation seems to be that, because she took her coat off to play on the jungle gym in winter, she doesn't care about them. When she cries, she's punished for it; when she doesn't, she's punished for that. Eventually, not crying becomes a goal in itself, a personal requirement for maintaining what little self-respect she's somehow acquired in spite of everything.

#TooLateNow.

She's disowned so many times, she's lost count. That will continue well into adulthood. Even then, she hasn't really pieced together the whole of the violation; it hasn't occurred to her yet to question how it is that she can be "owned" in the first place, such that she can be disowned anyway. It's a mark of how complete her indoctrination has been, how successful, that she simply accepts it as the norm and grieves anew every single time she's told that she is not theirs, cannot be theirs, because they wouldn't have a child (of whatever age) who was so bad. After a lifetime of spiritual hostage-taking, she knows little more than of life than a Stockholm Syndrome of the soul.

But she knows she was abandoned by those who could have kept her safe. No one knows, but more than that, she knows no one cares. She's inconvenient, and that's fine, but what they do not consider is that there will come a day when there will be demands for her to make herself available, accessible, adaptable to all of them, demands that will go unanswered because they now must, because the seeds were sown, the soil tilled with poison and watered with pain, and she will not be able to risk it again.

#TooLateNow.

And so she lived with the religious mania, with the hatred, with the paranoia and the persecution complex and the grasping sense of ownership threatening at all times to escape their clutching fingers, and she did it in isolation.

She learned to like being alone. She didn't know what it was like not to be alone on the outside; inside, it was the only time she got any peace.

Not much, of course. She spent her entire formative and years, and far beyond, in a constant state of "fight or flight." That word "constant?" That's the literal usage. And, of course, fight was never an option; she was too browbeaten into submission to consider it. Which left flight, but that was never an option, either; it's not as though she was ever permitted to leave. 

Except within herself.

It became her one refuge, albeit one full of chinks and holes enough to allow weapons large and small to penetrate virtually at will. But it was what she had.

Now, it's all she has, from that time.

There are no links, no connections, no ties. Grief and guilt there are in abundance, but the grief is as much for what should have been but could never be, while the guilt is always for what cannot be changed now, and could not have been even then.

It's tragic, but not in any epic way, not the stuff of literary grandeur. It's just one more in a lifetime of the small daily tragedies of ordinary people forced onto and out of the margins, an old, old story that repeats itself over and over and finds no resolution, just another solitary thread woven into the blanket of her life.

As always, it's #TooLateNow.

And so the blackness yet descends, again and again, a depression that responds to no treatment yet discovered, one that swamps her periodically, engulfing the tiny life raft, battered and patched, to which her soul clings fiercely. She knows to expect it, now and then, and she knows that some events will spawn a storm surge that will threaten to shatter the raft, break it on the rocks of memory, waves of grief pulling her into their undertow.

She'll survive it. Not prettily, nor conveniently, not in any way that pleases the people of her past, but if she's learned anything in recent years, it's that the spirit protects itself, in the end, however it can. Survival demands, and body and soul alike respond: not often gracefully, perhaps even downright ugly, but instinct is what it is.

She's working on learning not to care how others value that survival. It will involve cutting her own bonds, but most have been cut already. There's pain, but there's always pain when blood begins to flow again. Of course, while she waits for the life to begin to circulate through her soul again, there's always the risk of drowning . . . but she's been there before.

And she's still here.

Now, she's still buffeted and battered by the waves, an existential storm that rages beneath a blinding and acid sun. Eventually, she'll be dashed up on shore like so much burned and broken driftwood. 

In pieces, perhaps, but alive.

Because it's all #TooLateNow.






All content, including photos and text, are copyright Aji, 2015; all rights reserved. Nothing herein may used or reproduced in any form without the express written permission of the owner.