1.3.98

E.T. was on the movie channel. I saw that movie once when it first came out in the early eighties. I was eleven and my grandma took me to see it at that theater over on the far side of Bremerton. The one in the same complex as the Mount Constance Mountain Shop. Was it called the Redwood? Red-something maybe. Anyway, I saw Sixteen Candles at that theater a few years later. Man, I still love that movie. I think it was Fall when I went with my grandma; I think I remember her in her coat. Just before we went in, over lunch I think, she told me that she had breast cancer. Maybe she just told me they’d found a lump and didn’t know it was cancer yet. I don’t remember that detail, I only remember that it was breast cancer and even if at that point it wasn’t yet determined to be cancer, my little mind only knew that lump = cancer because my mother had just died from that disease not even a year earlier. The movie was on TV and I decided to watch it, thinking that I hadn’t seen it since it first came out. I mean, it was a huge hit and people saw it, like, a gazillion times but I had only seen it once. This time I watched it with the eyes of an adult and it seemed really hokey. Maybe my eyes also see it with the savvy of modern special effects. Yeah, I think so. Anyway, it seems I’d forgotten a lot of details about the plot. I usually forget details over time, but feelings never fade. At some points I remembered how ill I felt sitting in the theater next to my grandma. I remembered worrying if she was going to die, thinking of her as if she were an X-ray image and she was an outline of a person with a big deadly lump in her. My mother requested that grandma be my guardian, and here I was having just lost my primary caregiver and now feeling I could lose another. God, I was so sick during that movie. Her disclosure to me put that knot of anxiety back into my stomach. That knot that had lived there for something like two years when my mom was sick, that was itself like a kind of malignancy. It prevented me from eating, it made me want to throw up all the time; seems for two years I was always holding back the urge to vomit. Once when I was visiting my mom during one of her hospital stays, I lost it. I did vomit. I ran for the bathroom in the room and just let it go. A nurse came in and yelled at me. She said I was doing it wrong. What the hell? She said I was making too much noise and forcing it. Forcing it? It was all I could do to hold it back! Bitch. I think that my mom told the doctor and she was "talked to." So, watching that movie on TV today I just felt sad, as I sometimes do. I thought about how I was really ill that Fall while my grandma was having surgery and then radiation treatment. I had this freak cold that made green snot flow like a river from my nose. I was in sixth grade and I couldn’t take enough Kleenex to school with me to contain it all. Spose I should’ve stayed home, but I didn’t. Don’t know why. I guess staying home was too close to the fear, too much like being alone and left behind. I think the teacher was disgusted with me. Screw her. Earlier that year, when I was just ending fifth grade, I became violently and mysteriously ill. It was less than a month after my mom died, but I guess that in those days it seemed like a year had passed. The doctor didn’t know what was wrong with me and I was so sick, vomiting all the time, and unable to stand without collapsing. I was that way for three weeks. I missed the end of school. The sadness comes and I mourn the little girl who suffered loss, fear, and anxiety for so many years. It’s like I am not her but I know her intimately, love her, and feel agony over the pain she lived. I think how horrible it was for her to have to live through all of that. So many things have already tortured her young life, won’t things just get better? Is that self-pity? It’s weird for me to be that separated from myself. Like, if I learned those facts about another person’s life I would feel so much sadness for her. When I think of it as my life, I don’t allow myself to feel at all. I’ve thought about it and I think maybe it’s good for me to think of myself as another person, to give myself the depth of love I deserve. If I thought of it as me, I would feel immediately like I had to be stronger so I could survive; doing so necessitates pushing away the feelings. Being separate allows me to just feel the pain I held in for so long and then when I remember that it is me, I feel better…in a strange but good way that brings me one more sliver of peace.

future past index