Unfamilies

“It's like coming home,” she tells me as we turn on the car, me in the passenger seat. I blink. I'm not sure I know what she means. “My parents never fought, everyone helped out. He does his share—look at his house.” She's talking about my my uncle, my uncle's house, where we've been staying for the past day, where we'll be moving soon. She feels like she's coming home, I don't feel the same. I feel like I'm being thrown to the sharks, only the sharks here believe in god, and eat dinner together.

My mother grew up with family dinners and a sense of closeness. I grew up tough. I grew up telling my mother if my father causes trouble I'll get the baseball bat and fix things. I didn't know kids grew up and watched movies with their family. I didn't. Apparently all my cousins are friends but me: the things I never knew.

My first thoughts still fall to baseball hats when my father yells, and sitting in my uncle's house is like an out of body experience. Clean house, large rooms, a dog asleep at my feet while I write or work on jewelry. Whose life is this? It's not mine, I don't belong here. I live in small spaces, work until my fingers hurt, and date people who hurt me. I let my parents be hundreds of dollars in debt to me, and keep silent, don't let myself get annoyed. I don't live in still-life paintings, but I do reside in black-and-white photographs, the kinds they used to take after someone died. Look at the grieving little girl who doesn't cry in front of her family or friends or in her photographs. Watch her grasp for color, but still live in monochrome.

My monochrome feels threatened now, and I don't know how to live in the shadow of happiness. My borderline traits curl around me like a great gray cat, weaving around my legs, climbing up to rest on my chest, burying its back into my mouth. I need its claws digging into my skin. Instead I make bad choices, and come to my two-day home and cry. Sex is the weapon of gray cat clung to my mind. Regret. Like my brain-cat, I crave attention, but when I get it I go too far. I want someone to hold me, and for once I want it to end there.

I don't understand how I can fit into this little world my mother calls home. There's a sense of innocence there, and family. I'm far from innocent anymore, and this family I barely know.

I feel like I'm too much of a stray to belong here. To belong anywhere.