“I love you. I don’t like you.”
It took me years to realize that’s not a normal thing to say to a child though you always made a point of speaking to me like an adult. I don’t remember the last time you said it. But I remember hearing it for the first time.
Back when my eyes only reached your hands and the house was still being built and dad was always away. Too busy driving back and forth between vertical lines of vineyards and city streets in his Porsche that was a princess carriage those fistfull of days he picked me up from school. Too busy building us a better future while you stayed home and held the present together.
In those days Connor was your shadow and there was barely any room for me in your arms. Back then we didn’t know the clinical word for his skin crawling and the way bananas felt like vomit in his mouth. But I knew that you lay with him every night while I tucked myself in and I couldn’t see how thinly you were stretched over the quilt I pulled up over my eyes to keep the monsters away. So the next day at school I bent over backwards in class and snapped my elbow to stop it from bending so I’d always be called on first. I’d binge on top marks, stuff myself with extra credit, lick the fraudulent affection from my fingertips ahead of the purge at home where I’d gorge myself with words, lay my head down on textbooks and dream of all the correct answers that tasted something like love for me collect the following day.
