I tell most people I came to Gillette, Wyoming for family matters but really I am here to get fucked up. I am tired of the constant psychiatric, standardized, and vague tests that I will always complete, pass, and tattoo into my limbic brain. Ain’t got no spending money to etch symbols on my skin at the corner tattoo shop. I have a mouth to spit venom and a tongue to lick the salt from the big open wound of my hometown.
I am here because I want to test myself. Atonement, reconciliation, understanding–the fakery fed to me sticks to my ribs like oatmeal. This experience amazes me with the same feeling of curiosity that overcame me in Burns/Carpenter, WY watching my Grandfather’s fried eggs suspended in air before hitting the hot pan. It was the suspension that made those eggs taste so good. I am suspended, floating.
My irritability is stability reflected in my childhood demands of my family to wash their hands. I was concerned about contamination far before COVID. I learned about germs in school and came home to glare at the eggplants in my father’s garden demanding he tell me why he was growing germs. Given no direct answer, I would go to his box of worms and stab them in half with a screwdriver. It was something I could see and try to understand. (more explanation–too obscure, clear, concise
Mother and sister were connected and I am still jealous. Sissy was able to stay home from school with her and I imagine it must have been safe, secure, a release. (suicidaloity) The feeling of being left out would distill and intensify alongside the diesel fumes of the school bus plopping me off in the afternoon–the most confusing part of the day, I grasped onto anger asking that they wash their hands so I could scoop the dead bunny off the heating pad. It gave me a moment to put in the dumpster trying to figure out how to tell mother she wasn’t Jesus.
I came to Gillette to get fucked up and am sucking eggs the the reality of it all. My education means nothing here. I rely on my family’s name to get me the things I want and am horrified about what that name means. Schizophrenic mother, sex worker sister, violent felon brother, death father, drug addict me. My second week here I was called evil, the devil. And so I shut the fuck up but talk too much. I embarrass myself daily.
I am writing it down because it does matter to me. The incest, the lies, my own mental unraveling. The abuse, the gun in my face, my mothers overdose, the house my uncle bought my sister, the friendships I lose daily because I keep cutting the worms in half. I stare at the popcorn ceiling of my newest shithole wondering how the fuck any of this is real. Welcome home.
Fast forward, right now, here. Wasn’t that dramatic. The suspended eggs have turned into fake tanning foam my skin seeping capitalism and brown folds and wrinkles because my weight is impacted by my drug use as well. I here a pathetic gutteral meow downstairs because my uncle died in his sleep and now that is where I sleep.
My sister and niece have grown round and my niece placed her hand on the small of my back–there are no waists in her house.
