Paradise Lost

TW NONCONSENSUAL INCEST AND MENTIONS OF SUICIDE

They say you don’t know what you’ve got until it’s gone. But I knew, even as I was inching towards the deadline, staring down into the abyss I knew was reaching for me, I knew exactly what I had. I had even gone as far as to write over fifteen thousand words about it, an almost-novel, the setting ambiguous but very obviously a university. I knew what I had. I just half-hoped I wasn’t really losing it. That the fall was the fictional part, not what would later be memories of paradise lost. The lost paradise, permanently rewritten and romanticized because, well, nowhere else has that same organizing structure the way a class does.

Nowhere else can you expect people to care about you, the human being, as opposed to A Member of This Family. Maybe they never did, really, and my memories are just that – fantasies. Phantoms, ghosts, ghosting, ironic how that’s a verb used to describe someone who disappeared from one’s perception. Disappearing is so easy. I knew even as I attended university; this would all be temporary, and it was. I look back now and romanticize having something worth doing, a reason to wake up every day and leave the dorm room.  

Bedrooms are different. They’re cliché, for one. A door that can’t close properly is far from a prison. Paradise was having a door that closed completely, having control over who entered my space. That’s lost, just covered by the shouting about clothes on my floor and demands for my attention. Lost, loss, all is lost in the chaos. My life is chaos.

I used to have nightmares about the world I now live within – the demands, the role I was born to play, my brother’s laughter - “is it funny?” his hands stroking your chin, your neck, nowhere explicitly wrong enough as he laughs and and… and I would wake up with people to message who cared. I rarely actually reached out, but the option existed back, like the fruit tree in the Garden of Eden before the serpent had opened its jaw and ruined the world. Now I don’t bother messaging my friends because unlike nightmares, reality isn’t something I’m willing to condemn others to. They don’t deserve to know what’s – nothing’s really – nothing happens often enough to feel comfortable confessing about, risk ruining my friends’ perceptions of my family simply because I’m tired. I’m just tired. It doesn’t happen often enough to warrant any of what I told people back when I lived in a paradise. Back when safety was more than a mere fantasy, when I could say what I wanted and imagine it was real. I can’t imagine anyone wanting me around anymore, let alone willing to rescue me from – from a form of abuse I still find myself reluctant to even name, as though putting words to paper is still yet another act of betrayal against my family.

In that novel I have half-written, part of the metaphor involved the Mark of Cain, when God alone created a mark. The novel was about the idea of soulmates, soul birth marks, only the main character was condemned to have their older brother’s mark on them, as though that was – as though souls being connected made it acceptable for their bodies to connect, for the parents to neglect to consider the six year age gap, the wrongness of siblings and sexuality existing in the same sphere, none of that mattered when souls are involved.

When Cain’s condemned to walk the Earth, having never known the paradise his parents once lived in, that mark might as well have been God’s blessing. The book was weird, was probably antisemitic because I had the soul marks be a genetic disorder associated with Jews. Still, most of the story took place when the main character was at university, far from their family, and partially why I gave it up was because of how utterly depressing it would be for the story to mimic reality, for this condemned abused adult to return to the setting of the abuse and allow it to continue repeatedly because there’s nowhere else to go.

Nowhere to go. More recent stories I write, I put my main characters in settings where they have nowhere to go – I trap them in the wire of being a teenager, the threat of nowhere to go and the possibility of the evil you don’t know always being worse than – than the evil that’s known. I knew exactly what paradise I was leaving, what leaving meant, I just hadn’t thought it would be so easy to fall back into the pattern of feeling evil, like the evil isn’t – evil doesn’t exist. None of this exists. I’m just living in an elaborate nightmare, and eventually I’ll wake up and the only hands that will have touched me in months will have been my own. Mine, not the ghost’s.

Ghosts are a heavy-handed metaphor, memories that refuse to leave the present alone. In the new Ghostbuster’s movie, the heavily-implied-to-be-lesbian ghost betrayed the teenager to have an opportunity to rejoin her also-dead family, which was such a movie idea of a sixteen-year-old. I would have happily wandered the world forever.

I hadn’t thought it would be so easy to fall back into the pattern of feeling evil, but it’s so easy, sitting next to him afterwards, ignoring – avoiding – those eyes, half expecting hands to ghost go down my thighs again, like they had a sixteen-year-old’s lifespan ago, but this time I was as close to safe as I ever am. Just staring, nowhere was touched that’s explicitly wrong enough to feel as close to hiding away forever. Disappearing, like I did to everyone I once knew.

Sometimes I think back to when I was sixteen, when my then-boyfriend faked his own suicide to try to make someone look closer at his black eyes, bruises, attention seeking by subtracting himself from everyday life. In adulthood, nobody’s ever looking. Makes high school look a paradise in comparison – people had a job that involved caring if you lived long enough to graduate. After graduating university, well? I’m alive and that’s not changing any time soon, and that’s the best that can be said for my life. I’m dramatizing, obviously. Nobody really sees school as a paradise, just – just when they’re as lost as I am, maybe.