The Girl Called Esme

As I sit here in the future, I am an adult of twenty-three, and I want to share you the life a little girl named Esme. Esme lived in the realm of fantasy; she was a child born of the wrong time in the wrong century. She believed in more than this world could handle, and therefore was given a secret lobotomy that failed and now she is living two lives, and in one of them they locked up all the kitchen knives. She can't control her gnosis, nor could eventually the psychosis. So now she writes to keep the demons at bay. Hoping the man in the sky will stay.

She tried so hard to lay perfectly still, to silence the rumbling of static electricity in her brain. If she cried out loud enough—the shadow-men would come for her—the shadows would make her sleep. Esme did not want to sleep. She welcomed the static-electric shocks, the bizarre seizures of madness, because within them were the secret alchemical cures for her waking-life-terrors. A million possibilities in a world of constant errors.

She was a shy little girl. She called herself Mary quite contrary in an eight-year old’s body. Sitting on the stairwell, she made up fairy tales in her brain. She watched movies and told all her friends that you could time-travel through closets. She loved to walk, run, and play in the forests. Her father was Mr. Golden Sun, and he would chase her through the cobble stone sidewalks with gusts of wind. Her aunt knew that fairies were in the flowerpots.

Sometimes it was hard being so far behind all the others who called her slow. For what she did not know. Her mother was being blackmailed by men in black, and they gave her Prozac to prevent another delusional attack. Her mother went into a world so white it could not come back. The black cat called her name when she crossed its path and sounded like her father.

Sometimes he told her not to wander too far. She found magic sometimes, between the sidewalks and the roots of miracle trees. She came up with poetry in her head, she cried when the trees fell. She felt the pain in the creeks full of toad’s blood. She loved to sing in the mud and play dominos with her father on the porch when there were thunderstorms. Her father got her a porcelain doll for her birthday when she was eight and that was her favorite birthday.

The world was magical, and she was the princess of the woods.

She drew maps of all the places in this adventure land. She just loved to spin in circles. On the cruise, with carrot cake, and a velvet black dress- she was the flower girl. She woke up every morning when the dew was fresh on the white roses outside their little stone house in the city. When it rained, she cried too? Her father said that one day she would grow out of these fantasies—of Santa Clause and God-like beings in the clouds.

They sent her to the Catholic school down the road. There she danced around stop signs, and danced around the oak tree in the schoolyard, and they all wondered if she was autistic. Her best friend was a black girl. She did not call people black or white, because her dad taught her the word translucent, and she was secretly invisible. A statistic.

Her friend helped her steal her sister’s jewelry. They gifted them to the fairies in the park with the stone throne –before a golden coin appeared once that she had kept for years. She saw smiling faces in the tops of trees—she heard cackling witches at night, and their fire rituals.

The trolls told her she was a changeling and to come back home to imagination-land. When her mother took Prozac and was scrying into crystals—she saw demons, when her mother said her magical cat would save them all—she saw a mean woman in the mirror. The woman who would later abuse her brain and label her insane, was not her mother’s image. Just a cruel old woman in the mirror appearing as a vision.

Did they hate her because they could not understand?  The silence was deafening. The madness was haunting and painful. She was a white girl who did not wear a bra at the YMCA camp. She was ugly, fat, and a tom-boy. The black kids all said so. Her parents were ashamed of using the colorful monopoly money to buy food for the children. Her parents were hippies. Her parents told her not to use bad words.

The people at camp taught her all the bad words, and she did not know what they meant. Between being grabbed, kicked, pinched, and punched…she still did not understand it—but she had to protect her little brother who somehow escaped the bullies. He was only four years old. She was eight. She put herself between him and the bullies-between her mother and father’s arguments, between the government’s bombs and the aftermath effects. She was not just a statistic.

But she was loved, loved so much she broke into a million pieces of mental diseases. She became a suicidal thesis with a schizophrenic prognosis of eternal psychosis. She became paralyzed by her telekinesis. She rejected the man in the sky, and dove into oblivion and lies. She found darkness was darker than a shadow on the wire. She conducted seances and her friend’s dead animals starting surfacing as ghosts. She did things no one thought were possible, strange, that is why she was insane. She had past life memories, but were they able to be claimed?

How could she claim the life of someone before, so many impossible things the world ignored? Now she is before the plank about to jump into a new earth and born again on another planet that is time-reversed grateful that she was cursed with a gift and the gift was worth more than a million dollars or porcelain dreams, this is a cold cruel world full of political pet-projects and too much dopamine. I wish I could re-write this chapter, and end it with less than rapture, I prayed to the man in the sky to be redeemed, but it was the lady in the woods that saved my soul from the once screened dreams. Esme was me. I am Esme.