An Umbrella

Trigger warnings: references to rape, suicide, disordered eating, gore, ableism

I

I was a girl without a country, three weeks into my year abroad in Germany.  I couldn’t speak the language and detested the fact that they all drank sparkling mineral water instead of flat water from the tap.  The bubbles made me feel constantly bloated, as did the cuisine.  I gained almost fifty pounds that autumn.  The food was like the language, decadent and behind the deceptive mask of the humble.  I overindulged as I do in anything rich.

II

I did not take calls from home.  They were too hard, made me too homesick.  I kept my skype muted and didn’t return messages.  It was during this time that my best friend made her first suicide attempt.  I found out through facebook when they said she had so much brain damage that she might never speak again.

III

I read bad romance novels because that was the only thing in the house in English.  I hung on those words, sappy as they were, because anything in a familiar language was a comfort.  I read of Mary-Sue protagonists and bland, handsome men.  I’d left a boy in the states who snuck out of his house the night before I left to give me one last kiss and then raped me a month after I came home.  I carried his picture on my to show off to the other girls, who were jealous that there were so many good-looking black boys in America.

IV

The family was nothing like the one I’d come from.  In my home, you were neither to be seen nor heard as Dad drank at the kitchen table watching The History Channel and Mom tended a baby.  I didn’t know how to respond to a normal family, other than to make myself a ghost, which they only resented more.  This was ten years before I would get the news that my strangeness had a name, Autism.  Having sent away a normal child, they were less than thrilled to receive one so defective.  

V

I was an ugly pet for the other kids in school.  I was a novelty, not a person.  No even math was the same in their language.  I spent my free periods with the beautiful girls while they smoked cigarettes on the school property.  I was always too afraid to ask for one.  I took a drag one and fell in love with the dizzy head rush.  The meanest girl in school made it a point to befriend me because she hated the daughter that my host family had sent away.  She thought it was “so dear” that I was a virgin when most kids she knew lost theirs at eleven.  I had only had my first kiss a few months earlier.

VI

I made friends slowly.  One was a boy famed Rafi, an orphan my age from Afghanistan with a handsome profile and a perchant for the most disgusting pornography imaginable.  We would sit in the back of out “German As A Second Language” class and he'd show me, giggling, women with men’s heads inside of them like giving backward birth.  He would show me women copulating with horses.  I would show him gore comics about girls who could never die whose babies were blended up into a slurry and poured into their outstretched hands.  To be sixteen is to have a sort of moral freedom that you will never have again.  Everything is funny when you are sixteen.

VII

I developed the worst binge eating habit I've ever had in my life.  Lonely and hungry felt the same and so I gorged on chocolate and pastries and mourned the warping of my adolescent body, which reacted as if to a second puberty brought on by sugar and butter.  I ate lamb with cucumber sauce and swallowed candy balls full of rum until I was tipsy.  I hid millions of calories in my schoolbag and ate in my bedroom with the door looked, watching dubbed horror movies with the English subtitles on to improve my language skills. 

VIII

The Germans do not like horror, as a rule.  I guess they had enough of it.  What was quirky back in The States, a chubby goth gore-hound, was something serious in a society that still held the memories of the worst thing in history.  I watched Se7en, I watched Silence of the Lambs, I watched slashers and did not cover my eyes.  In Germany, they can show tits on the TV but cut down Law and Order episodes to barely 40 minutes once they trim all the gore off.  I don’t think I saw a dead body on TV the entire time I was in Germany.

IX

I went to the house of a younger girl for a slumber party birthday.  I gave her an Abercrombie T-shirt that had been meant for my host sister, but I didn’t like her very much and so I gave the gift to my friend, instead.  I had my family send up peanut butter cups because they don’t eat peanut butter in Germany and a girl in my class said it was her favorite part of visiting her grandparents in America.  I was warned against boys who were too friendly.  I was brought into the circles of girls who were cold but melted like ice cream in familiarity and learned just how fake it is to say “fine” when somebody asks “How are you?”

X

I was a young punk rocker afraid of the rain because it melted the spikes in my hair and the dreaded torture of the glue re-drying on my neck and cracking when I moved was looming over me as I prepared to exit the school.  A girl I recognized from a few of my classes, whose name i did not know, came up next to me with an umbrella.  She tilted it a little bit toward me so that I knew she was offering me shelter.  She smiled at me, and between us we did not need words.  We spoke in smiles, the way that only women can amongst themselves.