The Naivete of a Teenage Girl

The tree looks the same as it does every year; the same white, not colored, never colored, lights and the ever-constant traditional sentimental ornaments from generations past and childhood memories. That is, the sentimental ornaments and the bright yellow SpongeBob smack dab in the middle of the tree. My mom let my little brother pick it out one year when he was seven and could not be persuaded to choose a different ornament. At the time, I had thought it to be gaudy and very "off" the theme of Christmas. Now when I look at it, I have this overwhelming sadness that seems to pummel my senses, leaving me both breathless and weary, with little more energy than to feel the wet salty sadness pour from my eyes. I long for the simpler years when "improper" ornaments were all I had to worry about at Christmas. The mantle still has the token decor of smokers and trinkets, with four perfectly bright red stockings, with white tufted tops hanging beneath it. The small wooden Santa sits above them, practically screaming at me that there are only 3 days till Christmas. Everything looks exactly as it has always looked, as I sit on the old leather couch with its worn cushions from years of shoed feet pulled up onto the seat and puppy paws. Across the room, the dog lifts her head from the couch cushion and looks over at me forlornly. I smile sadly at her and say, "I know." She looks at me for a minute, as though she can almost read my mind and see the thoughts swirling around behind my gaze, then lowers her head back down onto the seat, closing her eyes once again.

I stood from the couch, the dog peeked at me from slits in her eyes, but she did not move. I walked to the stairs and began to make my way up to the bathroom to take a shower before bed. As I went to pass the normally closed door on my right, I saw it was ajar. I halted in the doorway and looked into the dark room hooded in shadows cast from the brightly lit bathroom across the hallway. The room felt different. Lonely. Though the owner of the room had chosen a deep navy blue for the walls, the room had never felt like this: to the point where there was such an absence of light as to feel like there was a wave of gloom engulfing everything. The dresser had a thin layer of dust caked upon it and the bed sat perfectly made, with a lone stuffed brown bunny with worn fur, sitting squarely in the middle of the bed. The floor, once littered with armies of little men reenacting battle scenes and stuffed animals pretending to have their own little families, was now barren. It was hard to look at this room now, as it sat in perfect disuse. I sighed and turned from the threshold, pulling the door until I heard a soft click behind me.

After my shower, I went to get dressed and climbed into bed. She probably won't be home till later on, I'll just see her in the morning, I thought. I lay there staring up at the slats in the bunk bed above me, my childhood bed that I had shared with my sister. I could see the sheets from her bed peeking down from the railing above me; they were the same sheets we had helped her to put on months ago. I couldn't sleep. There was too much going through my head, making me fatigued, but reinvigorated. It was an odd sensation. I rolled out of bed and planted my feet into the silver textured carpet, feeling the soft tubules tickle in between my toes. My sister and I had begged our mom for the rug and her arguments of the difficulty of vacuuming such a carpet could not dissuade us from our indomitable will to have it. That is, until a very unfortunate incident involving my sister, the flu, and her inability to get down her ladder fast enough, left a very large mess embedded in the soft tubules of the carpet. It's funny what comes to your mind at 1 o' clock in the morning. I gathered my favorite pink blanket and my pillow to make my way back downstairs. The dog looked up as I walked back into the living room with the pink monstrosity wrapped about my head like a big pink habit, as if I were a very fashion forward nun on a runway. I settled everything onto the couch once more and decided I would watch a Christmas movie till she came home.

As I lay on the couch I thought about this year and the decisions I had made that led me to where I am today. I never expected this outcome, but then again, who can ever really predict the future? I was naive. I have been in this family for 16 years, I should've known better than to think everything could remain the same after leaving. Our final conversation continued to play in my head, it was on an endless loop, that I played daily, as though to torture myself with the what ifs that could have played out differently.

"Sometimes, I feel like you hate me. I don't even know that you love me, and I feel that you can't stand me because I have mannerisms that remind you of mom and you hate mom. Parents are supposed to love their children unconditionally", he looked over at me from where he was perched on the other side of my bed. " I don't hate you, but I don't believe in unconditional love. I believe in building equity in relationships and that way, when you do something that pisses me off, we have equity built up and can move past it." For the first time, I looked at him and there was such clarity. All of the years of emotional abuse and this aching desire for his approval and love, I realized I would never attain that. I now saw that his standards and way of thinking were warped by his own narcissism and that it wasn't me who was all bad, or my siblings who were all good, it was simply that he was incapable of love, period.

The following days, I slowly moved my belongings out of my basement bedroom and into my mother's car, it didn't take long, I hardly had anything amongst my room: no decorations, no special comforter, no trinkets or items of sentimental value. In all honesty, after I had removed all of my belongings from the room, the space looked no different. I moved the measly items I had into my room at my mother's house. Over the next month, when my siblings would make the transition from my mother's house to my father's, I went with them less and less. As a result, my younger siblings followed suit and decided to choose their own respective houses to remain at without transitioning from one house to another. My sister chose my father's, and my brother tried to remain equal with his time, but by the following year, he had stopped coming to our mother's house completely as well. Leaving me all alone.

As I lay on my couch watching the last few minutes of some inane Christmas movie, I felt myself getting angry. I was surprised, because it was not anger with my siblings for leaving, or my mother for never wanting to be at home surrounded by the constant reminder that two of her children were no longer living here, or even at my father for his actions, but at myself. I should've known better than to delude myself into thinking I could cut pieces of my life into neat lines and separate what I wanted from what I no longer wanted. I heard the back door open, and quickly grabbed for the remote to turn off the movie. I laid back down on my pillow and shut my eyes, pretending to have fallen asleep on the couch again. She walked through the hallway across from my couch and I could hear her footsteps falter as she took in my sleeping form on the couch. I could feel her hesitation as to whether to awaken me, then I heard her heels continue clicking down the hall and to the bottom of the stairs, where I heard the soft footfalls, muffled by the carpet, make their way upstairs. I opened my eyes just in time to see the light flicker out from the stairwell and I was once again thrown into that all-consuming darkness that engulfed not just the room itself, but my thoughts as well, leaving one penetrating thought that continued to flash through my mind on a habitual loop: I should've known better.