green night
When I was younger, I told people that I was going to be an anthropologist once I grew up. It was mostly because I liked the way the word felt in my mouth— anthropologist, a word that hits every shape we make to sound out letters, something big and scientific. The other part of it was because it made it sound like I had a future, like I wasn’t going to be dead before I could legally drink. I had seen the other girls, you know? I watched them disappear. If you travel like we all did back then, it was real easy to vanish because nobody would know to miss you. I saw them, though. They would up and leave from whatever campsite we were at in the middle of the night, no explanation, and they never would return a call again. I thought it was going to be my turn one day. I thought I was going to be taken to the place where all those floating dandelion seed girls were hanging out without me.
(And these girls were cool, you know? Kimberly, who said she was 19 but couldn’t have been older than 16, used to play the Ramones from her car speakers and swing me around. Anna figured out how to bake cookies over a campfire. Helena, a sweet girl with an obviously fake name, used to put layers of eyeliner on me and let me listen to her My Chemical Romance CDs— my first introduction to the band. I wanted to be like them, and that equated to disappearing in my mind.)
But I watched them leave with the wind, too heavy for a breeze to move me. I sank into the dirt like a stone. I know that those girls probably all died, and I knew it then too, but there was nothing I— or anyone else— could do but watch them go. We couldn’t call the police, for fuck’s sake, what would we say? Hi, the probable-runaway girl whose real name we don’t know and who we don’t have any photos of has most likely gotten kidnapped. No, you can’t call me back on this number, this is a motel lobby phone.
The cops never gave a shit about us, much less our vanished. As far as they were concerned? We were all already dead.
So I watched and I looked for them even though everyone knew they were gone for good. I attended the memorials we put on, prayed for them whenever we made it to church and at night in bed, listened to people eulogize them, and then I watched them never come back. As it turns out, God doesn’t really give a shit about us either— He’s done enough, I think. But I wasn’t done. God might have shut His eyes to us, but mine were wide open, even as a kid.
I said I was going to be an anthropologist because I know what I’m good at— even if I didn’t have dinner, I had my eyes, and I observed what I was allowed to and then some. Privacy is something you learn real fast when you spend half your time in a van with about six other people, and it was always something I respected, but if nobody told me to leave then I wouldn’t. Sometimes they didn’t notice me and I used it to my advantage. I was quiet and had a tendency of hiding in the shadows and up trees, a habit that, in addition to me once catching a rat with my bare hands, earned me the nickname “Mouser”.
I heard more than any child should’ve, but I didn’t mind. I was a voyeur to human experience.
Voyeur is the only way I can describe it, specifically because it implies the presence of an external party. There’s one person and a few more make a group, and then there’s someone not in the group that witnesses the group. I was always the witness. But I didn’t mind it, you know. Human connection was never something I craved, and I liked being alone a whole lot more than what was probably healthy, but in my defense, alone time was not something I got a lot of when we were on the road.
The school year was a different matter— I got plenty of alone time then. We’d go back home to the city, and I’d be able to sit in the room my sibling and I shared, listening to nothing but silence. They were always out with their friends, anyways, trying to get as much time with them as possible before we were back on the road, but that was never me. I had a best friend, sure. But we were best friends forever. She told me she’d rather die than stop being my friend, and she used to throw up every time she told a lie, so I believed her. Still do.
The other kids at school didn’t really like me all that much. I was distant with Them because I didn’t care about Them, and They thought everything about me was weird— how I dressed, how I spoke, what I talked about, all of it was weird. They hung out with me when I wanted Them to, because I’m a charismatic motherfucker when I want to be, but I was never friends with Them. It was something we all knew. Here, on one side of the unbridgeable gap, is Me. They sat on the opposite side. It was never a Me versus Them situation, though. Everyone just knew that one of these things wasn’t like the others, and that was how I preferred it. Nobody bothered me, we were all perfectly cordial, and it meant that I could watch the mannerisms of the group.
Now, If my first love was music, my second love was Shakespeare. For my 9th birthday, I got the complete collection of his plays in one cloth-bound book. I still have it, actually— it’s the same shade of green I had come to associate with fairytales. Immediately, it struck a chord in me. I had been exposed to television and movies, but I never wrapped my mind around the concept of an actor, that someone could pretend to be a different person. I didn’t know that people were getting paid for what I was doing.
Because that’s the thing, isn’t it? I was always the alien in a human body, passing as a person even though I never saw myself as one. I was the black sheep. I had this fantasy when I was little that Gabriel and Michael and all the angels that they don’t mention in the Bible, a whole fleet of them, would come down and take me to my real home, wherever that was. They would tell me that I was right all along, about how I really wasn’t like the others. This fantasy was only fed by my penchant for fairytales, too— I was devoted to the idea that I was a changeling or something of the like.
I don’t always have a firm sense of identity, mainly because I don’t feel the need to develop one— identity has always been more of a prison than a connecting factor for me. There are some things I’ve always been, though. I have always been someone who needs a reason. Why was I like this? Surely it wasn’t my childhood or the road, because it wasn’t exactly like I fit in all that well with the kids my age there, either. The only difference between them and the school kids was that I was revered for it in the nomadic group; my strangeness and talent for collecting information were seen as desirable traits.
Acting, though, was my salvation.
It was never an official thing— I didn’t do school plays or musicals or any form of theatre, but I took to acting like a duck to water. All that observation for all those years taught me something. Not how to be human, but how to pretend to be human.
It was so, so easy for me from there. At first I played characters, adapted from books and movies and whatever else I could get my hands on. At school I was Drew Barrymore in Ever After, at home I was Briar Rose, and on the road I was Castiel, figuring out his character from the three episodes of Supernatural I caught on motel TVs. I edited them to suit my needs, of course, to fit whatever situation I found myself in— I figured out how to tell the truth like it's a joke, with a little grin, an eyebrow movement, a head tilt. Audience laughter. Nobody would find me out. Nobody would realize that I was a separate breed. Suddenly, I was one of Them. I was popular at school, notoriously funny and smart, known for being the only kid who could make a teacher rethink their idea of what life meant. The other nomadic kids worshiped the ground I walked on— I withdrew, kept to myself, smiled like I knew something they didn’t, occasionally threw in an insightful quote. Adults loved me because I was the only one who would willingly start a conversation with them, the only one who grasped those big adult ideas that they so proudly held over the heads of their children.
I wish I could say something sad about it, that I regret it, that I betrayed myself for nothing, that I feel guilty for my deceit. But it wasn’t nothing, and I don’t feel guilty. I was a fucking diamond. How could I betray myself when I don’t have a self? I was whoever I decided to be— it was never deception because it was always me. Not my fault I figured out how to be the crown jewel of every room.
The only issue is what happens when I pop myself out of the crown.
I have no qualms about my identity— I am what I am, and it ends there. I do have a problem with what to do with myself, though. There are no situations to read into, no social machines to figure out, nothing to reflect back at people. It’s easy to make yourself into a new character, to adapt to your environment like a chameleon. The issue is that you will, inevitably, lose track of all the people you’ve made up for yourself in your head. Mirroring becomes an issue when you’re alone with yourself, and I’ve become a mirror placed across from another mirror, reflecting nothing but a reflection of a reflection.
Have you ever seen what happens when you make an infinity mirror, all those reflections of nothing trailing on and on into eternity?
It becomes green.
Logically, I know that it’s because the atoms in the molecular makeup of glass reflect green more than any other color. Poetically, though? It’s growth. It’s the grass that I crash landed into when Kimberly accidentally let me go. It’s the pines that were sacrificed so Anna could bake cookies. It’s the color of Helena’s eyes, Amanda’s favorite shirt, the jade earrings Freddie wore, the eyeshadow Lily always had on, the color the twins, Ivy and Clover, named themselves after.
I’m not disappearing. My family can afford to feed me and pay all of our bills, including our medical ones. If we took up moving around again, we’d be able to stay in a motel every single night if we wanted to, and still have money for dinner. We’ve firmly entrenched ourselves in the upper-middle class. We’ve forgotten the food stamps and the stolen bags of gas station chips and the days we slept in shifts to make sure we didn’t get arrested for illegally camping overnight. It’s all in the past— time to move on.
In my room, alone, I am a flower. Lithodora, maybe— small but violently blue, able to withstand the rockiest of soils. I am blooming. And when I have to go to seed, I’ll be green, ready to blossom again. All in due time. Whenever I’m ready.