and wanted to ask him, “Where have you been? When are you coming home?” But I never did; I couldn’t utter those words, and instead observed all of the alcoholics as I reassured myself of how much I hated the substance that seemed to be the lifeblood of my family.
Countless long, uncomfortable nights led us to finally move on from the thought that my father would ever return home. We didn’t talk about it. To speak the words would mean it was true, and it would have shattered the illusions and pretense in which we lived. My mom sank deeper into herself, and I began to believe her lies. I believed her fake smile in the same way I convinced myself plastic flowers were real. They looked like flowers, so they must be flowers. I believed she would be okay, but she would never be the same again, and neither would we.
COMMONLY KNOWN AS THE ADAM’S APPLE, IT IS THE PROTRUSION FORMED BY THE ANGLE OF THE THYROID CARTILAGE SURROUNDING THE LARYNX. DURING MEDIEVAL TIMES A MYTH AROSE ABOUT THE ADAM’S APPLE, ACCORDING TO WHICH THE FORBIDDEN FRUIT BECAME LODGED IN ADAM’S THROAT AFTER HE TOOK A BITE OF IT. THE ADAM’S APPLE IS USUALLY MORE VISIBLE IN MEN THAN IN WOMEN.
My asthma came seeping back into my lungs with the changing of the seasons, autumn to winter being the most challenging. Every day I lost my breath. I was always trying to catch it, and that feeling of mortality and death crept in alongside the perfect, vibrant fall colors. Those are the colors prior to death’s arrival, before the hands of winter reap all that is living. The deepest colors always come with death.
In the months of September, October, and November I would end up in the emergency room for a treatment with a nebulizer. The nebulizer allowed me to breathe better, but I was ashamed of using it because of its pipe-like structure that resembled a hookah. In my mind I was an athlete, and drugs were the substances created for the weak and desperate. In addition to the nebulizer treatment, I was given injections of prednisone, a steroid that decreased the inflammation in my lungs. That medication is not the same as the much-abused testosterone and muscle-building anabolic steroids, but I was scared my teammates wouldn’t know the difference.
I became fascinated by the hospital and quickly began to pick up the medical terminology for my ailments. I had visited the emergency room so many times for my asthma that I began to feel like an intern. There was something romantic about a person who could prescribe medication. Those doctors were powerful to me, and I was attracted to the patient-doctor pattern—illness, diagnosis, medication. In a peculiar way, I felt I belonged there.
The doctors had changed my medications many times, and it was difficult to know which prescription made me feel better; all of them left me feeling hyper and edgy. During the numerous X-rays taken of my lungs, the doctors discovered an abnormality in my rib cage. This was more evidence that I was born different. I was born with an extra rib, a deformity that could not be seen by the human eye and was basically purposeless. My mom, who always tried to turn my awkward discomfort into ease, was a witness to the doctor’s discovery. Excitedly, she recalled the story she had been told as a child in church, about how God had taken one of Adam’s ribs with which to create Eve. She had read that Adam had been given an extra rib, like me.
As a boy, I didn’t attend church because it conflicted with gymnastics competitions that were held on Sundays. I found the sport to be a much grander religion, with a more promising outcome than any story supposedly written by God and told by men. My mom’s story made me feel better, and even though this extra rib didn’t hurt me in any way, I would have given it back to be “normal.”
A new asthma medication started giving me horrible anxiety, and I constantly believed something bad was going to happen. Panic and despair replaced my inability to breathe, and I would lie in bed wide awake. It wasn’t just a few hours of thinking of the many horrors and wonders the world held; no, this insomnia kept me awake until morning. The daylight announced a horribly arduous day ahead without any peace at all. A sleepless night left me feeling like my entire body was filled with rusty nails, heavy and dull, and my daily tasks at school followed by gymnastics practice seemed impossible to complete.
In the quiet of night I would sit in my room, staring at the walls, terrified for no obvious reason. I could never pinpoint what was behind those feelings, but it brought up an overwhelming desire to create something beautiful. At first, the feeling urged me to produce something original, to make some form of art or create something from nothing. I knew if I did not begin to create, I would live forever in frustration.
The form of creativity that eventually drew me in was writing. During my fits of sleeplessness I would write to keep the panic at bay, and the more I wrote, the more I had the desire to do so. I called my stories and my desire to write “ghosts,” and they moaned and lingered, stabbing me until their tales were written exactly as they tormented me to. Ghost-writing was the only way to freedom. Strangely, when I finished with one story, another one appeared, and sometimes two or three entered at the same time. I would sit on my bed, pen in hand, scribbling and writing, thinking beyond my imagined limits and discovering pieces of myself.
After endless attempts to fall asleep, I willingly surrendered to my imagination and began to summon the ghosts to my side. They were always in control of the stories, and I became a conduit to their voices and invisible forms, transforming nothingness into matter. I had been stabbed in the heart by a merciless muse that demanded my attention. I loved them because of the creativity they gave me, allowing me to be the vessel for their words and lives, but I also hated them because they kept me awake at night.
My mother was my biggest fan, and she was the only one besides my English teacher with whom I shared my stories. To me, they weren’t just stories; they were words born out of my own flesh, blood, sadness, and euphoria.
During that time, I was free to do whatever I wanted without being questioned by the people around me. However, when I turned thirteen, my freedom started to get curtailed by the unspoken rules for a boy my age. I had a desire to act, dance, and perform. I couldn’t help myself, but I realized the other boys around me, who used to do those things, had stopped, unwilling to cross a line in the sand that was invisible to me. I didn’t have that age-related restraint with which they seemed to have been born.
Tara was still my best friend, and I was under constant scrutiny by my peers as to why I had a girl for such a close friend. The glue that held us together was our ability to laugh, but the larger reason why I hung around her was simply that I loved her. When I wasn’t around Tara I felt a terrible loneliness. We were the same height, four feet eleven inches—the shortest students in our class.
Tara was turning into a beautiful young woman, and I secretly knew I was the ball and chain she was dutifully dragging behind her. She was a cheerleader and had many friends; I shied away from the other kids. All of my free time was spent practicing gymnastics, while most kids were doing their homework, hanging out, or watching sitcoms. I had nothing in common with them. I couldn’t make new friends the way Tara did.
So there I was, short for my age and best friends with a girl. To make matters worse, my classmates called gymnastics a “girlie” sport. I felt betrayed by the kids my age. I even felt rebellious against the wonderful spirit that gave me my gift, asking it, “Why couldn’t you have made me a football player or basketball player instead of a gymnast?” I could not understand why people thought gymnastics was a girl’s sport, because pound for pound, I was stronger than anyone at my school, including everyone who teased me.
I was an easy target for ridicule. In addition to being short, I had a squeaky voice that
