I’ve been waiting for freedom for a long time, and now, with less than an hour left on the clock, I’m panicking. It’s the last day of school and the air is mad with anticipation and navy blue graves of days gone by. My last period is English, a fitting end, dreamt of monsters and prison. We dwadle around the classroom, peeking our heads out the big windows into the sunlit gardens outside, beckoning, as some Disney movie plays on the projector.
I had spent senior year isolated from everyone, locked in the world of the skeleton people, a white membrane between me and the rest of humanity. So new beginnings were desperately in order. Everybody is excited for college, except our teachers, who are in mourning, dressed from head to foot in black, as they did every year.
Right before the final bell rang, Mr. Klenn showed me a letter he wrote to himself every last day, to reread in the fall when school starts again. It’s about all the reasons he got into teaching, why it was worth it to come back year after bloody year, herding children into adulthood. He had a paragraph about students that kept him teaching, and he had mentioned me in there.
I burst into tears and he smiles and pats me on the back. It’s an odd gesture, out of darkness, I hadn’t been touched in so long. For a moment, I felt like one of the humans again, that belonged in this world and not in the shadows.
Four minutes left, sings the clock.
Things will get worse, much worse, before they get better, before dawn claws itself across the sky, in sweet and pure white of relief
When the bell rings, a heavy rippling scream of joy and terror, of boots stomping and hands clapping sweep across the entire school like it had become alive in one, united breath. It’s really over. Welcome to the real world. I have an annoying chore to do before I get home. I text no to some grad party invitations, tell Cal I’m on the way home and tell Jake we should walk home. I tell Jake it’s over, he agrees, and we part gracefully.
By the time I get home, I’m trembling like an aspen leaf in a hurricane, several of them. Hurry up please, it’s time.
I shut my bedroom door and start packing, throwing anything I can find into my backpack. Clothes, books, art supplies, but no laptop as my school issued one is resting in a bin in the IT room, squeaky clean for next year’s hands. I pace around, trying to muster my courage. It’s like a cold plunge, you’ll be glad when it’s over, but for this part, my dear, be brave.
“Ma, I’m moving out,” I say, my voice quivering.
My mom, who is reading the newspaper on the couch, turns slowly, like a supervillain.
“You what?” she says in Bengali, eyes already huge and red and terrifying.
“I’m moving out.”
“No you’re not,” she says, but it translates more accurately into something along the lines of don’t you dare.
“I’m moving out,” I repeat stupidly, incapable of saying anything else.
“Where?”
“To my friend Cal’s house.”
“Let him come here and see what happens to him.”
The steel bars are piercing my chest like lightning and I feel faint. The world around me has slowed down to a mad rush, all the colors seeped out into sepia. At this point I flee to the backyard and call Cal in tears. “She won’t let me leave. Dad isn’t home yet.”
“I knew this would happen,” says Cal in a soothing voice. “You have to call the police.”
“I can’t,” I said wretchedly. Somewhere, a Wagner opera is playing deafeningly loudly, crashing over each other, notes tumbling. My heart is breaking and there’s nothing I can do about it.
New lows always come, just when you think things can’t seem to get any worse, there’s always more rock bottom to discover. Like when I get laid off from my dream job in New York a few years later. It’s the pessimist’s guide to optimism. Things can always get worse. The whole thing happens nightmarishly slowly, creaking like an old grandfather clock that’s never on time.
In the end, I do call the police, after trying it every which other way possible, from begging to threatening to screaming, all in tears. She wouldn’t let me leave. She slaps me hard across the face. She takes my medication bottles and hides them. I can’t leave without those. There wasn’t anything else to do. I don’t tell her I called the police. I sit in the backyard for the world’s longest 911 call, staring at that house I hated, the house I was finally running from, the house I would never call a home. There are bluebirds and golden daffodils everywhere. It’s so funny how the world can be beautiful while ending at the same time, just a majestic death, a red shock supernova. It’s the only time I’ve ever called 911. It’s usually called for me.
This day of emancipation is the most horrid day yet, but it paved a path for my sisters. They tell me, years later, that after the police had escorted me out of the house, Mom and Dad had stopped hitting them. It’s just the duty of the oldest child, to pave the way for them, covered in blood and grime and stone, go to wars that they cannot fight.
Mom and Dad are horrified, enraged, and frightened all at once. In America, there are rules. You can’t get away with as much. I’d been lying blatantly to the school counselors, doing everything I could to keep CPS away from the house, sort of like a lab rat resigned to its own fate. And if you raise prisoners, not children, they’re bound to escape one day, and that’s a one way ticket, my friend.
I can’t leave without my medication, so the officer orders my mother to give them back to me. And that was it. I left, with my backpack and nothing else, in a squad car, with no destination.
Why the obsession with keeping your children locked up in your house? I may never find out, but it never stops. Years and years after the incident, they had the same chime, trying to get me to come back to that house, by hook or crook, by bare knuckles and salt water.
The police drop me off at the local domestic violence shelter as I’m too ashamed to tell any of my friends what’s happening. The now what is somehow worse than the goodbye. They say running away is easy, but it’s the keeping on that’s hard. There’s Cal, an older man I met through mutuals at Columbia, a recently divorced alcoholic (though I didn’t know it at the time) who is the wrong guy at the right time. He invites me to New York like the plan originally was, but I didn’t want to trade one prison for another. It’s my weakness. I’ve always relied on the kindness of monsters. I would’ve laid on the sidewalk for the rest of my life if I could.
In the end, Cal comes down to Bloomington, with his ready smile and healthy pity. The sun will shine again, he tells me. We go apartment hunting and find a place for me on the east side of the city, where all the upper classmen lived, so the morning buses are always full of chattering students, armed with thermoses of coffee, and the nighttime is peppered by house parties and pop anthems. I spend freshman year of college hiding in plain sight from my fellow classmates, too bruised and wounded to join the world of the living. Cal holds me night after nightmare, brushing my hair, speaking to me softly as the ghosts and demons claw at me, pulling at my ribcage, throwing up medication that doesn’t work. I know I’ll join the college-goers one day, but for now it’s enough to be able to make it to class and back. Cal loves me, and it’s the first real love I’ve ever felt in my hellishly long life. It’s a love that burns, but it keeps me alive, it sees me through, and the heat reddens my face as I inch closer and closer, singeing my hair and clothes until I’m unrecognizable. Without him they would’ve found me dead in a ditch somewhere, but I don’t realize that till years later, long after we’ve clawed out our goodbyes.
Schizoposting 
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