The Monster That Lives Inside of Me

Once again I have completely sunk back into the hole where the monster lives. . I’ll have one or two days of feeling almost human, almost normal, and I’ll think,

            “Maybe I can do something.”

            “Maybe I can go somewhere.”

            “Maybe I can clean out that closet today.”

            “Maybe my brain is clear enough to actually write a short story.”

            “Maybe I’m getting well.”

            And then I feel it.

           

            Slowly, like a sharp claw reaching underneath my rib cage and sternum, drawing its talons down against my muscle, my tendons, and my bones, it travels quickly. The claw closes and rips at me. It tightens its grip and my body drips into weakness like someone has encased me in concrete, and then I begin to tremble like the last fall leaf on a tree. 

          Try to take shallow breathes because it hurts too much when my rib cage expands. Little sips of air. 

          Tiptoe into the back yard at night, slip down into the dew grass, and cry where no one can see me. 

          Curl up into a tiny ball and rock myself in time with the pain that pulses with every beat like a toothache in my body. 

          Tell myself I’ll feel better tomorrow. That the doctors will call me and shout, “Eureka! We know how to treat you and give you your life back!”

            One day I’ll go back into a classroom. I’ll teach again. I’ll stay late after everyone has gone home, creating lesson plans that will turn literature into magic for my kids. After we read Of Mice and Men one kid will take his time gathering his books when the bell rings and then shyly come up and ask me why, with tears in his eyes, Lenny had to die, or her eyes will flash when she howls  her anger after Jack has killed Piggy, or he will pretend to be Mercutio sword fighting Tybalt.

            But none of that is ever going to happen again, and I open my eyes. I am in the backyard alone. The moon is a slice of a fingernail and the stars are teasing me with their sparkle. They mock me. The night air smells of tea olive flowers and the world is still and beautiful, and I am trapped in my own pain. It is wrapped around me like a thick quilt that suffocates. I want to breathe in the tea olive. I want to swim in the white beauty of the stars against the inky sky. Star light, start bright, take my pain away tonight. But I can’t unwrap myself from it. The pain beats like dead drums. Thump! Thump! Thump! The pain encapsulates. My brain is one entity. My body another. They are forever battling for control. Little sips of air, always tinier sips of air.

            Years and years of internal cuts and slices that lap over one another like waves on a shore, a nightmare time-stumble that is circuitous. One year bleeding into the next. Doctors. Xrays, MRIs, injections, infusions, toxic medications. Hopes raised, hopes dashed. Family and friends:

            “But you don’t look sick.”

            “I saw you yesterday and you were fine.”

            “Aren't you well yet?”

             Fuck them. Fuck them all.

            I want them to slither their brain into my body and tell me how to live, how to continue, how to open my eyes each morning.  I want them to show me how to not feel the pain, how to ignore it, how to get my life back. Against all odds, against all I think I can do, I somehow wake up. Each morning I am ripped from my dreams where there is no pain and where I am able to breathe deeply and run among wild colors and clouds and I can hop off deep cliffs like an astronaut on the moon. I am free.. until I open my eyes and then my body engulfs me and my brain screams as it registers the sharp pulses under my skin.

            Another day. Another day trapped.

            The pain and exhaustion and trembling and weakness will not kill my body like cancer or leukemia or any other number of fatal illnesses, but it chips away at my brain. It clouds my thinking and makes me sink into deep chairs and stare out the window for hours. It saddens me. It angers me. But there is not one damned thing I can do to control any of it. Maybe pain is supposed to be my life lesson. Maybe pain will bring me to some sort of enlightenment or actualization. Then again, maybe it will just chip away at me until there is nothing left but a sliver of bone with a bit of rotten tissue attached.  

Bang bang, that awful sound.

I was getting caught up on the daily news yesterday, like I usually do a little before 4 p.m, when breaking news of an active shooter inside a high school in Florida was announced on abc news. I watched live footage as law enforcement stormed the high school. I saw kids running out with their hands over their heads. I saw a sheet covered body being loaded into an ambulance. I saw EMS checking over the bodies of teens for injuries. I saw shaken teens running to their parents in tears. I saw raw fear and incomprehension on the faces of not only the high school students who had been in that building and heard the screams of their classmates in between the loud pop pop of the rapid fire gun shots, but I also saw fear etched into the faces of teachers, parents, emergency personnel, doctors, and law enforcement.

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     But I also saw anger. Anger at a system that would continue to throw up its hands in resignation and say, “Well there’s nothing we can do about it,” when there IS something we can do about it.

     The shooter in Parkland (17 dead) yesterday, like the shooters in the Aurora movie theater on June 20, 2012  (58 dead), Sandy Hooks Elementary school on December 14, 2012 (27 dead), the Pulse Night Club on June 12, 2016 (49 dead), San Bernardino on June 16, 2016 (14 dead), the Las Vegas concert on October 1, 2017 (58 dead), and the church in Sutherland Springs on November 5, 2017 (26 dead), ALL used an AR 15 due to its ability to fire rapidly. But the AR 15 has been used in lesser publicized American shootings:

·         Oct. 7, 2007: Tyler Peterson, 20, used an AR-15 to kill six and injure one at an apartment in Crandon, Wis., before killing himself.

·       June 7, 2013: John Zawahri, 23, used an AR-15-style .223-caliber rifle and a .44-caliber Remington revolver to kill five and injure three at a home in Santa Monica, Calif., before he was killed.

·         March 19, 2015: Justin Fowler, 24, used an AR-15 to kill one and injure two on a street in Little Water, N.M., before he was killed.

·         May 31, 2015: Jeffrey Scott Pitts, 36, used an AR-15 and .45-caliber handgun to kill two and injure two at a store in Conyers, Ga., before he was killed.

·         Oct. 31, 2015: Noah Jacob Harpham, 33, used an AR-15, a .357-caliber revolver and a 9mm semi-automatic pistol to kill three on a street in Colorado Springs, Colo., before he was killed. (Source: USA Today February14, 2018).

     Is there anything we can do to help slow down gun violence in this country? Yes. We can outlaw rapid fire weapons like the AR 15 so that civilians can’t own, buy, or sell them. Those guns are meant for one thing and one thing only: to kill as many people as possible in as short a time as possible. Will outlawing rapid fire weapons solve the problem immediately?  After all, the NRA estimates that there are some 8 million AR 15s in circulation in America, other less conservative figures put that number at 15 million (and that doesn’t even take into account other types of rapid fire weapons). So, no, outlawing those types of weapons for civilian ownership won’t solve the problem immediately, but in five years there will be fewer of these types of weapons on the streets, in ten years there will be still fewer, then in twenty years still fewer. We have to start somewhere. 

     And don’t give me that Second Amendment bullshit. If you are one those people who hold your “rights” to own a rapid fire weapon higher than the rights that American children have to live and breathe and grow, then you are part of the problem. And if you continue to insist  that you need those weapons to protect yourself from your government in case it goes rogue, then you are deluding yourself if you think you could defend yourself against military tanks, Apache helicopters, or weaponized drones. If you distrust your government that much then maybe you should get off your ass and actually DO something constructive, like staying in touch with your senators and representatives, and voting (half of voting age Americans didn't even bother to vote in the 2016 presidential election). Maybe you could actually DO something that would help make you feel safer, rather than just stockpiling weapons. The NRA has spent billions since 1975 to lobby in Congress. Recently their lobbying efforts succeeded in scrapping a CDC proposal to study gun violence in America. The NRA isn’t protecting your rights. They are protecting gun manufacturer’s, seller’s and buyer’s financial interests. They don’t care about you. And they damn sure don't care about American children.

     What can we do to help make America safer for kids to attend public school and for you to go to a mall? We can make our existing gun laws stricter. We can increase the wait time to own a gun. I don’t mind waiting longer to buy a gun if it will save the life of a child (and yes, I own a gun). We can establish a federal database to keep track of people who have histories of violent crimes and domestic abuse, and make it illegal for them to own, buy, or sell a gun. We could raise the federal age to buy, sell, or own a gun to twenty-one (if we won't let people buy alcohol until they are twenty-one then why the hell would we allow them to own a weapon?). We could make it illegal for anyone on a terror watch list or no fly list to own, buy, or sell a gun.We can do away with the “gun show loophole.” Most states do not require background checks for firearms purchased at gun shows from private individuals -- federal law only requires licensed dealers to conduct checks (Source: governing.com). My youngest son sold a gun four years ago in the state of Georgia through a want ad in the local sales paper. This type of gun transfer should be illegal. We can hold adults fully responsible when children gain possession of guns owned by adults. And finally, we can create stiffer penalties for people who break gun laws. 

     I am a retired teacher, and way back in 2000 when I was student teaching in a small rural Georgia town, three police officers walked into my classroom and asked that I take my ninth graders across the hall into another classroom. I told my students to gather their belongings. One of the officers stopped me and said, “They can all go, except for those two,” as he pointed to two students. Later I found out that one of those students had had a gun in MY classroom. The other kid had known about the gun. The officers escorted the students out and I didn’t see them for the rest of the semester.  

    

     Thanks to that experience, the entire time that I taught high school, in the back of my mind, I was always on the look out for any sign of guns in the school. The only time I never thought about guns in my school was for a brief period when I taught in the United Arab Emirates. That was the only time I ever felt completely safe in a classroom. There simply were no guns to be worried about. I am glad I am retired now. I don’t know if I could teach in the current atmosphere of fear that permeates our public schools. And I damn sure don’t support arming teachers. Teachers in this country are overworked and over stressed and underpaid and over medicated. You want to give teachers guns to keep up with when most can’t even keep up with their cell phone in class? My cell phone was stolen from my classroom twice in my career.

     I have six grandchildren who attend public school in three different states: Florida, Georgia, and Arkansas. There is not a day that goes by that I don’t think of my grand kids and hope that for one more day they will be safe at school, that no one will run into their schools shooting, that my grandchildren won’t die by a bullet tearing into their bodies. And what about the other members of my family? Will one of my grown children be shot down while shopping at a mall? Will my husband be shot and killed in a movie theater? Will I be shot at a concert? Who knows anymore? Not me and not you. Thirty years ago I could never have imagined the state of fear that we live in in this country in 2018.  If we don’t do something proactive to solve our gun problem, and we do have a gun problem, what is it going to be like in thirty more years? I shudder to imagine.

And for those who say that now is not the time to talk about this; They’re right. We should have been talking about this after the first school shooting. We should have talked and talked and talked, and not stopped talking until something was done. Maybe if we had, there wouldn’t have been eighteen school shootings in the past seven weeks. Maybe if we had talked about it back then, the people in that Aurora theater wouldn’t have died or the people at the Las Vegas concert shooting wouldn’t have died. Maybe the 17 dead teens in Parkland would still be alive. Maybe we would actually feel safer. Maybe there wouldn't be grieving and shocked parents in a Florida town making funeral arrangements for their children as I type this.