Checkmate

Him with a suitcase in one hand, the other on the doorknob. Her standing a few feet away, sobbing, voice raised but cracking under the weight of desperation and anger. Me, three years old, trying my hardest to fade into the wall. But she saw me out of the corner of her red, wet eyes, and grabbed my tiny hand. She pulled me to her, unwilling to relinquish her spot on this well-played chessboard, and knelt down to my level.

“Go tell him not to leave.”

The heart is malleable and soft at that very young age, and empathy comes readily. Her tears transferred to my eyes, and I cried as I went to him, not understanding yet the implications of how I was just made a pawn in their destructive, selfish game. I didn’t even understand what was going on, nor what I had walked into just then. But I did know that I loved the voices my dad used when he read me stories at bedtime.

The corduroy of his pants rubbed my face as I pressed into his leg, two arms around it as if my weight could bolster him to the ground. “Daddy, don’t go. Please.” I looked up into his face, and it was puffy and red from fighting or drinking or shame- probably an unholy trifecta of them all.

And then my brain pulls a fast one and protects me from what happened next, a memory filed away deep in the basement of my subconscious. He did leave that day, as he would over and over again through the years I lived with them, always choosing something else instead of me- at least that is how I felt and what my mother taught me that day. The lessons set forth by them going forward were that they did not want me, either of them, that I had ruined their great dreams and designs for their lives, that because of me they were fated to a seemingly endless cycle of emotion, physical, and verbal abuse that ended up transferring to me, like a river that eventually becomes a waterfall when the only place left to go is over the edge.

How can I describe to someone who does not know what it feels like to want to disappear, to fold into such a tight ball of origami that I can’t be found, to freeze until I blend into my surroundings, to hide as quietly as possible in the dark recess of my closet and never come out? Disappearing was my survival tool, one that I honed over years and years like a magic act- my prestige, my illusion, my great reveal.