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The Black and White of It All (Revised)

Kelsi Oser

    Jay’s eyes misted over as they moved back and forth like a typewriter over each line I wrote. We were hanging out, of all places, in a church parking lot, drinking forties and snorting coke. But something had come over me when Jay began talking about his sister who was only a year younger than him, about how much he loves her and how he doesn’t know what he’s going to do about her cancer. I parted from the group with my notebook in hand, and wrote a poem about life and death and love and hope, inspired by Jay’s heartbreaking situation. As the words flowed from my fingertips onto the paper, salty tears also flowed quietly from my sad eyes, creating mascara tinged sunburst splashes on the page. A warm summer breeze dried my cheeks and forced deep breaths of sweet air into my cigarette smoke-filled lungs.
    I never really showed people I didn’t know very well my work; the things I wrote were usually much too personal and revealing. But the distance in Jay’s eyes remained even when I’d pulled myself together enough to rejoin the crowd. I pulled him aside nervously.
    “Here, I wrote something; it’s kind of about what you’re going through...” I mumbled, already embarrassed by my boldness to assume he’d even care. When he finally absorbed the last line, the guy who most people would be afraid to fuck with had damp cheeks as well. Suddenly, his arms were around me, tightly. We stayed like that, in silence, for a long time.
    I didn’t always communicate hopped up on cocaine and booze in dark parking lots. I was one of those annoying little babies that never stopped talking, one of those toddlers that everyone smiles at while secretly fantasizing wringing their necks in the movie theater. You couldn’t shut me up if you promised me the world. I’m told I had my own language and knew my name at six months, and by seven I associated English words with people and objects. My first comprehensible word came nine months before I learned to walk, and I formed complete, coherent sentences by the time I was nine months old. By eleven months, I dictated every possible thought that entered my head.
    By the time I turned eight years old, the bellowing voice of my father echoing in the stairwell came to be a nightly occurrence. “LIGHTS OFF!” He had a tendency for shouting ten times louder than necessary when he wanted to make a point. Five minutes later, when the sliver of light peeking out below the bottom of my door had not yet disappeared, I could always count on an ear-piercing whistle he made with his fingers. He was sneaky and quick, always forcing me to crouch next to the door, book in one hand and light switch under the other. Somehow, I always managed to get caught hours after my bedtime, in the middle of a frantic scramble to jump in bed. During close calls, my heart galloped at full speed, and I would forget to breathe until danger had passed.
    During adolescence, I discovered I possessed a few crucial talents. I managed my way to the New York State Qualifiers for both the 100 and 400 meter hurdles; evidently I was good at leaping over obstacles. I was a brilliant saleswoman, discreet and effective while dealing acid to support my own habit. And though I rarely cared enough about the subjects I was learning about in school to actually pay attention, I did care enough about my grades to refine my bullshitting capabilities in the field of essay writing. Eventually I realized that my writing—and most definitely not my test-taking or study skills—was successfully propelling me through high school.
    But becoming a good scholarly essayist came as a mere byproduct of all the impassioned prose, poetry, letters, and journaling from my adolescence. I found solace in expressing emotions that I barely understood with surprising precision and clarity. Between heart-crushing crushes, fickle friendships, a turbulent home life, and a bad case of depression, I had much to let out; writing my exact perception of things made me feel more secure and confident about my life. I wrote all the time. I also took drugs all the time.
    Ninth grade, fondly known as “the corruption year” among friends, signified a turning point in my life. I went from being the cigarette-experimenting “rebel” in my relatively nerdy, smart group of friends to the young girl ready to try anything, anywhere, with anyone. I sought to shed myself of my former identity. I was miserable being the frizzy-haired girl with braces that was as invisible as the air circulating through the school’s hallways. I was depressed, and like most fourteen year-olds, misunderstood. When the opportunity to change arose, I seized it.
    I threw myself into a dizzying world of drugs, alcohol, and older guys. I snuck out through my second-story window countless times to party with skaters and stoners, and ravers and speed-freaks. It was a colorful, vibrant world, not bland and boring like my old life. I felt alive, and for the first time, desirable.
    I carried my battered spiral notebooks everywhere, recording revelations and insanely original ideas, philosophizing on the world with acid in my spine and ecstasy on my tongue. I began to see the beauty in everything, and my dilated eyes were wide enough to let the world inside. I sacrificed precious brain cells that will never be regenerated, but drugs gave me a completely new perspective on life. The laughter, though not as gratifying as my drug-induced thoughts, also kept me coming back for more. I was sick of writing lyrics and poetry about my pain and sadness. I essentially regressed to my childhood and revisited my lost sense of urgency to discover and explore new aspects of the world and ways of being. My parents weren’t quite as thrilled. Like my eight year-old self, the sixteen year-old me was still an expert at breaking the rules, and even more talented in getting caught.
    When arguments with my parents elevated into screaming matches, any word that left their lips quickly enraged me to the point of uncontainable resentment for my powerless position. At this particular point in our conflicts, all constructive lines of criticism and debate shut down. Neither party could discern between the other’s legitimate points and verbal assaults. After storming off, absolutely hopeless that any acceptable resolution would be made, I’d scrawl furiously in my notebook about the injustices my parents had committed against me. Instead of trying to convey myself with choked up gasps and flushed cheeks, sometimes I’d let my mother read my frustrations on my bed with me curled up next to her in exhaustion. Trying to vocalize my jumbled thoughts while still emotionally volatile never worked out for me; my pen was the only vehicle through which I could convey any reasonable argument to my parents and actually be heard. Even then, seeing eye to eye was a rarity for my parents and me.
    After school one chilly September day, I huddled with my cousin, Therese, on my front porch. I was chain-smoking and glaring at my mother, who was absorbing every move we made from the other side of the bay window to our left. This was my only time to be with anyone I cared about; I was lucky that a good friend was also a relative because I was no longer allowed to come into contact with any of my friends. Having recently been deemed a “Person in Need of Supervision” by a family court judge, I was only permitted to go to school and work, driven to and from by my parents to ensure that I wouldn’t use drugs in between leaving the house and arriving at my destination. So when my mom told Therese to leave a half an hour after we got home from school, I was outraged at the brevity of the rare visit. My father pulled up the steep driveway two hours earlier than usual, and the cold tones in my parents’ voices demanding me to go inside sliced through my skull.
    I sat with my knees pulled to my chest and silent streams draining from my swollen eyes, waiting for another fight to begin. Last week’s incident was still fresh. That night they tracked me down at the park when I was supposed to be somewhere else, under parental supervision. When the mushrooms kicked in, it was the first time I’d smiled in weeks. But when my father’s silver Celica coasted around the loop in the parking lot, I knew he’d spotted me. Any trust I’d tried to gain with my parents was instantaneously lost. After we “discussed” my escapades soon after, my knees sunk and I slumped next to the stove. For two and a half hours I laid sobbing uncontrollably, face down, on the filthy kitchen floor, lost in my own self-hatred, frustration, anger, and despondency. That night I did want to die, and my parents almost called 911 because I lost the will even to move or speak. I got through the night, though, and convinced them I was better. Or so I thought.
    Now, a week later, my parents sat facing me, one to my left and one to my right. Therese had already started her long walk home; I was furious they wouldn’t even give her a ride simply to fight with me. The calm swooshing of ruffled leaves was the only sound for what seemed like an hour. I was tiring of waiting for them to start in on me. Unexpectedly, the doorbell rang.
    “Who is that? What’s going on?” I jumped up, alarmed. Two social workers sauntered in and proceeded to inform me that I would be transferred immediately to the hospital’s therapy/school program, which ran 8-5 Monday through Friday. That way I would be completely cut off from all my “delinquent” (but only) friends, have to quit my job, and have school for twice as long. Naturally, I resisted. Hysterically sobbing and swearing at the two strangers out to ruin every last aspect of my already crumbling life, I ran to my room. I called Holly with my back against the wall and both legs locked in front of me against the door, preventing anyone from entering my bedroom. When the police busted in to place me under a mental health arrest, one officer picked up the dangling phone. “Don’t worry,” she told Holly, “We’re going to help your friend,” as I screamed in terror in the background. Apparently, she hung up before hearing Holly’s accurate response that I would be fine as long as they left me alone.
    My fifteen-day ordeal imprisoned in the adolescent psychiatric unit of Genesee Hospital was more traumatic than any previous incident that had contributed to my pessimism regarding my future. The psychiatrists and nurses disagreed with anything I said, or claimed that I was lying. After all, I was a patient in the psych ward. That’s all they needed to know to invalidate my thoughts.
    When the pillars of my world became to crumble, I knew I could hold on to my sanity as long as I held on to my pen. Free expression enabled me to retain my identity when the power of suggestibility may otherwise have convinced me I was simply a hopeless, self-absorbed, psycho loser. During each private therapy session, I felt these messages pleading to poison my mind against me, sneakily creeping into the cracks in my psyche, like a red sock weaseling its way into the white load.
    Even before the hospital, writing remained my only outlet for the anger, humiliation, and hopelessness that festered inside. Through poetry I broke down my emotions. In prose, I contemplated the reasons for which my life was seemingly a series of misfortunes. And in my journal, I’d recorded every inconsequential detail of my substance abuse, social interactions, family dysfunctions, romantic encounters, and anything else fit for an after school special. Nothing could have prepared me, though, for the day I met with my parents in one of the psych ward’s cramped conference rooms.
    The head ward doctor, the psychiatrist assigned to me, and my case manager were also present the moment my explicitly detailed diary was placed on the table. As it sunk in that my parents searched my room for my deepest, darkest secrets, I became nauseated. It read like a raw confessional exposing my complex web of deceit in which my parents were entangled. As if having my parents read about how I sold acid (a felony) and about my explicitly detailed first romantic experiences wasn’t horrifying enough, they highlighted the most disturbing passages for the doctors like it was research for a term paper. Needless to say, I decided that writing an unabridged encyclopedia of my life was definitely a catastrophic mistake that I’d never repeat.
    Most of my memories from the hospital consist of staring out the window. My room overlooked the emergency entrance, so I saw people being rushed into the ER every day. I wondered what each person’s story was, if they’d come out alive, or if they were strapped down against their own free will as I was when they wheeled me through those automatic doors. Oh, and those nurses on their smoke breaks. The cool air enhanced the effect of billowy clouds rolling from their mouths, and I would inhale tightly and slowly with them, trying to mimic the feeling of pulling drags from a coveted cigarette.
    The “professionals” holding me hostage tried to convince my parents to give up custody so they could claim me as a ward of the state. I was a “hopeless” case, they maintained. By this point, though, I’d learned the trick to being discharged. From then on, I kept my thoughts and opinions confined to the pages I was allowed to keep privately under my crunchy cot next to my barred windows. The day the head psychiatrist’s petition (to detain me without consent until I turned eighteen) was denied by the judge, the ward staff sheepishly acknowledged how lucky I was that my parents refused to sign me over to the state the previous day. Suddenly I wasn’t so crazy after all, huh? Time and verbal repression of my thoughts and emotions had earned me the right to once again savor the crisp, smoky scent of the still autumn air. Hopefully those copies of my diary were destroyed a few years ago when the despicable hospital in which I was both born and jailed closed its doors forever.
    Though the exploitation of my deepest emotions and most private and sacred experiences scarred my trust in brutally honest writing, I continued writing from personal experience in more discreet language once I escaped the hellspital. Whether I scribbled prose, poetry, or reality-based fiction, I ultimately wrote for personal therapy. Writing is the only type of self-medication my parents ever approved of; it just took them some time to figure out that, yes, that means writing about things they wish I didn’t do and horrifying experiences they wanted to protect their child from having. Writing changed my perspective on life, with time, by reminding me who I’ve been, how I’ve interpreted situations, and why I’ve made particular choices. Reading past work forces me to revisit myself and determine how and why my views and personality have evolved. Writing still helps me through life as a method of healing, of confronting pain, and of course of emotional and creative expression.
    Every few years when I run into Jay Golisano, we exchange typical formalities. But each time, right before we part ways, he mentions quietly that he still has that poem I wrote hanging on his wall, over his bed. Being a gifted writer is one thing. But having the power to give hope, to create light in a dark world, is something I’ll never take for granted. I’m determined to use it.



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