My First Minor Epiphany

I wrote this some time ago, but had never shared it here. Yes, another true story. A boring one, perhaps. Or perhaps not. It depends on what you've experienced, too.

The sofa sat over the bump in the floor, where the wood had long ago begun to warp up and leave a small crack that led to the basement. The paper on the walls was peeling, to reveal several other peeling layers, the bottom layer being dated in the late 1880's, with a trademark.

 

 

In one corner, a battered old television set with no remote showed a fuzzy program, one that none of us were watching, since the sound was turned down. Slipknot's "Wait and Bleed" was blaring out our voices, forcing us, between coughs and puffs of the joint being passed, to shout over the music, though none of us dared to admit we wanted to turn it down a bit.

 

 

The parties at my house had calmed down a lot, since we had moved for a while and just returned to Nebraska. In fact, though it was my 20th birthday, I had only invited two people, my two best guy friends. The three of us occupied that couch that coverd the bump in the floor. (To protect their identities, we will call them John and Travis.)

 

 

Travis, once tall and gangly, had become tall and portly in the few years I had known him. He was the son of the local Sheriff, and had only recently been released from Juvenile Rehabilitation, where his experiments with Marijuana had been turned into an addiction to Crank, partially just to spite his father for being disappointed in the imperfections of his eldest boy. He was filled with hate for many things, including himself, and yet was somehow goofy as hell, when you least expected it. I loved him for that goofy side, and tolerated the rest of him.

 

 

John, on the other hand, was a classic example of the type of young man to turn to drugs: a loner,an orphan of suicide, a writer, a philosopher- a lost soul who had found comfort in befriending me, as I had in him. He was average in appearance and build, but very different than anyone else I have ever known. At times, he and I would have conversations that no one else around us could pretend to understand, filled with the metaphors we had constructed in other conversations. We wrote stories knowing that few others, if any, would ever read them, content to share with one another. Many nights were spent with John, just walking aimlessly in the crisp air of a Nebraska night, through a small town with few streetlights to guide our way, talking, and just being alive. Of the friends I have known and loved, there has never been an equal.

 

 

My father sat in a torn and stained brown lazyboy rocker, his face awash with the awe that only Marijuana, muscle relaxers, and a quart of Merlot can give birth to. Occasionally he would laugh at something that was said. Otherwise, for this night, he sat and stared at everything, at nothing all at once.

 

 

I sat sandwiched between John and Travis, as on many a weekend night, and shared stories, sang along with the music: "I felt the hate rise up in me, kneel down and clear the stone of leaves, I wander out where you can't see, inside my shell I..." laughed, and at times came close to tears. I felt glorious and terrible all at once. Travis went outside for a moment of air, since the air was filled with the stench of at least two packs of Newports, in addition to the pot smoke.Lazy from the alcohol and weed, I ignored that the CD stopped, and started singing a song I had written. A part of a song, actually, just a chorus is all that there was so far.

 

 

"My head is on fire, my heart is the flame, my pulse is a lion, she's roaring your name..." As I sang this I looked over at John, my best friend. He was in tears, and tried to speak, but found himself incapable of anything intelligible other than one word in the middle of his babble.

 

 

"Beautiful...." It was the first time I had really looked at him all evening, really. He looked at me and the tears came faster, and I longed for escape, to get away from what I realized was causing his tears. It was me.

 

 

Somehow, from his dewy gaze alone, I understood that the reason my best friend was crying silently was because he had really seen who I was; the ugly parts hiding the real me, and the real me underneath her skin were all there in his eyes. I rose and stumbled my way to the bathroom sink, looked in the mirrored door of the medicine cabinet, and saw myself as John had seen me.

 

I peered into my own eyes, and put down the 40 ounce Mickey's I still had clasped around the neck.

 

 

Looking back at the bottle, I picked it up again, to dump the remainder down the drain. I walked into the kitchen and made myself a cappuchino from a powdered mix, my mind whirling along with the cup as I watched it spin on the microwave turntable.

John was still slowly nursing his 40, his tears dried.Travis was crouched over my stereo, which was on the wood floor,changing the music. My father, oblivious, had fallen asleep in his chair. I stood there drinking my cappuchino, saying nothing, a million thoughts racing through my clouded mind.

 

 

I had had dreams once. I had been the "smartest girl in my class". I had been a visionary, an artist, a young woman who wondered about things that were bigger than myself. I had become far less than my young dreams expected of me. I had become ugly. I had turned the outside into the inside, allowing the obesity and the acne to invade my soul. It was time to start dreaming dreams again; to be beautiful again, if only on the inside.

 

 

"This is my last party", I thought. It wasn't, but it was the beginning of a change in me. I started to question who I really wanted to be, and that was the first step toward creating her-- no, not creating her, just finding out where she had been hiding. Yes, I stopped hiding on that day.

 

I'll never be certain what John's tears meant to him that evening, but to me the meaning will never change, because his tears changed me. They broke through the haze of intoxication and forced me to look at myself-- the first of many small epiphanies that helped to shape me into the person I became, and who I am today.

Reviews

[AK]

Nicely done. Thank you for sharing this.

[yinseriv]

And in a moment of clarity. Finding that truth within us is a life long process. But hey, look at the bright side. We are never going to run out of storied to tell. Low and behold the stories get beautiful also. Thank you for what you wrote.