The Summer I Was Fourteen

First Chapter/Preface

The summer I was fourteen I didn’t leave my house for a month. I slept. I wrote. I sat on my bed. At night I trapped the summer beetles that buzzed their way into my room under empty water glasses and left them in their places until, by the end of the month, empty spots on my wooden floorboards were littered with overturned bugs in overturned glasses. The darkness terrified me, and looking out my second-story screen windows while my family slept, I imagined the street and neighborhood a silent movie set, my racing thoughts the only source of sound. With my overhead light gleaming across my scattered room and scattered mind, my mother would catch glimpses of me from the hallway on her way to the bathroom. The lights were bright, and I was very much alive in my terror as I trapped beetles amid the mess of overturned bookcases and shredded books covering the floor. She would look for only a moment before continuing past, and I would continue chasing the fluttering, buzzing bugs that circled about my mind.

During the heat of the days by the comforting hum and whir of my fan, I filled a legal pad with voracious writings, pages of single words repeated and repeated. There were twenty-seven lines on a page, and if I wrote seven times across each line, a single page could express one hundred and eighty-nine repetitions of a single feeling. Sometimes the word would simply be my name: Alice, Alice, Alice. My thoughts bounced and raced straight through the journal, and I began to speak to myself, maybe even to a higher being, recording every thought from my bed �" every thought from my teeming head.

            This obsessive, repetitious behavior had started long before my chosen summer seclusion: high school finals stirred in me a monochromatic need to succeed. I woke hours before school to cram in that one fact no other would recall. The walls of “my office” were plastered in color-organized, week-by-week study schedules that I was not to waver from. I started drinking coffee. I started making coffee. There was no time for play in this winner’s world until this winner crashed mind first into herself.

At the end of June, bookcases were overturned, drawers were wrenched from their frames, vermillion nail polish was shattered in splatters across the hardwood floors of my bedroom, and my freshman biology textbook was methodically torn apart page by page until only the frayed binding remained intact. As I sat on my bed with a kitchen pot full of hundreds of paper scraps that had once diagramed cell respiration, I turned my fan to its highest setting and let the pieces fly about my summer bedroom. Pictures show the remains of a hurricane; I see my brutal handiwork. Living within this broken room for weeks, I sidestepped tumultuous piles of books or shattered junk, following a narrow path on my way to the bathroom and back. The mess was easily ignored, though, as I curled into my bed, listened to music so loud that my ears hurt, and scribbled, manically depressed, the desperately confusing destruction that was still playing within my head.