From Confused to Confident

By Monika Darling

The Pain Under My Xyphoid Process

Part 2 of 2 (Go to Part 1)

What does pain look like? A tree, a coal path, a sharp knife, a thick screw, a mountain, a dying fish, a bottomless well, a cut in your arm, a slice in your wrist, two fingers down your throat, a faceless fuck? Just like the human body, pain comes in all shapes and sizes.

I began my travels on a rather smooth path – a bit of it was even paved. The road behind me was too dusty to see with my own eyes. Walking is an innate reflex God has built into our finely wired circuit. I walked down the clear path ahead, leaving the dusty trail behind me. An unforeseen shadow jumped out from nowhere, captured my purity and dangled it in front of my face. He licked it, touched it, molested it, and forced me to do the same. Never had an unfamiliar image disgusted me so or a rough, forced touch felt so disconcerting. How can any first be so wrong to the naïve mind? The question itself describes the destructive nature of his attack. That finely designed circuit shorted out and part of the wiring was permanently butchered. He spit out the remaining indigestibles. They remained sticky and wet from the saliva and dirt gathered from the ground underneath. It felt slimy against my fingers as I picked it up and placed purity in my palm. I could no longer call it purity, but I didn’t know what to call it. I looked at it for the second time and became acutely aware of my filth, morbidly disturbed by my deformity and desperate to hide my ugliness from the world. The shadow always stayed by my side as a constant reminder of my fate. To expose it was to seal a death of my love, my life, my provider: my mother.

I forged forward, following my mother’s equally burdened gait. The dust kicked up from under my feet, dirtying my clothes and sticking between my teeth. My range of vision narrowed and visibility shortened. There were so many traveling down parallel paths, but theirs looked more like a road. I could see their purity before they even knew it existed.

So I fell back a bit to stay out of the others’ sight. They laughed at the way the dirt surrounded me. I knew I was ugly. I knew I was stupid. Otherwise, I wouldn’t be in such a mess. But God blessed me with that ability to walk, so I kept going. A pointed edge of a stone in the road pierced my swollen feet. I fell with my knees thundering to the pebbled path. Mud stuck to the moist blood from my scraped knees. The soles of my feet got thicker, my vision sharpened and my legs strengthened. It didn’t matter. I was still ugly. In fact, uglier. I didn’t look at anyone and could just as well assume they didn’t see me. Only the shadow always watched, not over me but at me.

I did not know what a xyphoid process was. In fact, I barely understood pain. Pain was what someone felt when a soccer ball hit an unprotected shin or when falling off a bike. Though I did not understand pain, I knew that the way the others looked at me and judged me always made me feel bad. Ironically, if you asked me then, at the beginning of my journey, or now, decades later, only the simplest words come to mind: “I feel bad.”

What does bad look like? It looks like discomfort felt by my mother directing me to the path where I met those kids with the purity I could see but they could not. Silently and reluctantly, I would pass my days in the company of my fair, pure counterparts. I dreaded each day I was forced to show my hidden face, my ugly body, my filthy skin. They despised me. Why else would I sit alone and eat egg sandwiches and the squishy black bananas my mom so lovingly packed for me? Why else would I look down in anticipation of being selected last for the team again? Why else would my only friend demand the rules of the game be followed only according to her, and I willingly comply? Why else would kids with so many Barbies insist there weren’t enough for me to play, too?

These questions contaminated my immature mind and lay heavy on my heart, perhaps even creeping down my sternum and tickling my xyphoid process a bit. The answers became apparent. They were illustrated in my hideous clothes covered in brown smut, my yucky privates of which I was acutely aware, my round protruding belly, my fat thighs that stuck together when I walked with a dress on. My dirt was exposed and created filth in everyone I came close to. My lips widened when I laughed, revealing the brown grit between my teeth, so I quickly learned to hide my smile. No wonder they passed me up in relay races, played fun games yet refused to let me participate and kept a good distance between me and my smelly egg sandwich. I looked down at the dry indigestibles, now resembling a crusty insect dead from the summer sun beating down on it, sitting in the palm of my hand. I did something horrible to deserve this. I made myself ugly and no one should have to look at me. I did not utter a peep and moved with grace so that no one may see me. I externally morphed into a boulder that blended into the backdrop of its surroundings. I internally morphed into the solid earth to numb myself. I no longer felt bad, I no longer felt at all.

As each unbearable day ended, I waited eagerly for my mother to retrieve me. On the days the shadow came to retrieve me, my heart shuttered and my stomach ached. His bright white uniform and matching finely polished shoes glowed in the dungeons of our daycare. Now, the wretched daycare, smelling like a cocktail of stale urine, broken brown crayons and mold-infested carpet, quickly became my safe haven. I so badly longed to yell at my caretakers to help me: “Look at the dark shadow lingering inside!” “Look at my indigestibles!” Rather, they gladly turned me back to my perpetrator. I envisioned spitting in their pruned faces and destroying their paved road. I hated them for turning the other way and continuing with their uncontaminated day. I hated them for not protecting me. I screamed on the inside until my throat ached from containing the sound and my head pounded from withholding the tears. I protected the indigestibles, I knew that was the only way my mother would remain safe.

The paved road quickly narrowed behind us as we returned to the familiar path. Once again, we traveled down a bumpy, dirt road together, me behind my mother and my brother behind me. I always kept him behind me and walked with a steady gait to prevent the dirt from kicking up into his mouth and eyes. Nonetheless, he was one of us, riding on the same path, so try as I might, I could never protect him like I wanted to. Perhaps my mother felt the same way about me. Because the sad truth is that my brother carried indigestibles no different than mine. Later, I would learn that my mother, too, carried indigestibles no different than both of ours. It led me to wonder if familiarity blinded us from recognizing them in each other.

With time, I learned that my two dirt-covered role models looked astonishingly different when our paths met with others. They weaved a finely knit cape, smooth like silk, to drape over their scarred bodies and disguise their repugnant odor. It was obvious to my brother and I what lay beneath that cape, but not to the pure soles that rode on paved paths. The conflicting images were confusing, but their deep desire to protect that hidden identity was apparent.

As generations before us traveled down a poorly visible, dusty road, the tradition, the burden, the secret would be passed to us as well. Soon, my brother and I learned to weave our own capes and show them to the world. Ours were quite exquisite, if I could say so myself. So finely fit, in fact, I would sometimes forget the dirt underneath them. We reveled in our new outfits and the new roads they would permit us to travel and dreaded the thought of returning to that pebble-ridden path. To wear the cape was to wear a new identity. An identity that friends, family, and strangers enjoyed, accepted, and celebrated. To wear the cape was to escape our harsh reality.

Exposure equaled weakness, as far as I was concerned. The cape gave me a power over others I never previously felt; my life was a secret, but theirs was an open book. My magic cape was my right, as that paved road was theirs. I learned what a funny joke sounded like, and soon it became mine. My sharp-witted tongue earned the laughs of all those girls who were prettier than me and all those boys who didn’t know I existed. Now, I was picked second to last, not last, for the softball team. When others looked at me and acknowledged me, I could feel my smile grow and my teeth show. My chest became warm, and my legs tingled. I remembered, for the first time since the day I morphed into a boulder, that a little piece of me existed.

Those dustless guys with the unscratched surfaces and polished purity became items of every girl’s deepest desire, including mine. How do I go about obtaining one? I studied those pretty girls, their feet smooth like butter from walking a paved road, their knees hairless and unscarred from walking a balanced gait. As perfect as they looked was as ugly as I felt. My magic cape stopped working! I tried to fix it, mend it, and make it more beautiful. It didn’t work.

I utilized its powers in the only way I knew how: “I will make him laugh, I will compliment everything wonderful about him, and do whatever makes him happy.” I longed for a glance from him. I would capture our exchanges, put them in my pocket and look at them secretly at night. The images were etched in my brain, and I memorized our dialogue like scenes from a movie. Our exchanges lightened my dim core.

He did not regard the way I saw other boys long for girls, yet we passed many days together; we even ran off, at times. One day, he introduced me to his road. “Fall back,” I would whisper, “Your parents won’t see us.” I thought my humor supplemented with a clever eye would secure him as mine. He shared his most private feelings with me, as I did mine with him. Slowly, I pulled up a sleeve, revealed a shoulder, flashed my belly, exposing what was under the cape. Only the shadow had seen my indigestibles; I thought they were too crusty and decrepit to show him. I did not want to burden him; more importantly, I did not want to chase him away. To my surprise, he wasn’t hindered by my dirt or overwhelmed by my ugliness. At least he stayed near me. I studied the way he moved, the music he listened to, the way he watched others, the hats he wore and the things that made him happy. To compliment him was to compliment myself; he defined me. Soon enough, I longed for him always. I never wanted to leave his path.

A cylinder surrounded my insides, including those elusive, yet ever-present indigestibles. The most posterior aspect of the cylinder scraped the edge of my spine. The most anterior aspect skimmed the back of my xyphoid process. My cylindrical-shaped core was made of glass and was hollow on the inside; it never really got filled. It used to be that a meandering insult or a backhanded comment would crack that fragile core. Now, piece by piece, I filled up my cylinder like a jar of coins. I filled it with glances from him, stories from his childhood, secret moments together, and his discrete touches.

The days I didn’t get his reassuring glance, I felt neglected. When an anticipated, secret moment together failed me, I felt worthless. The cracks grew, I could feel my core shatter and crumble to the ground beneath me with each slight. Each time, I would sink to the ground, hunch over and secretly collect the broken glass pieces in the palm of my hand. Inevitably, a shard would break skin, drawing blood from my finger, staining the rotting, smelly indigestibles tucked into the palm of my hand. My scraped-up palms resembled my scarred knees, like a matching outfit.

I was a bottomfeeder, consuming the remnants that wafted down to the ocean floor. I still had no concept of what these “boyfriends” everyone spoke of were about. Nor had I had “the sex” that my friends, everyone on TV, all the cool people in the movies, and pretty much anyone worth anything had had. I was segregated into the category of the prudes, super-Christians, those “saving themselves for marriage,” along with the physically incapable females of the world.

The shadow lingered, but from afar. His presence wasn’t felt strongly, like in my younger years. But my purity, or lack thereof, was my souvenir of the past. That souvenir was pinned to my chest, tattooed across my forehead, patched onto the fanny pack synched loosely around my waste. It was on my hooded sweatshirt and on the seat of my jogging pants. It was me. From the inside out, those indigestibles contaminated all they touched. From a cracked end moistened by blood stemmed a spout of fungus. Like the weeds that light up in the dry summer heat, that fungus traveled rampantly throughout my body. Piece by piece, my insides rotted. My outsides were marked with points where the fungus would break through. I fixated on tearing out any little infected pore; the scars on my face, back, shoulder, and legs were there to remind me.

I tried to rectify the damage done when that shadow popped out from nowhere, decades ago. But what he destroyed was eternal, and I could never escape. I could only make myself into a boulder, better yet, into a fluffy cloud that, with a gust of wind, could just… pooof! Disappear.

The views expressed in this section are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of ABCDlady.

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