It was often that imagination that saved me, in the end, from some of the horrors I would rather not have faced. Everyone has a sob story; I am no different. I don't really think that anyone wanted to focus on their family's shortcomings. Mine was simply this: my two younger half sisters were loved more than my brother and I were. I know that was how our stepfather felt, and it was how our mother acted. It was just something that we learned to live with.
"In the winter, my mom's van (named Casper for its coloring) made the loudest noises that it ever did. It stuttered and whined and echoed around the garage before it was too filled with clutter to fit the vehicle. I don't think that we ever really liked that thing; my mom regretted needing a mini-van, and it filled the garage and entryway of the house with the terrible smell of rotten eggs. But it was the way that I got to school and from my father's house in the afternoon after I walked home.
That van was always a mess, but in the wintertime it was even worse. The cold air of Ohio made the metal creak and groan even when it was completely safe, and my stepfather worked on it at least once every two months, or so it seems in retrospect. I liked to close my eyes and listen to it when I was having a particularly fantastical day. I daydreamed a lot, got called the weird one in the family, but I liked to get lost in my mind.
My mind could turn the engine noises and hissing exhaust pipe into something different if I just subjected myself to the back of my eyelids. I pretended that I was somewhere else to escape where I really was. As long as I couldn't see the dank garage and dirty silver paint of the van, I could be anywhere, from a spaceship to a rickety, old boat. I made up elaborate situations to go along with these sounds, to supplement this fictional reality that I had created.
But then I would always hear the sound of my mother beckoning me into the house and I would leave that world behind."
Even though she probably loved us all the same, I think that the reminder of who we were and the past mistakes that we'd come from were often too much for her. I stayed out of her way; I took to my room, to my journals, to my solitude of the mind, where I could just relax and let be. It was so much easier to focus on someone else's problems, particularly if they were fictional and I knew that they would win in the end.
It can be funny, though, the want to reflect only on our best moments, but finding ourselves drawn only towards the worst. Pain can plague you, twist the figments of your imagination into twisted caricatures of themselves.
And those worst moments aren't always as bad as they'd seemed. I had it better than some people; we actually had a vehicle, even if it was clunky and obnoxious. But pain doesn't work relatively, does it? There's no way to compare it like a sandwich at elementary lunch, no way or exchanging your problem's for someone else's.
