14. barf
i’ve been reflecting on my life a lot as i live in the in between. i’ve been in the tunnel a long time now and the truth is, walls do start talk after awhile. i’ve been thinking about why i’m so comfortable with rejection and embarrassment when it seems to cut everyone else off at the needs.
i’ve been wondering about how i’m able to keep taking steps forward without the people i’ve known for years, rooting for me to get to where i’m going. i can’t tell you the truth about what i’ve discovered in the answers to my questions because it would be like a hurricane hitting a wishing well from the ground up. All the people beneath my surface using nothing but a map and intuition to figure out how my insides work would drown in my tears.
instead i will offer you a much simpler explanation which can be tied to the series of unfortunately timed bouts of food poisoning i experienced in my early life. i would tell you about the year my family of six + my grandma + her boyfriend + my aunt were trapped in a house on christmas eve, fighting for toilets, sinks and trash cans to throw up in as we all felt the publix cheeseburgers we ate the day before, now coming out the other end of us. we had all been poisoned except for my younger brother who doesn’t eat meat. but i’ll save that day for another month.
today, i’m going to tell you about the most humiliating day of my life which happened in 8th grade. i was in the school band not by choice but because my mother made us all play an instrument growing up. i didn’t know why at the time and even though i had no interest in playing the violin or the clarinet i loved being in the center of other people playing instruments.
i wasn’t very good and i didn’t care to be good truthfully, because either way my mother would make me play. by some grace of luck, when i auditioned for the band at the start of 8th grade i got placed in the second row of clarinetists. i was surprised and it was a new year.
in 7th grade i learned that each week my mother would have to sign off on my hours practiced. this was very hard to achieve on both ends. i didn’t play often and my mother always forgot to sign stuff. in 8th grade, i planned to take advantage of both these things. i wouldn’t practice much and i would forge my mother’s signature from the first week of school so that every week it would look the same and i wouldn’t have to burden her with the responsibility of remembering to sign my practice sheet.
so despite the encouragement of being sat in the second row, i hadn’t planned on playing much that year. i had perfect my technique of moving my fingers and making it seem like i was blowing into the clarinet but i let the other musicians play the music. i liked to just listen. i also liked talking to my band mates in between breaks. in 8th grade i was sat between Kelsey Fuller and Erin Schickner. The three of us were an odd pairing, the three of us seemed to be the odd balls out. Knowing this we formed a soft alliance that embraced our oddities and made sitting next to each other enjoyable. I think I told them both that I never played and made it an inside joke.
Anyway, all of this is to say that when I was met with an untimely, gutteral feeling of vomit I was in the middle of the band. My father and mother are New Yorkers and the idea of ‘powering through’ things was embedded into my membrane at a young age. When I got the sense that something was bad was coming and my stomach was turning, I tried to hold out as long as I could. I thought the moment might pass. Maybe it was just nerves because it was the night before the winter concert and this was our final rehearsal of the program. I’m not sure what I would’ve been personally worried about since I didn’t actually play my instrument and had no real role in the music but when I felt the first pangs that’s what I assumed.
But that wasn’t what it was. It was, what I believe to be, the soup my mother had made now coming up the other end. As I realized this, I got up from my seat in the middle of the row and tried to evacuate as fast as I could, knowing a big blow was coming but I wasn’t talented and I was at the center of the band. I held my hand to my mouth but it wasn’t enough to block the vomit and as I was running out of the crowd of chairs, musical stands and the entire band of my middle school class, I got puke on some of them.
As soon as I cleared the room, I threw up all down the hallway. When I finally made it to the bathroom there was nothing left to come up. I stared at myself in the mirror in horror thinking about the trail I had left behind and how there was no way I was ever going to go back there. I couldn’t bare it. I had vommitted all over my band mates and the hallway we walked down each day to get to classes.
I ruined the entire night. Parents were called early. Everyone evacuated the school so that they could clean up my vomit. My mother came to pick me up and when I told her I would never return to those people and that place ever again. She said I would have to go to school the next day. I was so exhausted from the experience and disappointed by the reality, I said nothing but a loud sigh. I put my hands to my head and when I got home that evening, I went to the computer and wrote about it on my xanga.
I would give anything to see that journal entry but I think by the time I had written all my feelings on the situation out, I was so embarrassed that this was a story about my life I deleted the post.
The next day was picture day and all the 8th graders in the band had to take a photo together. Full of shame, I walked toward the group, some sitting and some standing and took my place hoping no one remembered who I was.