Leaving Isn't the Hardest Thing(59)

All those secrets we keep and the lies we tell to keep them rot into shame. That shame isolates us. We’re shaped by our experiences, but when we see those experiences through shame, all those experiences feel like failure. Cults, evangelical Christianity even, teach you that God will break you to re-create you in his image. So they break you. And all you have are the pieces. You patch yourself together. But all you see are the flaws.

The thing about being part of something like a cult is it fills something inside you. You have a reason and a certainty in that reason. You need that purpose because they take everything else, everything that defined you, down to your fucking name. Kind of hard to make friends when you don’t know who the fuck you are.

I didn’t even know where to start. I asked the guidance counselor for guidance. She said I should consider the meatpacking plant and junior college. Gabe told me inspiring stories of entrepreneurs who’d started from nothing, rode the bus to New York, and didn’t give up. We didn’t have Google to search for career options, or how to pay for college when your dad’s investing in Primerica. The Air Force recruiter said I could be a translator. I figured I’d be an airman. I’d have friends, a shared purpose. That’s how it worked in books.

   And it sort of worked. I did have some friends in the Air Force—a roommate who hung out at the basketball courts because basketball shorts reveal the exact size and shape of a dick. She called it window shopping. Then we moved rooms, new roommates, and never spoke again. I didn’t get along with my next roommate. But there were two girls from Idaho down the hall who I hung out with. I was in love with one of them because she challenged me to arm wrestle the first time we met. And she won. Then I was transferred to another training base in Mississippi, traded those friends for a few airmen in my class. We’d drive to New Orleans on weekends, share a shithole motel room where the stamps on the phones said they came from another shithole motel, where we’d lie on our sleeping bags atop the stained sheets. When I transferred to South Carolina, I made friends with the guys in the room next to mine. Then moved off base and made friends with my roommates. Moved again. New house. New friends.

My friendships, if you could call them that, were built on all the depth and intimacy of a fourth-grade relationship that starts and ends with “We sat together at lunch for a week” and lasted about as long. We never stayed up all night talking. I never knew a thing about their hometowns or families. Never told them a damn thing about myself that wasn’t a lie. I couldn’t.

   All my life, friends came and went, or I came and went. When I was younger, there were kids I played with and talked to more than others. But I’d wake up one day and their bunk would be empty, or they’d wake up and find mine empty. We were never allowed to say if we were going and when, certainly not where. Never allowed to say goodbye. Might be why as an adult, I considered acquaintances with the same sense of object permanence as a dog whose squeaky toy is taken away. I’d wonder what happened, and then they’d simply ceased to exist in my mind.

Don’t get me wrong, I desperately fucking wanted the sort of friends everyone else seemed to have. I just didn’t understand how anyone formed those bonds. I wish I could say that it occurred to me maybe the problem was that I was lying to them about everything, that my entire past was fiction, that I’d pretend to know and remember things I didn’t because I was so fucking concerned with fitting in. In fairness, you people do get irrationally mad when someone hasn’t seen Star Wars or E.T. And it’s a little fucking unnerving that a common response to someone whose childhood memories aren’t an exact replica of your own is “What, did you grow up in a cult or something?”

It would’ve been so easy, so many times, to just say yes. But I didn’t know how. I was too fucking ashamed of it.



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My only permanent contemporaries were my siblings. When I was in the Air Force, any three-day weekend at Shaw Air Force Base, I’d drive the fourteen hours up to Massachusetts to see Valerie. I’d pull into her driveway sometime around seven a.m. on a Saturday, knock on one of the kids’ windows to let me in. They’d watch cartoons while I tried to sleep a couple hours. And I’d spend the weekend at the only place, around the only people, I didn’t have to be anyone but me.

   Still, my family rarely talked about the Family. There was one time I can remember, one summer weekend when I was twenty-three or twenty-four. I was bartending at Badlands in D.C. and working on a healthy coke habit. Mikey had just moved up to Massachusetts after college and was bartending at one of those happy hour bar and grills with a random collection of vintage sporting goods nailed to the walls. (Turns out, he was half right about our futures. We’ve both spent years slinging drinks. But he still paints. And I never could stop writing.) Ann had long since left the Family on her own and was waiting tables to put herself through nursing school. Valerie and her husband had just bought their first house, a drafty little ranch with brown shag carpet and a park bench on the front porch.

We were down in the basement, all four of us, sitting on a futon couch, the floor, Valerie’s husband’s computer chair, drinking wine after the kids went to bed. Valerie brought down a photo album she’d swiped from Gabe’s house after our grandma’s funeral. I’d never seen it before. Mom must’ve forgotten it when she left. We started flipping through those old photos and kept grabbing the album from each other. I’d find an old picture from Chile—our sun-bleached hair looking like it’d been cut with a steak knife. I forgot we were blond once.