Learning to Cry

by Christopher C. Payne

  In prison you no longer have to choose what to eat, what to wear, what activities you will do or anything for that matter. All your choices are made for you. Your schedule is laid out. There is no need to make a decision. Isn’t life simpler that way? No choices. You don’t have to pick between your mom and your dad. You don’t have to figure out who was wrong in the latest fight between your two sisters. You didn’t have to decide where to go to school. There is nothing in prison that is really your concern. Just keep following the little yellow line that has been given to you, and you will go through each day ready to face the next.

  One day after another on an endless path to death. Death was really the only thing to look forward to. It was the only thing that every human shared. In the end, death was the only commonality that bonded humanity. All of these lonely people, leading separate lives, feeling isolated until death unites us in our common bond. It might sound a little morbid, but wasn’t it true? At times Melissa wondered what the point was. Why go through all of these trials. Why not hasten the inevitable, grasp the hand of God as her own, and take charge. Wasn’t it the one decision that she could make by herself, no parental influence?

  She and her dad had dinner that night just the two of them. They ordered pizza and while he had a beer, she drank some soda. He didn’t drink every night, but often enough that Melissa thought about the connection. She wished he would treat her like an adult and let her drink, as well. What would it be like to get ripped with her dad? Would it be strange or in some way help them connect on a new level? She probably drank more than he did at this point. The only difficulty was finding somebody who could get her the alcohol.

  They sat next to each other that evening. She snuggled with him for the first time in what seemed like years. It was nice watching TV being held in his arms. Again, the feeling of being secure washed over her like a calming blanket. She so much wished things could just go back to the way they were. Her parents fought so much. They yelled and screamed, and their home wasn’t always a fun place to be, but he was always there. He was always with her. If she ever stumbled and needed help she always knew he was at home, waiting to wrap his arms around her and make things better.

  The rest of the week was interesting for Melissa. She got acclimated to her new environment, figured out her schedule, and met a couple of new kids. They were teaching her the basics of how to ditch class and where and when she could find a joint. It doesn’t matter what you say about standards, test scores, football teams, extracurricular activities, all schools are the same. Kids are all alone in life with nothing left to connect them. Only a little green herbal substance wrapped securely in a tight thin white sheet of rolling paper held them together.

  Father

  What is a jail cell? I have thought about this a lot lately. What does it mean to be confined? Are we all not confined in some way or another? Are we all not locked into some form of personal hell that we have spent our entire lives building? Does a jail cell have to be four concrete walls or can it be our friends, our family, our co-workers? I remember those first few days of school when my daughter began her new journey, and I can’t remember her ever being happier. It was like I had my little girl back for a few nights.

  Little did I know this would be the beginning of the end. The path was already defined, and yet we trudged onward in a veil of clouded hope. Hope is a satanic word. Once you have to use the word you are already lost. If you lose control of a situation, you hope. If you find yourself lost, you hope you can figure out how to get home. Hope is the one word in the dictionary that should be as close to death as you might find.

  Melissa

  I spend my sleepless nights awake

  Contemplating which direction to take

  My choices were made so long ago

  I now realize I had lost my soul

  Where was my beacon of promised light

  My parents were too busy in a fight

  Maybe if I could find some rope

  With death might be my only HOPE

  Living with Dad full time

  Melissa

  Parents are not really stupid, Melissa thought to herself. Still, it shouldn’t be this easy. When you open a puzzle box for the first time, there are clues right up front on how difficult the task might be. If the box says it is 1,500 pieces and has subtle coloring schemes it might be monumental. If the box states it has 10 pieces, and they are very large then… surely, you get the hint. Melissa was tired of flipping back and forth from house to house. She never felt very close to her mother, and enough was enough. She was now in the process of asking her dad if she could live with him full time.

  She didn’t lie to him, but in the end, what is the definition of lying? She reflected back on her issues with honesty and deep down felt there were ways to get around telling the truth without actually lying. Maybe she should run for office someday. She wasn’t sure what running for office actually meant, but her parents were constantly saying how all politicians lie. She wondered if they started out the same as her. Lying to their parents, sifting through the facts, eliminating what was not relevant to a specific point being made. Lying was all in the semantics of how you presented the data.

  Currently her dad and mother hated each other. They were constantly sending e-mails back and forth, calling each other names, telling each other things that were just flat-out crazy. Jesus, they were getting to the point of saying and doing things that even she felt was out of line. It seemed like the prime opportunity to approach her father and ask the question. Why couldn’t she live with him full time? She was done with her mother, had always felt more comfortable with her father, and they both hated her mother equally, right?

  She had felt this discussion might be a little more difficult than what it ended up being in reality. Maybe when you open that puzzle box, and it states it is difficult, you have to keep an open mind to being surprised. Melissa had her ducks all lined up. Her case was simple. Her mother walked around most of the time with a glass of wine in her hand. She didn’t know for sure, but with her mother’s glazed eyes and slurred speech, she seemed to be boarding on alcoholism. She was constantly in a bad mood. Screaming at all three kids, blaming Melissa for all her problems, and most of the time she wasn’t even home.

  She was out with her friends or with one of her boyfriends, and Melissa’s primary job was babysitting. She talked to her mother more at her father’s house than she did when she was home. Her mother was just never around. She had prepared her speech, effectively presented her case, and watched as her dad acknowledged the facts as they were presented. He agreed with her. He hated her mother, and when you harbor such ill feelings toward somebody, it is natural to believe the worst. After all, Melissa had now learned, when you splatter enough truth mixed in with a lie, the blurry details that accompany what you are presenting seem a little clearer than they otherwise might.

  Additionally, Burlingame High School was so close to her dad’s house. She could walk back and forth to school. She could walk to her grandparents’ house after school. She was much more in control of her activities, and this would allow her that much more time to study. Not that Melissa had any intention of spending one more second in a book than she had to. But again, the paint-by-number picture was sitting on the easel, just waiting for her brushstroke. If the No. 2 is crimson red, then fill in the space with crimson red. If the No. 8 is purple, then fill in the space with purple. Her dad wanted to believe the worst of her mother, all Melissa was doing was giving him what he needed.

  So with the wheels in motion and only three weeks into the New Year, she packed her bags and moved in with her dad. It wasn’t official yet, but what could her mother do? Moving wasn’t easy, and as expected it was a fun-filled extravaganza in the gloomy depressed house her mother called home. It went from crying to screaming to crying to screaming so many times that she had lost count. Her dad waited down in the driveway as she packed her clothes. She wasn’t sure if he was scared to come in or he thought it was t
he right thing to do, giving her mother some space. At one point it almost came to a physical altercation which would actually have been fine with Melissa. She calculated in her mind how she could potentially use that against her mother, but the situation dissipated, and everyone reverted back to screaming.

  By everyone, she meant everyone. Her youngest sister was crying, Amelia was screaming at her, along with her mother, and crying, as well. It was like World War III had erupted, and everyone was picking sides between the two powerhouses calling the shots. Divorce has a way of dividing a family. Friends pick sides, family picks sides, kids pick sides. It is much more than a division between two people. It rips the foundation apart of everyone and anyone who is close to the two individuals splitting up. Melissa was picking her side. She had spent a few months with her mother, and she was now done with that. She was ready to spend some time with her father and see what was in store for her there.

  It was also the week her two little sisters were going with their dad, as well so all three made it down to the SUV and climbed in. It was a franticly loud entrance as the crying didn’t stop for several minutes into the trip back to their little home in Burlingame. Her dad had set up a huge TV in her room, given her a DVR cable box, and she was ready to shed her shackles from the tyrannical grip her mother had chained her down with the last few months.

  She had always been as much of a friend with her dad as a daughter. They hung out together and shared a lot of the same interests. She didn’t want to tell him that she also enjoyed a drink now and then as much as he did. He was a friend to her but even he had limitations. Today was the first day of a new life. She was in a new school, meeting new people and now had a permanent residence to call home. It might not be the best home she had ever lived in, but it was home just the same.

  In the first few weeks of school she met Rachel. Rachel lived in an apartment building on Rollins Street not far from the campus. While most of Burlingame High School was the privileged select, there were a fair share of lower-income families who lived in the recently built apartment complexes. Rachel had an older brother, was a sophomore, and had a plentiful supply of pot. Her brother was something of a dealer, and he allowed his little sister to pass along some of his stock at times. She didn’t mind, and it made it easier for him to get the stuff inside high school grounds. He had been kicked out of school a few years back, but now that he was 20, it didn’t really matter.

  Melissa periodically wondered if she was attracted to the druggy crowd or if the druggy crowd was attracted to her. The two seemed to be drawn together like little magnets sticking to the refrigerator. It almost seemed that no matter what choices you make in life, everyone is on a preprogrammed path. Destiny is mapped out long before anyone is even born. It reminded her of those movies, “Final Destination” where the kids all escaped a near-death experience, only to die shortly thereafter. If it is your time to die, you will die. If it is your destiny to smoke pot you will smoke pot.

  Does this mean if you are tracked from birth to be an alcoholic you really have no choice? If you are prone to doing drugs, then at some point in your life you will do drugs? Are we all left with no free will, or is our free will simply masked by the preordained choices we already know we will make?

  She began wondering what the point of life was anyway. If the choices you were going to make on today’s test were already known, then why take the test? If you didn’t even take the test, was it known beforehand that your test would not be taken?

  She was sitting in English class, contemplating chaos when out of the background she heard her name being called. Jesus, wouldn’t her teacher leave her alone? She made a feeble attempt at answering the question, but she hadn’t read the assignment the night before and really had no idea what the hell he was talking about. Homer Simpson might be the only Homer she knew of in real life, and she didn’t feel this would get her very far along the grading scale curve. Only a few weeks in and she already felt herself slipping down the path of self-destruction. God, she hated school.

  Her English teacher just wasn’t going to let up though. He continued pressing her, and it was now making her, as well as the rest of the class, uncomfortable. Finally, she had enough. She gathered her stuff and headed off to the bathroom. What the hell is the problem with some teachers? Can’t they just let her be? If she had done the assigned reading she would have answered his damn question, but she had not. No amount of badgering can inject the knowledge into your head if it is not there. You are either capable of answering the question or you are not.

  She entered the stall, hung her backpack on the hook bolted squarely in the middle of the door, sat down on the toilet and started crying. God, she just wanted out. She wasn’t even sure what she wanted out of, but she knew she wanted out. It was too much. Parents battling, school, homework, friends, drugs, drinking: where was it going? The walls of the stall felt like they were closing in. Is it possible to be inside of a garbage compactor and live your whole life on the verge of suffocation. She was having trouble catching her breath, and her heart was beating too fast. She felt herself banging on both walls with her open hands as she pounded and pounded, but nothing seemed to make it stop.

  Then the voices came.

  When Melissa was little, possibly 8 or 9, she attended her first sleepover. Lilly was her good friend at the time, and it was Lilly’s party. There were six of them all together. Birthday parties when you are young are mostly the same. There was pizza, a birthday cake, some games and DVD. Sitting at home watching a movie as an 8 year old has evolved so much over time. The screens are now huge, and the sound systems can rival that of most theaters. It seems the theaters continue to shrink, and television continues to expand. At some point they will merge, and we won’t have any need to venture out of the house.

  The girls began the nightly ritual of getting ready for bed, after having enjoyed a few hours of fun-filled activities. They donned their nightgowns or sweats, brushed their teeth,and dutifully unrolled their sleeping bags. It was such a treat to sleep on the floor in the living room. When she was little, she used to wonder why grown-ups didn’t prop their beds right in the middle of family room and never leave. Better yet, why even use the bed? Just drop right on the floor.

  As always the jockeying for position occurs with who is sleeping by whom and what person gets to lie next to the birthday girl. Sleeping next to the hostess is always the biggest treat. Melissa was chosen for this on several occasions, but that night it just wasn’t meant to be. She wasn’t as close to Lilly as most of the girls. Not to worry. Her good friends were there, and they were all still very close. They snuggled up and after a couple hours of mandatory conversation, one by one they dozed off. Melissa’s eyes closed, and she drifted off somewhere in the middle of the pack. Not the first to pass out, and not the last one standing either.

  In the midst of her slumbering, she awoke rather suddenly. It is always such a strange feeling, waking up someplace other than your bedroom. You are disoriented, and it takes you a while to gather your senses. As a child, the sense of safety is so important. Maybe that is why it is so hard for some kids to spend the night at a young age. The scariest thing in life is the feeling of abandonment. Being alone and helpless. Pushed into a dark corner not understanding who might be next to you or what might be happening.

  Melissa awoke, and that was when she heard the voices. At first she thought maybe the girls were talking next to her, but everyone was asleep. A soft whispering that seemed to be all around her and, yet, wasn’t anywhere at all. The voices were just talking, not really directing her to do anything but more like a conversation. Her head was exploding with pain, as well. It was a searing sharp constriction as her head felt like it was imploding. She wanted to cry but was unable to get any noise emitted from her mouth. Who were these people? Where were they?

  Melissa’s grandfather had sold Electrolux vacuum cleaners when he was younger. He no longer did this, but for a short time period, before she was born, he sold them
door-to-door. One time when she was visiting, he told her a story about the demonstrations they did within the house to sell them. They would take the vacuum cleaner, strip the blankets and sheets off of a bed and vacuum the mattress. Sounded like an odd thing to do, and she didn’t understand why.

  To prove his point he grabbed the vacuum he had in the closet and after hooking it up, stripped the guest bed where she had slept the night before. He ran the contraption across the bare surface several times. Before doing so, he had emptied the bag completely. When he was finished he held up the bag for her to see, and it was 25 percent full of dirt. OMG, where did that stuff come from? Her grandfather was just smiling. He said that one always got them. Side-by-side, an Electrolux could suck more dirt out of a bed than any other vacuum. There was no match. Since most people don’t vacuum their mattress, they have no idea how much dirt resides in the very bed in which they sleep. No wonder bed bugs congregate there.

  As she sat in the middle of all the sleeping girls, she remembered this story since it felt like somebody was putting the hose to the end of her mouth and had the power on full. She couldn’t catch her breath, she couldn’t speak. The pain constricting around her temple was mind numbingly harsh. The scariest thing was these people. The talking continued. Not anything important, but they just shouldn’t be there. What were they trying to tell her?