Violet

one

Imagine a small child standing in an empty kitchen. Her hair is in a mess, and she's wearing her fathers old shirt that falls down to her knees. She's watching her father tear the couch cushions apart in the next room, searching helplessly for any loose change, any pennies, nickels or dimes, anything he might be able to pocket. His expression is desperate, pleading into the hollowness of their home, their empty walls, their empty wallets. Their stomachs are empty as well-- they've eaten nothing but white rice for four days now.

It's her ninth birthday today. Her father wants to buy cupcakes to celebrate.

In this moment, she remembers feeling like paper. She remembers the crushing weight of poverty, the pain of having the freedom to decide their own fate stripped away, bill by bill. Money doesn't buy happiness, but it does buy freedom. Her father can't finish college anymore, it's too expensive and his children are starving. She remembers hating the world for making her father feel this way, hating the very air she breathes when she notices tears in his eyes. He thinks he hides them well, but she sees. And she remembers feeling small. Very small.

That girl was me.

I was introduced to desperation very early in life. My father fought tirelessly to keep me and my little sister living in a good neighborhood with good schools. He would work multiple jobs at once, leaving before we woke up and coming home hours after we had fallen asleep. At school my classmates would judge me mercilessly on my worn sneakers and out of fashion t-shirts. My jeans would always be a little too short because I'd outgrow them before we had the funds to buy another pair. They'd reveal my bony ankles, making me feel naked and isolated and terrifyingly vulnerable in the eyes of my peers.

"They look at me and they laugh," I told my father once, sitting on the floor with a book opened and abandoned beside me.

He sighed and looked at the ceiling for a very long time. I noticed the bags under his eyes were growing in their faint purple color.

"People often resort to aggression when they see something they don't understand. It's just human nature."

I nodded, but I didn't really know what he meant until years later. For a long time, I hated my peers the same way they hated me because I, too, couldn't understand. I couldn't understand how they could be so cruel in their judgements over such mundane things-- an old backpack, misaligned teeth, a bad haircut-- aren't there more important things to not like about a person? I couldn't understand why a backpack mattered so much, because the family I was born into never gave me the luxury of worrying about something so simple. I had other problems to deal with. The monsters under my bed were real.

But I'll get into that later.