Squamish

The mostly dark town of Squamish in the eyes of a 7, 8 year old.

Childhood trauma, drama reigns supreme in this case, and my memories are muddy, blurred or missing. I do not pretend to believe that my memories are true, as they could very well be fictional answers to the unanswerable. A child's mind creating fantasy for the sake of protecting itself.

I know that I acted out though, I remember clearly doing things I could not even speak of now.

But part of me wants to console the child left behind, at the skating rink, in her skates to tight her feet were numb. I want to cradle the child that packed a backpack with snacks and left to find a new home, only to become terrified at the edge of the trailer park. I want to stop the child that tried to light the couch on fire. So very badly I want to comb her hair and feed her. Cover her ears from the screaming, the crying.

I didn't take her pills, why would I? She is frantic, racing about, emptying drawers, her purse lay strewn across the dinner table. In my face again, her face is turning red, she is angry with me. Phone calls, the day turns to dusk and she is spent. Where are my pills, Shanna-Marie? I wish I had an answer for her, so that she would let me be. She only needs me when something has gone horribly wrong. I sense her fear. Enter the male. Thin and angry and smelling like Rye Whiskey. It's his turn to interrogate me. A harsh cold slap across my slim little face. It burns from his rough skin. They are always the enemy.

A few years later I would have taken her precious pills, and eaten them all. For now though, this child, is lost and unable to provide an answer.

The smell of booze, the smell of the carpets in a bar where smoking is permitted. I remember the smell so well, as a lot of my childhood was spent circling the bar. My mother, the cook, could slip in and out of the bar, stuff me in a corner. I would draw pictures for the customers, eat greasy fries. Always in my own world where darkness reigned and sunlight came from the occasional stranger or when my brother came to town.

My brother. So animated! He told me stories, joke, took me everywhere. He was brilliant, funny and sang beautifully. I remember driving with him everywhere. He saved me. He may not have known at the time that I absorbed his darkness. I learned that my deep insides of horror were normal and felt by all. He cried too, I remember, the night that he arrived at the hospital to gaze down at our critically beaten mother. His sobs, his body shaking. The dried blood and ambulance lights. What came next is blank for me.

I remember the dog bite, clean through my hand. Like most of the time, I was uncared for, roaming free like a wild thing. A German Sheppard snapped and caught the soft part between my index finger and my thumb. My hand swelled up and ached. I needed tetanus, a metallic taste in my mouth.

I remember many of the different townhouses along our complex, as I must have straggled into most of them. The stifling heat inside the valley of mountains. The neglect.

The train would cross town on two ends blocking traffic in or out of the city centre for what seemed like hours to a young girl. I would sit in the gloom of the backseat of the New Yorker, without proper windows to open, watching smoke curl from the mustache of my step-father.

Children should be seen and not heard. I was neither.