Twelve years old. A hoarder’s den. The air conditioner in the heat of Texas summer is out. The windows are open and there’s no front door to shut anyway. In a delirium I walk through the house to get something cold from the kitchen but the refrigerator was empty. I turn back to go to my room just as a gentle cross breeze hits me. I take another step and the soles of my feet are freezing. Still in that delirium I step up and down and up and down over and over trying to think to myself what could be so nice and cold when it finally dawns on me to simply use my eyes. It was a giant coiled snake. I ran as fast as I could to my mother’s room to tell her and as I jumped onto her bed I saw my foot was bleeding. Had I been bit? Was it venomous? Am I in trouble? My mom won’t take me to the hospital and I can’t drive. There’s no working phone, but 911 doesn’t come to us so rural anyway. Am I going to die? And wouldn’t that make my family happy? My mom could be a martyr and everyone else along with her would be rid of me as they all express wanting.
I had, it turned out, cut my foot on a nail sticking out of something in that mess of a hoarder’s house as I ran as fast as I could from what turned out to be a snake so long there it had died in a mouse glue trap. But in that moment I realized just how insignificant and unloved I was. How insignificant and unloved I could always be. That snake ate up years of abuse and let me go cold. It wasn’t until a therapist wanted to dig at my phobia of snakes that decades of suppressed traumas spewed out of me and made me the unstable mess I still am today. That shit was repressed good!
thebadgerspath.com 