There’s something about small dark places that comfort me. Maybe it subconsciously reminds me of the womb, or the space beneath my bunk bed where I went when I was a little kid. I remember sliding underneath my bunk bed; my small skinny fingers gripping the brown wood that was about the same color as my skin, in order to slide, feet first, into that comforting darkness. It wasn’t so much a hiding place, as a place to get away, because everyone knew where I was, as they would often say “Go get her from under the bed.” The bed that I often laid underneath was shared by me and my sister, and the top bunk was inhabited by my other sister. In total, five girls shared that room, all of which were many years older than me, and at the time I didn’t see anything wrong with that.
I couldn’t turn over on my sides; there was only enough room to lay flat on my back or flat on my stomach. Since two sides of the bed were pushed flush into a corner, there only remained two other sides that were open. The longer side was lined with my sister’s shoeboxes that she anally kept in a straight line, and the shorter side was how I got in and out of my not-so-secret hiding place. I spent a lot of time staring at the dusty underneath of our wooden bed, mentally counting down the years in which I would be as old as my sisters so that I could move out. Usually I would slide underneath there when my father came home, in order to hide from the yelling and the cursing. He would come home and unload everything—all of his anger from the shortcomings that he was faced with in his life—on the frail backs of his children. Afterwards, mentally bruised and beaten, my older sisters would come back into our room and vent to one another, and speak in hushed tones of making it out of the house to a better life. And as I would lie there, my hands linked lying on my stomach, I quieted the urge to ask them to vent to me, to let me understand. They seemed to me at the time as an entity, My Sisters, all the same and all-wise and knowing. I didn’t know them individually, and I couldn’t understand why they wouldn’t tell me things, because I would most definitely understand.
The day that I finally felt that I could get closer to my sisters was when I found one of their diaries. It was small, green, and fuzzy, and every aspect of it attracted me to it. It was hidden in one of the shoe boxes that my sister, Stacey, kept in a straight line.
