Finding Proportion

I was merely six yet already an impassive witness to a life that had proceeded as if I were merely part of the scenery. The credo I imbibed was bleak and clear: to be visible but not vocal, and often not even the former.

It was under the strict supervision of my grandparents that I existed — a target for their disillusionments and beatings rather than an entity worthy of affection. Their displeasure had little to do with me and everything to do with themselves. Their failed ambitions and unrealized potential all found a resting place on me. As for my father, a failure in their eyes, and my mother — well, she was “open to any man’s advances,” or so my grandmother would bitterly pronounce. I am thankful I was too young to decode her innuendos.

Lonely is a different word. Loneliness implies an alternative, a parallel life filled with companionship and warmth I could have had. My reality contained no such duality.

A goldfish swimming listlessly in a transparent bowl for a time. It’s an appropriate analogy for my upbringing — clear boundaries but insurmountable, perceptible, yet infinitely distant. My grandparents, custodians by necessity but jailers in practice, peddled criticism and blame as if these were commodities more valuable than kindness. I was resented and disliked. “The grandchild.”

My parents? They were players in an entirely different narrative, a complicated story without space for me. I was an appendage to their plot, a detail to be overlooked, a sentence never completed. The words “Shut…