pretty much any authority. Because of this, he was cursed by Zeus and doomed to forever roll a huge, heavy boulder up a hill. I mean forever. When he got to the top, instead of rejoicing in his achievement, or sitting down for a rest, he had to immediately roll the rock back down and then heave it up the hill again. It never stopped. He never finished his task. For all eternity.
To me, the tragedy isn’t that he was doomed to labour up and down this crappy hill. It’s that he got no false hope along the way.
False hope is a blessing. It keeps us alive.
And so, when I open the door to my apartment, I’m Syphilis.
Sometimes a door is just a door. Other times a door is the partition between two things. Like a past and a future. A good choice and a mistake. Your life now and your life after. Thing is, with a door, you pretty much have to walk through it. You pretty much don’t have a choice. You could walk on by, but that’s useless if the intent is to get to the other side.
When I open the door, on the other side is the rest of my life. In the living room, seated around a surprisingly clean coffee table, is my Children’s Aid Society social worker, my probation officer, my mother, and her hippie flower child best friend, Crystal. It’s been two days since the cops brought me home in the cruiser that night, waking my mom up, explaining to her that they found me with two girls who had stolen goods in their possession. They had taken Jasmyn and Ally to the detention centre, but charged me with break and enter and drove me home since I didn’t have anything on me.
“Melissa?”
Which one said it? Lately, all four of their voices have blurred into one. And even though I’ve sobered up, I’m still dopey after those days of partying.
My heart races.
Turn and run. Turn and run. Turn and run.
“We need to talk to you.”
And so, just like that, I am moving into a group home. My mother can no longer control my behaviour. It is dangerous to have a sixteen-year-old girl AWOL all weekend, spending nights in strange guys’ apartments, doing drugs, and exposing herself to other potentially harmful experiences. And since my break and enter charge and my school suspension, there seems to be no hope left for me.
“Is this about something else?” I ask suspiciously.
“About what?” Sue, my CAS social worker, asks, her head cocked like a hawk hearing the faint squeak of a mouse miles away. “A charge? A suspension? What else could there possibly be?”
I figure they must know about Michael. A twenty-eightyear-old boyfriend can’t be kept a secret forever, even if it is legal since I turned sixteen. Jessica must have blabbed at some point. Or perhaps they read my journal. The discovery would be just cause for panic, even if we did just break up.
“Is there something you should tell us?” Sue persists.
Relief. They don’t know. “No.”
“We gave you lots of warnings, Melissa,” says Julie, the probation officer, a youngish woman who barely knows me. “You knew this was coming.”
They are right about that. Syphilis knew it was coming. So she kept doing what she always did. Rolling the rock.
Up. Up. Up.
She kept rolling because she was cursed to do this forever. And hope? That after this crest there will be relief? Life will be better? She would be happy? Why attempt to change when you know the next step is just to roll the rock back up again?
“Yeah … I knew it was coming,” Echo repeats. I look at my mother, who sits with her head buried under her hands. She can’t even look me in the eye. Truth is, I want to go. I don’t want to live here anymore. I don’t want to deal with my mother’s bullshit boyfriends and mood problems. I want my own life. And really, what can I do? Ask to leave my mother? Ask someone to stop her from destroying my life? You can’t ask for that without a gut-wrenching knife ripping open your soul, the guilt oozing out, the stain of mother abandonment forever on your skin. I don’t want to be like psycho Lady Macbeth, wringing her hands and mumbling to herself in dark corners, for the rest of my life.
No. You can’t ask to leave your mother. It must be forced upon you.