to stay alive kill your mind; wyatt [day 4]

Age five, learning to spell a name in the only deemed correct I would sometimes happen to forget that there were two t’s instead of one, papers with the word ‘wyat’ scrawled across them like each letter was worth a million dollars. My mother would laugh; my father left in amusement he’d always stick the extra t on the end like it was his job to finish anything that I began. Scrawled in color across the wall he stuck the finishing touch on the name before his voice began to climb in volume like the summit of it all would leave me looking down on a world that could not be touched; only watched.

His voice down the hall I heard my mother stand in my defense for the first and last time, her voice quiet dignity against an anger I’d learn to match before he nailed my coffin shut for the final time. Pencil still in hand I hid behind the corner with my thumb dangling at the corner of my mouth, voice an empty shout I bit down out of shock and had to hide the cry of pain that would otherwise reveal the fall of virtue that came with eavesdropping.

(“Look at this fucking mess—”

“Just child’s play.”)

Age nine, first name followed by middle and the last the sound of it reverberating against hollow walls simply sounding right. Wyatt James O’Connor scrawled across the top left corner of every paper with a sticky grin plastered against the palms—two t’s; two n’s never to be forgotten. My mother made it a habit of asking what my favorite thing was with the changing week, and every time the thought to say myself—pencil lead—blank paper crossed my mind as parts to a whole I could not confess without the negativity of arrogance, yet I never loved myself, only the complacency that those seventeen letters brought about. And at age nine I never really wondered why, but time turned to thought I realized that scrawling Wyatt James O’Connor across the top left of every page was the single way to remind myself of my own existence. For even at age nine, the idea of a fading child and his slowing heart was already a prominent promise.

My mother took the silence in stride, settling for nothing when her peers were settling for muddy hands and drawings to tack on the refrigerator. Instead, we spent evenings across the table, her lips spitting questions I wanted to be too small to answer, yet still in return I gave her the mind of a boy who only wanted to scrawl his name across the top left of every page. So when she asked me what I was, a boy of nine who knew his middle name as well as his first, I started as small as I could.

Silence in stride, my mother knew her son.

(“A boy.”

“What else?”

“I’m nine—almost ten.”

“Who are you?”

“Wyatt James O’Connor.”

“What makes you different?”

“Nothing really.”)

Nothing really I dropped the middle name at age eighteen like it no longer existed. Simply a boy with a tagline that’d be etched upon his tombstone I did not deserve the individuality that was determined in those five letters.

I had heard my named called as death’s distraction on the second day, when the monster in front of us struck at my skin like it had the right to sink its blade where I had never had the courage to—the second step to fixing your child’s problem is action.

My mother had been one to take the silence in stride, but inheritance is accidental and I missed the memo, so I am thankful when the cry of a cannon distracts the silence sitting between myself and Sue Tate, for he rises to stable feet on a body missing sanity and takes the silence in stride, no wishing words for departure I watch his sword trail in the dirt behind him like it mimics the sticky grins and muddy hands of the boys my mother wished would sit across from her at the dinner table.

When faced with nothing and no one my mind has the tendency to shift to the automatic reasoning of the times my mother would stare across at me from the other side of a splintering table and ask me what I loved about myself, the week, the changing seasons. At age nine I would have said blank paper and sharpened lead scratching out the seventeen letters of an existence I had to remind myself of, but now, the answer remains the same as that to which lingers in the air after the questions of separation from a society I did not care for.

Nothing really.

A simple equation left blank by a mother who only gave the solution set I had watched her whittle away at the questions of my existence like chipping away at the pages of the books she left lying on the kitchen counter.

With my departure, I was forced to leave behind blank paper and sharpened led and the meaning of an empty name, and she was left with the same only personified in an empty room and broken windows, white-washed walls reminding her of the time we spent tearing apart the threads of my existence for fun because I saw no humor in placing muddy hands upon the walls to match the sticky grin of humidity and pride.

Now I was left only with bloody hands and an axe handle to match so I scratch my name across the loose dirt at arm’s length like the white-washed walls of my home, taking the silence in stride to the extent that I can manage while wasting the time that passes until nightfall replicating the ninety-six marks that followed pure hatred of a name once spent on the pedestal of reverie.

I scratch ninety-seven for good measure, for the cannon that sounded, and for the missing love of those seventeen letters.