What We Choose to Remember
this is not a protest. this is an invocation
What does a child do when love feels like a trap? When “I love you” hides behind raised voices, disappearing faces, and footsteps that signal danger more than comfort?
You don’t run. You shrink.
You don’t cry. You memorize.
The mask I wore first wasn’t fabric. It was silence. A practiced smile. A stillness so precise it could pass for obedience.
I remember brushing my teeth at the hallway mirror. I was eight. I looked into my own eyes and wondered: Am I allowed to feel this? My chest ached with something heavy and hot. I didn’t know the word for dread, but my body knew. Down the hall, her footsteps ticked like a countdown.
She could be soft. For a moment. Then suddenly, she’d snap—rage without warning, words like knives dipped in sugar. “You’re just like your father,” she’d hiss, and I’d shrink further. Was that bad? I never met him unfiltered. Only through her rage.
But here's the thing: I still wanted her to love me. I still longed for her arms to be a refuge instead of a trap. That contradiction—needing safety from the one who shattered it—burrowed into my bones. I flinched at her voice and ached for her approval in the same breath.
So I learned: don’t speak too loudly. Don’t laugh too hard. Don’t win. Don’t lose. Don’t exist in ways she can’t control.
At school, I mirrored other kids the way she mirrored reality—strategically. I figured out who they wanted me to be and tried to become it. Not out of deceit, but survival.
But the only time I felt real—really real—was when I was alone in the woods behind the apartment complex. No voices. No eyes. Just the hush of pine needles underfoot and the creek mumbling secrets no one else could hear.
There was another time, too. On the playground at school—his supposed sanctuary. One day, after she'd hurt him again, he couldn’t face her smile, couldn’t bear the teacher's concern, so he slipped away. Not far, just out of sight. He had watched how shadows stretched in the morning, how the sun lit some corners but not others. He had planned his escape routes like blueprints in his head.
While they searched, he stayed curled behind the dumpster, knees pressed to chest, silent as snowfall. They called his name. She called his name. But her voice didn’t sound like love—it sounded like the echo of everything he couldn't say. That tone that always bent toward blame.
He didn’t come out until the bell rang.
He wasn’t trying to scare them. He was surviving.
The teachers said he was clever. Independent. Good at quiet play.
But he was ghosting himself—already perfecting the vanishing act. Learning how to disappear in plain sight. Not because he wanted to—but because sometimes being seen was the most dangerous thing of all.
I'd build stick forts and talk to birds like they were old friends. Sometimes I cried there, and nothing interrupted me. The trees didn’t tell me I was overreacting. The moss didn’t make me question my own memories. I could feel what I felt, and not be told it was something else.
It was the only place I didn’t need a mask. Not yet.
There was another sanctuary, quieter still—his small bedroom with the yellow cassette player. He’d curl up on the carpet, knees tucked to chest, pressing rewind over and over on one song: Puff the Magic Dragon.
Jackie Paper came, and then he didn’t. And even as a child, I knew—somewhere inside myself—that the magic doesn’t stay. That joy leaves. That growing up means losing something no one will help you name.
Was it a sad song? Maybe not for everyone. But to me, it felt like a funeral wrapped in rhyme. A lullaby for the boy I was already leaving behind.
Years later, I’d learn to call it growing up too fast. Being given jobs no kid should have. Holding someone else's emotions like they were mine to fix. But back then, it was just me and Puff, drifting through a world where dragons were safer than mothers.
I didn’t cry because the song was sad. I cried because someone else had written it—because someone else must have felt it, too.
Eventually, he crafted a new mask—black, hard-edged, matte. Protest gear, at first. Then a shield. Then a declaration: You don’t get to see me unless I say so.
That’s the voice I speak with now. Older, wary, watching. The boy is still here, tucked somewhere beneath it all. But I wear this voice because it survived when he couldn’t. And sometimes I wonder—how many masks did I build before I realized I was trying to become invisible on purpose?
What happens to a boy whose reality is questioned and co-opted before he even forms his own?