Monstera

Preface

A house is a living thing. Its walls are as permeable as skin, absorbing and holding the love, the laughter, the tears, the secrets, the fights, the mistakes, and the sacrifices of all those who have stepped inside it. A house is the most forgiving of all living things, still providing us with strength and shelter, no matter what we have done to it, or to each other. No matter what we may or may not deserve. A house stands silently and without judgment, knowing all, yet saying nothing. It can be torn down, but it can never walk away.

When one family leaves a house and another enters, they are made aware of its faults. Maybe it fights to retain warmth during the cold winter months. Maybe it becomes as stifling as a greenhouse in the summertime. But there is no disclosure of the real faults it holds. The abuse, in all its forms. The crippling weight of all the crimes it has shouldered for its inhabitants. Perhaps houses become more vulnerable as they age because we wear them down. Perhaps we destroy their hopeful spirits with our constant transgressions.

She is Pot-Bound

Carried inside and carefully placed,

Intrigued, scared, yet hopeful.

Attempting to grow beyond the space provided,

Soon to be punished for flourishing.

Twisted and uncomfortable,

Far too big for her surroundings.

She is pot-bound, kept wound, and wilting,

Praying equally for death and survival.

Roots so densely matted and intertwined,

She’s become her own self-made prison.

Having paled as she’s waited patiently,

To be either cared for, or set free.

But freedom only comes through ruthlessness,

A violence to her already tortured roots.

An abrupt and emotionless splitting apart,

A breaking open of all she’s made from.

Only then, at the site of her wounds,

Can she begin to repair herself and grow again.

She braces herself for what’s to come,

Longing to find herself on the other side of it.

Quickly, under the glow of the full moon,

Into the rich soil waiting to feed her.

She reaches up to meet her new baptism,

A rain of apologies for what she’s endured.

She carries on, smiling and without confinement,

Stretching and sighing with relief.

Soon her health returns, so that she may flourish again,

And be looked upon with more nurturing eyes.

Part One: Savannah’s Story

The only reason I knew it was four in the morning was because I heard my stepfather’s clock radio click on. Its tinny sound echoed through the walls and registers, and could be heard, at some level, in any room of the house. That pretty much summed up who my stepfather was…loud, domineering, and not the slightest bit concerned with how he affected others. I laid there, face-down in my bed, in the dark, not sure if I was half asleep or half dead. I couldn’t be sure how long I’d been laying there like that. The only way I knew that a new day was beginning was by the clunky turning over of that clock radio, every morning at four.

oh, let it rock, let it roll

let the bible belt come and save my soul

holdin’ on to sixteen as long as you can

change is coming ‘round real soon

make us women and men

oh yeah, life goes on, long after the thrill of living is gone

My body was being jerked up and down repeatedly, as if I had fallen down in a bounce house and the other children just kept jumping all around me. I couldn’t stand up, and I couldn’t make it stop. Pins and needles covered every inch of me; my entire body was falling asleep, one section at a time. My ears began to ring. I felt intense pain down the length of my spine as the spirit tore away from my body, like Velcro.

And then, there was nothingness.

Chapel Hill, North Carolina

1983

My mom promised me, when she first broke the news to me that she was going to marry her boyfriend, Dan, that things were about to get better for us. They didn’t.

I was just three months old when my dad died. He was in a car accident. Well, sort of. He pulled over to help a woman change her flat tire during a heavy rainstorm; he got hit by a driver who took the curve too fast and didn’t see him crouched down along the shoulder of the road. According to my mom, he was always doing things like that; helping people when they needed it most. When no one else could be bothered to. She told me she was kind of a troublemaker before she met him, and that he changed her. He was good for her. He was good for everyone, it seemed. I wish I’d had the chance to know him for myself, instead of just my mom’s stories. She had a way of seeing what she wanted to see, and remembering a version of the truth that better served her.

I loved my mom more than anything else in the world, but I hated how weak she was when it came to men. She never stayed single for very long, but when she was, we had so much fun together. We slept in on the weekends, lived on take-out and junk food, and watched a lot of romantic comedies. Life with my mom was like a never-ending slumber party at your best friend’s house. One of our favorite things to do together was to get coffee on Saturday afternoons and take a walk through the secondhand stores. Our apartment was warm and cheerful, filled with thrift store finds, mostly from the 60s and 70s; things that made us happy, things that comforted us, and things that made us laugh. I could look around our apartment at every single item and recall where we found it, what it cost, and why we chose it. Unfortunately, the same could not be said for the men my mother chose to date.

There seemed to be no rhyme or reason to who she was with. No type, no list of must-haves, no definite deal-breakers. He didn’t even have to have a job, reliable transportation of his own, or a clean record. If he was interested in her, she was interested back. My theory was that, while she was always looking for love, she never truly believed she’d find it again. When your first love is also your true love, she always said, there’s really no outdoing that. Granted, I only had my mother’s biased opinion to go by, but my dad seemed to have left some pretty big shoes to fill. Despite the significant size of Dan Davis’s ego, I could only assume he had some of the male gender’s smallest feet.

It used to be my mom and me against the world. As soon as the ink was dry on their marriage license, it became just my mom and Dan. Instead of her trying to talk me into tolerating whoever she was with at the time, she was