Soliloquies Anthology 30.1

by Hannah Prisco

I was born in a city at the break of the New Year. Three years later, we left for a suburb by the lake. My parents fell in love with the park that bordered the water. They were compelled by the quiet, by the vacancy. They saw a life where they could raise me with a kind of consistency neither of them were lucky enough to have as children. Not long after, their love went its separate ways and five feet between rooms became five blocks between doors. It wasn’t scarring, it doesn’t haunt me. I stayed true to myself; loud, somewhat humble, absolutely hilarious to myself and a select few people that had the patience for such energy. I realized at a young age that I’d been tragically cheated by not being born in Hollywood where I could have put my incredible, pathological lying skills to good use. But I made it work, because though I was an only child, every stranger got a different story of siblings I didn’t have and places I’d never lived. My hairdresser thought I was one of five kids and my friends in the after-school program thought I was born in Germany and spoke three languages. It wasn’t a yearning to belong so much as a call to entertain. 

I was a dancer by six, a cheerleader by nine and I had dreams of cheering for the Dallas Cowboys, my father’s favourite team. I wanted to be one of those girls long before the rest of the world did. I wasn’t flexible and it took me a year to achieve my backwalkover, but I dreamt hard and my mother ingrained in me that dreaming has and will never be something to be ashamed of. 

I knew how to talk to people, I was reliable in conversation. I could mold, I could shapeshift. It was never in vain and I never thought of myself as anything but an outgoing kid. Inevitably, I grew, I changed, and I began to challenge my place. 

That challenge was met one fine morning in January of a year that has no relevance anymore. I was no longer a cheerleader. I never would be again. I was no longer loud, nor was I a child anymore. But a case, a study. An x-ray on a board stared at by the most elite brains. 

The intense sense of self I’d once had crept out and disappeared. Some told me that was just life. Some said, though when I can’t remember, this was what I’d signed up for: To break so immaculately, that there was no physical way to put me back together as I was before. 

My town stayed the same. That park by the lake never changed. But I could not recognize it anymore. When I returned home many weeks later, I was new. I sounded the same and I wasn’t sad, but I felt it inside. My voice didn’t feel so strong, I felt foreign in the only place I’d ever known. The loud turned unsure. The hustle and bustle in my brain quit, forced into an indefinite stillness. I never told another lie. 

I started again. I re-learned where I lived, how to speak at a volume everyone could hear, how to love a home where I could no longer be the girl it taught me to be. How to walk on legs that had betrayed me. My mother got to watch her daughter take her first steps twice in one lifetime. 

And through it, as I chipped away at the rock, impatiently waiting for it to break, the lights of the stage found their way back to me. Slowly, and by happenstance. This time, though, I was not dancing or cheering. I was playing pretend.

I have been, in my short life, a von Trapp child, a student of rock, an acrobat, an ogre, a baker’s wife, a hairdresser from Ireland. I found pieces of myself in every character I played and on that stage, blinded by those lights and lit by those eyes, I was nobody and somebody all at once. I was a liar and an honest woman in one.

Somewhere along the way, I made it to high school. I grew, no matter how hard I tried to stop it. It felt like the stage was the only place where, ironically, I was most myself. 

Day to day, month to month, I spent my hours with the same four girls. Together, we fell apart and came back to life. We didn’t party, not a lot. Ally and I snuck our first drinks at sixteen at her family’s cottage, getting hammered off watered down White Claws and beers we couldn’t finish. Late bloomers, some called us, but we’re still making up for it however many years later. 

It was the five of us, the only people that mattered in the entire town, in the entire world. They are the only people I’ve ever been truly in love with.

We got our licenses and after that we were unstoppable. Our carbon footprints grew embarrassingly large with all the destination-less, monotonous driving we’d do up and down the shoreline. I often think of how psychotically we’d obsess over the same few “loves of our lives” for far too long, how many fights we had about nothing that would matter a year in the future, and how late we’d stay up in someone’s basement, wishing we were anywhere else but that town. 

But boy, were we free. We’d scream and sing and run up and down the school halls in nothing but our socks. We were notorious for being heard down the street many minutes before we entered the house. It took years, but my loud had come back to me ten-fold, and taught me that there was somewhere it belonged, if not everywhere anymore. We graduated and that last summer we learned the value of a good party. We spent the last few months of nonstop togetherness getting drunk at the beach, going into the city for fancy dinners we couldn’t afford, working ourselves to the bone all day and then staying out all night because every last second mattered. 

I was the first to go. We got wine drunk the night before and cried for three hours. It was a privilege to be that dramatic. The next morning we stood on the quiet street, the late August sun beating down on us, not letting each other go because we could not believe it was the end of what had felt like the rest of our lives. 

Nothing, however, prepared me for the ache of leaving the cement that had known every size my feet had been. The trees that heard every secret veiled in our bones. The stage that had given me dozens of homes. The lake that watched every one of our first loves bloom, every one of our hearts break. The soil that drank up the shed tears, the weight lost, the guts spilled. 

It was not until I was gone that I understood the value of consistency. That I remembered why my parents raised me there, and never left. We forgot, after having lived all our lives, why any of our parents chose that town in the first place: so we’d have somewhere beautiful, peaceful, to return to when we inevitably left them. And how lucky was I to find forever so young? To know true love in a form so many rarely do. 

The girls and I went our separate ways, and learned life outside the town by the lake. I moved to a place that was louder than me. Sirens that screamed at a volume I could not emulate, cast in a violet darkness I’d never seen, decorated with art I didn’t know existed, thumping with music I couldn’t sing. But I’d known change, I’d known new. So I sat, and I watched the people walk, focused on their gait, deciding whether it was weak or confident. I smoked with people whose names I can’t remember and danced with strangers I’d never see again. My lungs got tired of me, so I vowed never to breathe anything but oxygen ever again. My skin grew sick and I made up for all those lost years with nights I can’t remember and mornings of regret on the cold bathroom tile. 

But I return home, now and again. We all do, and we drive, we talk, we walk the downtown strip. We scream. By God, do we scream. The sirens in the city have nothing on us. 

It dawned on me, one night not long ago, where the loud must have come from in the first place. I was born the day after the loudest night of the year, in the loudest city I’ve ever heard, from the loudest people I’ve ever known. It came from my mother’s laugh and my father’s voice. It came from the fireworks and the cheers and the “Happy New Years”. From the horns blaring and the subway screeching and wind tunnels between skyscrapers, that even in utero I took note of. Maybe I thought it was Hollywood, and came out ready. Maybe I knew it wasn’t, and knew one day I’d be grateful for that. Regardless, the loud was tamed by the town, honed by the stage, protected by the girls. It didn’t leave that morning in January so many years ago, it just learned. It learned who it belonged to, and where it sounded best; in that town by the water that I thank God I left. If I hadn’t, I never would have known what it meant.