How do you like your stories to begin? Once upon a time… ? A dark and stormy night? Do I stand up here and say: “Hi. My name is Jaelyn Alexander. Call me Jae, cuz everyone does. I’m 28 years old and my favorite color is purple, but not lilac. I don’t do pastels. I find pastel colors unambitious. They’re too fucking lazy to be bold and in your face…” Is that really what we want here? I didn’t think so either.
So do I simply “begin at the beginning”, the way they say to do? I’d like to, but where does anything really begin? I can’t tell. “Common sense” (like I still believe in that) probably says to start with the day we met. But that seems arbitrary to me. Why not the first time we fucked? Or even the day I was ready to take a swan dive off the 87th story? Those are “beginnings” in the sense they’re points on this long crooked line I call my life where everything changed, and they’re also “endings” in that they sum up everything that came before.
So what to pick? I don’t know, maybe because we’re not at the end yet. I can see the end from where I am right now, moving right at me—or maybe I’m falling towards it—at what feels like breakneck speed, but it hasn’t happened yet. When it does… I guess we’ll know soon enough.
But let me tell you another problem. I’m telling you this from memory and—as my dad would’ve said—memory is a “rum go.” At least mine is. My memory is like a bunch of badly recorded video tracks, full of noise and all jumbled together. Some parts are barely discernible while other parts are crystal clear, but seem to be missing the timestamp. I’ll give you one:
The Christmas I got this little remote-controlled helicopter. It was awesome. I terrorized the cat and almost crashed it into a big plate of mashed sweets our mom had just set on the table. My dad laughed and my mom looked pinched because she did not approve but couldn’t bring herself to get after me for something that made my dad laugh so hard. Then the charge ran out a few minutes later and there was “Peace in Happy Valley”, as we called it in our family. That is, until my sister Teagan (Tee) got a hold of it. I can remember everything about it except the year. I think we might’ve been nine. My sister thinks we were ten. She’s probably right. (She usually is.)
There’s another memory, and this one I have down cold: the day I found out Tee was sick. September 23rd, 2013 at 11:23 AM. I was sitting in class and happened to glance at the clock when the teacher walked up and handed me a note. It said I was excused for the day, and my dad was on his way to pick me up.
I remember the bright blue cloudless sky as I stood at the curb waiting. I remember the musty, oddly sweet smell of the blossoms on the tree I waited under. I remember Dad not saying a word when I got in the car, and the way the knotted muscles in his jaw made lumps under his five-o’clock shadow.
I remember seeing my mom sitting in that ugly green armchair in our lounge, her face so gray it was like you could see the bones showing through. There were two bright spots of color high on her cheeks—it made me think of bad, sickly clown make-up.
Mom wouldn’t meet my eyes or speak, so dad sat me on the couch—also green, but it didn’t match (none of our furniture did)—took the other chair, and gave me the news. Five days ago, we’d taken Tee to see the doctor yet again. She’d been sick for months. They always had an answer—some answer. This time, they’d admitted her to hospital for tests. And more tests. And this was it: she had the gene.
And if Tee had the gene, I had the gene.
Nothing prepares you for a moment like that. I can’t remember how I felt. I remember everything else—hearing the words, Dad looking like he was trying to not puke—but not that. Mom died that day. Sure, her heart kept beating for another two years, but that’s when she died. Dad lasted for five, hating that—somehow—we’d gotten Mom’s lethal gene and not his healthy one. That it was all his fault. Not God’s, not some random mutation, not merely a roll of the dice—him.
People say I’m a lot like him in some ways.
Of course, I didn’t get the gene. We didn’t learn that until after both our parents were gone. I lived six years thinking every cough and ache and nosebleed was the onset. Every symptom Tee got, I felt. Finally, I went to get tested. And retested. And re-retested. And no one understood how it was possible.
I think there’s a lot of shit no one understood.
And then there was college and getting an O‑chem degree because I thought it might help, and taking care of Tee when she was sick and trying to figure out what normal meant. Resenting people who were normal—whose bodies weren’t slowly, catastrophically disassembling themselves at the cellular level.
And all this presents as startlingly clear lucid moments stitched together by crappy videos, often out of time or place—even transposed in spots. And always—still—thinking that somehow, some way, there had to be a point to all this. That it would—it must—make sense.
Am I making sense? Maybe not so much.
Maybe try to think of it this way: if you had to describe your life in a single phrase, what would it be? Journey of discovery? The road less traveled? A tightrope? Maybe even the broad and easy path?
Those all have beginnings and waypoints and steps in between. They may not be easy (rarely are) and they may not follow the shortest distance between any two points (rarely do) but you can follow them.
My life is a seesaw. Seesaws aren’t a path, there’s nothing to follow, they don’t make the same kind of sense. If your life is a seesaw—and maybe yours is too—you just try to keep it level. Going up and down might be fun when you’re a kid on a playground. In life, not so much.
See the problem I have with beginnings?