Ribs

A Life Slowly Coming Into Focus

EXPOSURE-PART ONE-The Girl Who Watched Everything

I don’t remember a single moment where I became “aware.” I just know that by the time most kids were learning multiplication tables, I could already tell when a room felt weird.

Or a car.

One of my earliest memories is sitting in the backseat at a red light while my mother launched an ice cream sandwich out of the driver’s side window and directly into the face of the man in the car next to us.

Not near him.

Not onto the hood.

Direct hit.

I still remember it in cinematic slow motion. The little paper wrapper fluttering backward through the air like some kind of dairy based revenge missile. The way it hit his glasses and slid downward while he just sat there stunned, blinking through vanilla ice cream and confusion. Honestly, if it had happened in a movie theater, the audience probably would’ve applauded.

I was under seven years old and already realizing adults were… complicated.

The strangest part is I don’t remember what happened after that. I don’t remember the light turning green. I don’t remember whether my mom sped off or laughed or kept yelling or immediately regretted it. I don’t even remember what she was mad about.

I just remember his face.

Everything around him kept moving, but his face stayed frozen in my memory like a paused frame from an old movie.

I stared at that man like my little brain was trying to solve him. I swear it felt like ten full minutes passed at that intersection. The shock. The silence. The disbelief sitting on his face while melted ice cream slowly surrendered itself to gravity.

Honestly, I think I could still pick him out of a lineup.

I mean… he’d obviously look different now. Add almost forty years, cholesterol, lower back pain, rising insurance costs, maybe grandchildren. Life comes at people fast. Still, somewhere deep in my nervous system, I think I’d recognize him immediately.

I also hope he wasn’t allergic to dairy.

That feels important.

I wonder sometimes what story he told when he got home that night.

Did he tell his wife some exhausted woman in a station wagon assaulted him with frozen dessert at a stoplight?

Did his kids laugh?

Did he file a report?

Was there paperwork involved?

Was there an officer somewhere trying very hard to maintain professionalism while writing the phrase “ice cream sandwich related incident” onto an official form?

I have absolutely no idea.

What I do know is that childhood is strange because you rarely understand the full story while you’re living inside it. You just absorb moments. Tone. Tension. The feeling that adults know something you don’t.

My mother was a single mom trying to survive. That sentence gets to be true.

She was also angry sometimes. That gets to be true too.

It turns out “trying your best” and “leaving emotional shrapnel” are not always mutually exclusive. Best, I would later learn, is subjective.

I remember my mother sitting on the floor cleaning hair out of the vacuum brush with her fingers, a pair of scissors, and occasionally a screwdriver. The tool, not the drink. Although honestly, for all I know, the drink may have been involved too. I was too young to notice that part yet. The television hummed in the background while life kept unfolding around us. I remember paper routes. Waitressing jobs. Crossword puzzles. Mario. Coffee pots at Marie Callender’s. I remember hearing that her new restaurant job required makeup, and suddenly makeup stopped looking glamorous to me and started looking mandatory.

I remember exhaustion living in our house like another relative.

Not dramatic movie exhaustion. Just regular, working class, trying-to-hold-it-together exhaustion. The kind that sits at the kitchen table with cold coffee and unpaid bills and still gets up the next morning anyway. Or, if you relate to me on a deeper level, the kind that sits in front of the TV replaying the original Zelda game while quietly dissociating from the fact that the bills are never going to line up correctly. Honestly, the bigger sign of exhaustion might be that I was a child who already knew the phrase “robbing Peter to pay Paul” instead of something more age-appropriate like “Hakuna Matata.”

When you grow up around emotional unpredictability, your brain starts studying people for safety before you even realize you’re doing it.

Some little girls played house.

I became an emotional detective.

Which sounds much cooler than it actually is because mostly it just turns into being hyperaware in grocery stores and replaying awkward interactions from 2007 while trying to fall asleep.

Still, there’s always more to the story.

That’s the part adulthood teaches you.

Because now when I think about that memory, I don’t just think about the man at the red light. I think about my mother. Young. Overwhelmed. Carrying things I probably couldn’t even comprehend yet.

I used to think the story was about the ice cream sandwich.

Now I think it was about how quickly a moment could turn.

Because once you learn that as a child, you start studying people carefully. Their tone. Their moods. Their silences. You learn to notice shifts before they happen. You become fluent in emotional weather before you even know what emotional regulation is.

And eventually, without realizing it, you start adjusting yourself too.

Maybe that’s the thing about exposure. The image is usually there long before it ever comes into focus.

Tomorrow: How to Become Easy to Love

This piece was written under the emotional influence of “Ribs” by Lorde. I highly recommend listening while reading. Some stories develop differently with sound.