She Lives Inside Me: Tending My Inner Child Through Home Movies

By Turi Sioson

By Tina Tully

"I wanna see." 

My dad presses play.  Someone can't keep the angle consistent.  I'm in the right corner, the center; my head disappears and is replaced with my knees in intervals.  Two beats of silence.  "I wanna see," little me says between static, grabbing at the air.

I let out a gasp, laugh at the echo of a phrase I use weekly, shake my dad in excitement, but my chest is tightening — 

when i think / of who i was as a child,
there are no scraps left / underneath my table now.

twenty-one and redistributed / into finding the sound / of my voice / resistant.  i turn three
and leave behind ignorance / of hand-held radios and book jackets.
there's a turn in the afternoon / when momma asks me / to look at her.

somewhere / someone loves me, of this i'm sure.

***

impossibility grown.  two / front / teeth.  you take me / by the hand / to kindergarten, where i will meet / the first boy you tell me / i love.

how long until i become a / mothered mosaic / of misremembered secrets.
staircases shake.  you call out an eaglet and / tell / the camera / i'll be angry when i hear it:
that you / empty-armed / starved / me of attention / for an afternoon.

There's a Christmas morning where my dad is sick.  You can hear it in his voice from the other room.  I hand him everything to open, watch with my fingers between my teeth.  I'm mad when there are no more presents.  Simba keeps singing the same two songs.  At the 40-minute mark, there's loss in my eyes.  I can't fathom what it was.  Last Christmas morning I opened presents in your passenger seat.

***

I loved the camera.  I'd ask to see myself incessantly, begging my parents to flip the camcorder's screen around until I got what I wanted.  I’d get my face so close to the lens that you couldn't even see me anymore.

But the camcorder will barely hold a charge anymore.  I hold my breath when I replace the tape and tentatively press play.  Rewind is risky.  To go back means to possibly lose the whole thing in an unseen tangle.

i don't / know how to / make peace with it.
if i stay here / could i become her again, pigtailed and toothy / questioning every stranger with who's he? while / the sidewalk crunches / underneath light-up shoes.

if i / had my way / we’d be eating easter candy / all day, going broke / but gaining every toy / i always wanted.  something in the way / i chew my lip / still has me / haunted
by infancy / i never outgrew.

***

I wear your yellow shirt to bed.  In the morning, we watch you in the same shirt, me on your shoulder, us dozing on the couch.  Momma holds the camera steady.  She's as silent as I've ever heard her.

scarcely old enough to crawl into blankets, into thoughts / without holding every melody you sang / through tired teeth.

nothing will ever be / that soft / again.
but when i hear crickets / outside my window, i try / to recreate it.  sprawl my limbs and /
try to grin but / sometimes i think / i'll never see my mother smile / baby-tender again.

I wonder if that makes me a bad person.

***

If nothing else, I find there are things adolescence can't preen.  I couldn't open anything.  Christmas cards ended up on the floor; my favorite stuffed animals got stuck between doors and drug across the hallway.  The clumsiness wasn't just kiddy limbs if 18 years later I'm still hitting myself in the face trying to tear tape from a cardboard box.

There's grief in the rawest part of my throat when during bedtime I hear myself laugh like my dad.  At lunchtime I eat turkey off Scooby-Doo's face.  Sometime between noon and nap I go cross-eyed, smiling without consciousness of my face.

Sometimes, in the mirror, I'll force the edges of my mouth as high up as they'll go.  Until my cheeks push my eyes almost closed.  I don't know what I'm looking for.  I don't want to have to feel my face.

***

I didn't know I could dance.  To funk classics and ’80s pop and my mother’s improv tunes.  I'd “get down,” literally, and mess up my already-unkempt hair until I was carried to bed.  I've often thought, especially during a subpar Taylor Swift dance routine, that in another life I could've been a dancer.

i didn't know / i wore that yellow shirt / in the same year
as those pants.  i slept / in weird positions / on the way home.
seaworld and tuesdays and / after breakfast; before i learned / that someday / it would
have to end.

when i pulled the pieces / it drew a dent / where the sleepiness
of neighborhood walks / stayed, flowered and sun-yawned / ringing /
with the way / the dogs' collars would sing / with a shake.

something tumultuous / happened to break / when i was old enough / to have my own
bed frame.  i begged / for my crib at six.  tried to pretend, in moments, that i was not too big
as my voice grew boxed / around its own sound.

I wonder, sometimes, if my childhood still has a house.

***