Who is Jane?

Let’s talk about Jane.  I write this from an imaginary place.  A writing desk, in a high up room in a castle.  The window is just a bare square in the middle of a stone wall.  There is a breeze from outside.  The green leaves in the tall trees are swaying, singing to one another.  The air is warm.  Warm in the sense that you can barely feel it.  I take a deep breath in and contemplate where to start.

Jane.  Who is Jane? She was born to a mother and father in New York City.  Family intact.  Four months later, she looks upon her mother and her mother only.  Her father was gone, and she would not see him again for twenty three and a half years.  There was no imprint on her memory of her father.  In fact, she never referred to him as “father.”  He was her mother’s “ex.”  That was all.  There was no anger, no resentment, no feelings.  Jane never thought about not having a father.  Her family didn’t talk about him, and from all of this she told herself that his absence did not impact her.  Her poor mother, she would think.  She was the one who was impacted.  Jane grew up in a lower middle class neighborhood in the city with her mother, aunt, and grandparents.  As a child, the neighborhood was perfect in her eyes.  The sounds of helicopters or police sirens were nothing but a sound, just as the birds chirping or the kids on the block playing hide and seek were.  For twelve years Jane was a happy and well adjusted girl.  Smart.  Pretty.  Well liked, and kind.  Jane had a good childhood, which not many can report.

It was right after her thirteenth birthday when it broke.  It being a balloon inside of her.  A balloon representing her absent father, filling up with water little by little every year.  Jane was born at 7:40PM.  She sat on the couch in the living room with her mother at 7:32PM on her thirteenth birthday and sobbed.  “Mom, I don’t want to be a teenager.  I want to be a kid for longer!”  “Okay” said her mother. “You can stay twelve.”  It was almost as if Jane knew on some subconscious level that entering adolescence would be the start of it all.  She was a happy kid.  Everything was okay.  But the pressure from the water in this balloon would become a burden.  And soon it would pop.  It had now begun to leak.  And no one would know it was the balloon that was the underlying cause for all of the chaos she would endure.