Essay About Family: Cutting Strings :: Personal Narrative essay about my family

Cutting Strings I’m in bed, scanning the ceiling for a light that isn’t there. There wasn’t one last night, or the night before, so I shouldn’t have expected anything different than the textured surface that my retinas now scratch across in a long diagonal. The same grey, dried-paint-sharp ceiling that they don’t show in the brochures. Always without a light. Sure, one of those fake-Southwestern lamps with a plastic lamp shade sits beside me on the coffee table, but it’ll just fall with everything else once this island of a motel room shrinks down to a pinpoint and these two beds, those dresser drawers, that mirror, Jessie, Bekah, and my own elusive existence tumble into the empty gap. â€Å"Are they still out there?† I don’t see her, but I imagine my 16-year-old sister Jessie gaping at the blank TV screen, hoping somebody will answer her question. â€Å"Yep,† Bekah rattles off too quickly. That’s right, I realize. Still outside. Probably in the car, pinned under the hard rain. It was raining when we got here. Some firefly of a town at the crossing of two faded freeways in northern Pennsylvania where it snows a lot in the wintertime for the skiers, my dad told me in a watery voice while our minivan hummed down the off-ramp. Watercolor black, I thought while I looked out the window, except for the yellow, splotchy Super-8 sign and the white motel lobby. My two sisters and I brought the luggage down and we’re still waiting for mom and dad like dead puppets, and I’m still wishing for a light fixture. Like the bubble-shaped one that hung in my bedroom about two thousand miles away, before I turned 18 on this family road trip. Before this second act, when my parents stopped flinching their puppet master wrists from above the stage, and so I finally cut my own strings, just to fall flat on my plastic face and deflate like a balloon. The door clicks open. What can I hang on to? The ceiling is blank. â€Å"Mom?† I hear my sister’s drawl and think desperately about a light fixture, this one big, with crystal chains and gold bars. I can feel the mattress slipping below my back. Take your things. Swinging from chandeliers? No, too much. I’d just hold on. â€Å"Take your things and get out,† Mom says. â€Å"You’re sleeping with your dad tonight.† My two sisters and my older brother and I never heard much, but my mother would sometimes tell us about how her parents beat her and did other things too.