On Being Loved

I’m glad I had a shitty home life. I can’t imagine hearing myself whine as much as some of these polished porcelain children who can’t seem to get over the realization that nobody’s going to be there when they break.
Of course, I’ve got nothing to complain about, myself. I grew up with enough to eat, enough to read, gnawing nipples and fingering knives with a sly smile that would make Freud reach for his pen. Yea verily, I went resentfully to a federally subsidized school, that pride of the middle-class taxpayer, that torturer of tapping feet and wandering minds. I spun sinister plots on that playground, bending fresh fantasies daily like a baker smelling yesterday’s bread as he turns on the lights. My parents hated each other, of course, but they were fairly quiet about it for a while. The grain of guilt festering in the filter of their stressed-out heads kept them roped together and only silently contemptuous. I fought with my sisters like any good boy, pinched the dog when Sunday’s backyard was sleeping, and cried in silence at the static on the TV screen when I woke up for cartoons and didn’t know what to do.
Sure, I was a fine child. But never really loved. My father never called me by my real name, preferring to hide impersonality behind a nursery wallpaper of postnatal christenings and a funny falsetto, pinching and tickling incessantly but never really wanting to grasp our innocent giggles, ruffle our sun-touched hair. My mother would have liked to love me. The heavy boot of her work-ravished world repeatedly stomped the shards of the bright daydreams I sometimes imagine her fondling through college. She had a strong mind—imprisoned now—and I imagine her youth, that muscular mind plowing through the soils of her education, breaking with a smile to chase faceless children to the house where she would someday live with a handsome husband. The reality—that she was not permitted to love me as she was so obviously dying to—that, at times, makes me question my faith.
And now, these people appear before me, rising from the crystalline lakes of a golden childhood, guarded from the evil sneezes of a sick world by all the medicine money and love could buy—and they waste it. I look into their eyes and see frail frames that have never had to fight for anything. They, the ornately programmed and musical machines, well-oiled, well-kept, that run well for a dime—that have never learned anything on their own. They who are spoiled on love, those merely affectionate beings: I look sternly, steadily at this portrait, cough into a clenched fist, and continue quietly down the hall.