Family Christmas Photo Destin, Florida 1991
Christmas 1991. I am thirteen years old and my parents are both about to find out that they have cancer. We live in Destin, Florida in a house on the bay. At night little green tree frogs press their stomachs soft against my bedroom windows and spanish moss filters down, almost audibly, through the trees.
We'd been there for five years, hiding out, after my father's company went under and we had to leave Atlanta. We had going away parties and sold the house for an exorbitant amount to some new developers but we may as well have left in the night, clutching our most precious to our chests.
The town of Destin, known to tourists as The World's Luckiest Fishing Village sits on an isthmus, a population of almost 12,000 residing on a shallow nugget of land sandwiched between the Choctawhatchee Bay and the Gulf of Mexico. Equidistant from Pensacola and Panama City, Destin's year-round residents are made up of a mixture of blue-collar fishermen, military families from the nearby Englin Air Force Base and a smattering of wealthy, new money inhabitants looking for a quiet place to settle. Originally occupied by several Native American tribes who were then conquered by the Spanish, the land making up Okaloosa County is rich with interesting names. Words like Valparaiso, Ocala, Shalimar, Seminole and Villa Tasso, which had more vowels than I knew what to do with, bounced off my tongue as I called them out sing-song like from the backseat of the car.
We moved into a house on Indian Trail, a lonely street that stretched out long and flush against the bay. The only homes were all on the bayside, our only neighbors across the street the dense and scraggly forest, a winding twist of dried out trees and lichen, with lizards that snaked underfoot and opossum hanging hidden in the harsh noon sun. Being an only child I had long ago gotten used to spending my afternoons alone, riding up and down the quiet stretch of our street, wading through the bay, picking barnacles off the pilings under the dock and kicking over dead horseshoe crabs to peer at their prehistoric underbellies.
In this picture I am in seventh grade, the peak of my torturous middle school years. I don't believe I've ever hated myself more than I did when I was in seventh grade. I wore my self-loathing like a cloak, fastened tight around my neck, softly choking myself through pre-Algebra and Earth Science. At night I curled tight into a corner of my queen-sized canopy bed and wished myself to sleep, even my nightmares more gentle than my dayscapes.
In this picture I'm wearing a dress that my mother and I picked out for my cotillion dance. I dreaded that dance, hated the rehearsal nights, the awkwardness, always getting paired with another girl or the wrong boy. I was too tall. I was too skinny. I had too much acne. I tore at my skin in the shower. Sometimes I thought that if I cried hard enough my tears would smooth away the bumps. They only left me breathless.
I was obsessed with a boy named Chris Pike. I was determined to dance with him at the big Cotillian dance. I wanted more than anything I'd ever wanted, for him to like me back. I thought it was fate, that we were meant to be, because my favorite author was Christopher Pike who wrote my beloved teen horror books. I had befriended Chris Pike's best friend, Scott Icabella, and I poured out my heart ache to him on the phone every night. He sympathized, having his own fierce crush on one of my best friends, Jamie Geannaris, but neither of us could promise the other what we wanted.
I remember talking to Chris one night before rehearsal, my words careful and tight. His eyes were red, his hair damp. I thought he'd been crying. I imagined that something had opened up inside of him, that he wanted the world as much as I did. Are you okay, I asked softly. Soap. He'd gotten soap in his eyes in the shower. I knew in that moment that I lived in my own world and that it would break my heart if I let it.
That beautiful green velvet dress. Worn to cotillion, a night which I can hardly remember, except for the shame I felt amidst the other girls who all seemed to be what I wasn't. I did dance with Chris Pike but all that I remember is that it was in no way memorable and that nothing came of it. That beautiful green velvet dress, worn only once more...to a Christmas party at the country club with my parents.
That dress, worn for this photo, the three of us, my mother, my father and I, posed in the last instances before our lives would change forever. My father diagnosed weeks later with prostate cancer. My mother's aching abdomen as we moved towards my father's surgery date. An ulcer, they all said, stress, they repeated. And finally, they said: stage four colon cancer. The soft sound that came out of my mother's mouth, those words still hanging in the air.
