The Nest
I remember being fidgety, my unfinished body unable to settle into the icy, still dark of our shared room. Several other heartbeats (“practically an army,” my mother would say) filled the house around me, but they were all too quiet to hear.
Not like mine.
My nervous heartbeat tip-tapped against my skull like a child knocking to be let inside. It was clumsy from the cold, my large family unable to pay for heating the year we lived in Missouri. There was no running water then either. No light, but flashlights and cloying apple cider-scented candles from garage sales to help us fight off the long Northern shadows.
But there are no artificial lights lending me their imaginary warmth in this memory, only the vivid sense of being awake in a world as silent as snow that refused to melt.
It’s funny, they don’t teach what to do in school when you’re born too big and too poor for your life. They might teach you financial literacy for a week or two in highschool—maybe sort you into pretend jobs when you’re still too young to understand things like “inequality of autonomy” or “Reaganomics”—but do they teach you what to do when your mother’s 19 and has more kids than her full-time job at Quiznos can support? Did they teach her how to take what food she could from work and divide it up between five starving mouths: until eventually even that ran out, and our tiny bodies were left so hungry that the idea of eating made us throw-up? Did they teach my step-father how to take us on walks to steal railroad spikes for scrap money? To shield our eyes from that all-consuming poverty by doling out spare quarters afterwards, so that each child could pick out a can of soda, our delight in the infrequent gift temporarily blinding us to the exhaustion from the day?
They teach you to multiply, to annotate, to recite all 50 states, but they don’t teach you how to live with the emptiness.
They don’t teach you how to be cold.
But I remember when I learned on my own. I remember being
alone,
alone,
alone,
Even in a house that could hardly contain its inhabitants. And I remember crawling out from under the covers to gather up as many armfuls of jeans and t-shirts as my deceptively chubby arms could carry. I remember piling them up on my bed and burrowing beneath them, blessed warmth finally tingling across my skin. I remember that tip-tapping in my skull finally quieting down, until that child knocking learned to stop.
Sonny Shouse is an Indigenous-Hawaiian first generation college student currently attending UMF for a degree in History. Raised under the constraints of generational poverty in the Deep South, their work often surrounds difficult personal topics such as class, gender, and social inequality.
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