Quieting the Voices

I looked at myself in the mirror and a black eye stared back at me, crowned by a puffy face and bleeding mouth. I was no stranger to black eyes. I had had more than my share in my 13 years on the planet at this point. This one, however, had been yet again delivered by my father. It wasn’t the first and had I not acted, it wouldn’t have been the last. The months before that moment were quite literally the very definition of Hell. My father would come home drunk, and beat the ever-loving crap out of me for kicks. If I resisted, I got beaten harder. But, I still resisted. I fought back. The problem is, when you get treated like an animal, you tend to think of yourself as one. It didn’t matter too much to me; pain and I were old friends by this point.

This black-eye was special to me. I resolved for this black-eye to be the very last thing he ever did to me. The reality was, I was used to the pain, I was the used to the humiliation, and I was used to having to explain away marks to my teachers and friends. But, now things had escalated to where I had no doubt that in no more than two months I would probably be dead, the victim of another drunken rage, swallowed by an angry, inebriated father. Underneath all of this, there was this voice. The animalistic, defiant side of my psyche saying, “It’s time to leave.”

It was 3:25 in the morning, June 24, 1994. This was the day where a thousand unspeakable acts were finally answered. I collected money that I was owed, a total of $620 in my pocket. I went to the bus station 20 miles away, having walked there in the dead of night. I bought a ticket for Los Angeles, California. At 9:35 in the morning, I stepped on the bus and never looked back.

Growing up in England, my father had never been like this until two years before our return to the United States. What happened to him, I couldn’t tell you. I was only familiar with the consequences of that change. I just know that he went to work, and when he came home, all I could see was drunken animosity. The only difference between me and my siblings was the fact that of the three of us, I was the only one who took to the English aspects of my upbringing. The other two were, and are still as American as apple pie and embezzlement. That’s the only reason I can come up with as to why I was mistreated, and they were valued.

I had neglected to tell anyone of my leaving. No one cared at that point; why should I let them know? My father knew instantaneously I was gone because his punching bag had been absent. My mother, in her drug-induced and alcoholic stupor, didn’t realize I was gone for six weeks. Meanwhile, I was surfing for the first time off the coast of Santa Monica, attending school, holding down a job (they thought I was 18, didn’t ask for ID, and I wasn’t about to correct them of this oversight), playing in a band, washing my own clothes and paying my own rent.

I was free in every sense of the word. I was without the fear of being harmed every day, I was without the fear that came with wondering where my next atrocity came from. But, there was also a different kind of fear that I had learned; the fear of failure. Whether I prospered, or whether I failed miserably was up to me. My future was quite literally in my own hands. Up until that point, I had resigned myself to an early death. On the streets of Los Angeles, I was determined to meet death the same way I met life; on my feet, fists clenched, eyes ablaze with defiance and righteous indignation. If I was going to meet death I would do it my way, the same way I lived my life. But, always, there was the voice, the voice that indulged every whim and every impulse. The voice that would lead me across the world and to realize the very meaning of “living.”

But, because I had made the right choices, that death never beat me. I’ve never succumbed to the character I had been preparing to fight my entire life. I left Los Angeles when the wanderlust hit me. I traveled Europe, visiting Barcelona, Florence, Venice, Rome, Palermo, Bremen, Berlin and Munich and finally Paris before doubling back to Barcelona, then getting kicked out of Spain altogether.

Somehow, I eventually found myself in Western Pennsylvania, after a short stint in Tampa, Florida, and met the woman who would later become my wife. When we fell in love, something amazing happened. The voice inside me quieted a bit, and the wanderlust stopped altogether. I no longer felt the need to fight everything. The animalistic aspect of my life had been tamed and I finally felt a sense of peace, after years of searching for it across distant countries and cities. I looked for peace in the cathedrals of civilizations forgotten, when all I had to do was look into the eyes of my wife and realize, I was finally home.

My fight that had begun with the malicious, upraised fists of my father, ended with the tender embrace of my wife. I think about the transition from my period of “rock-and-roll-barbarism” to my current form and I often think it really was universal luck that brought me to this place where I finally found my peace. Then, I look at the silhouetted form of my wife as she sleeps, and I think, perhaps it was fate after all. Only design could have brought something so wondrous to my life.

I am a child of that voice– that defiance that screams threats in the face of the coming storm and says, “I am the last bloody person on this planet you want to f**k with.” The voice of the defiant, the fleshy and the aesthetic.

The voice may be quieter these days, but my biggest fear is that it will awaken again. I don’t know what else there is to see in this world. The fear that I have isn’t seeing more of the world, it’s whether or not the voice will deem it necessary to leave what I have behind. But, the voice is always there. Waiting.

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This post is republished on Medium.

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