Sidewalks
a mosaic I first performed in January 2020, about my brother and I's neurodivergency.
Here’s a link to the video of my original performance.
Content warning for: ableism and "pull yourself up by your bootstraps" ism
My brother and I, playing together as toddlers. I am wearing sunglasses, and we are both wearing blankets tied around our shoulders like capes. My brother is smiling at the camera with some front teeth missing.
I chase my brother around our fence. With our fingers we trace the single line that ties our neighborhood together. It stains the bottom of the fence dark, but it stops under our front door. The water line splits my neighbor’s house in half: top white, bottom grey.
Every year the hurricanes send floods rolling down our streets, gushing out of the sewer drains, pouring from the dark sky. We sit in our house like an island, and clutch to each other as the wind sends waves crashing against our door.
I hold on tight to my mother’s pinky as we walk through the toy section of Walmart, and she tells my brother to stop flapping his arms in public. I let go of her, and I smirk at him. We do it together as soon as she turns around.
Mental illness, neurodivergence, and disability are not known words. Autism is just something to label “weird” kids with, and ADHD can be fixed with a good belt whoopin’. My restlessness turns into nail biting. His excitement turns into silence.
We spend our nights boxing on our parents’ bed and pulling out each other's baby teeth by tying them to the door handle. We spend our days in different realms of the same public school.
They tell me that I’m a genius. They call my brother disobedient, or a retard.
We drift away from each other, on separate rafts, in opposite directions.
Sidewalks were the first things that stood out to me as I traveled further and further north. I noticed the width of the concrete, the distance between each crack, the density of the people walking on it, the shade of grey.
I remember a conversation with my friend as we walked to Hannaford’s one snowy Sunday. I was halfway-mocking an old conservative man.
“It’s no wonder we call y’all northerners snowflakes. It’s cold as shit up here and ya’ll babies need sidewalks on streets with houses that are miles from town and a hundred feet apart.
“See, back home, we can barely keep up our roads, so who has the time for sidewalks? You gotta walk the couple feet of grass ‘tween the road and the ditch to get where you need to go. Step left, get hit. Step right, fall.
“Survival of the fittest.”
There’s a memorial by the train tracks that I pass twice a day. A wooden cross with ribbons and flowers to remember two boys who were hit on their way to first period.
It’s covered in dirt now and I’ve forgotten their names. I never heard details of their lives, I never knew what they accomplished, if they played sports or if they had friends. The only important detail was that they were young lives, full of potential, that were killed off.
Or, they were just stupid kids that shouldn’t have been walking by the tracks anyway.
I’m walking across campus, from Mahaney to the AFC and back again, and my stability teeters like a seesaw.
Overstimulation ignites the explosion. A thought rams into the backed up highway traffic of my mind and cars collide and fall like dominos. The flames of the crash reach miles, destroying everything in its path. Fireworks and gas stations erupt behind my eyes and I am sprinting through the wreckage, leaving burning trails behind me.
But my breathing is steady. My pace is slow. My eyes lazily look over my phone, the sidewalk moving below my feet, my computer screen.
But my heart is pounding in my throat like the knocking of police at the door and I don’t have time to run or hide. Every single thought I try to hold onto darts away as if escaping blame. “It wasn’t me! I’m not going out there!” And I am left to fend for myself.
The officer steps into the room, armed with a manual to assemble a clock. But I was told that we have two minutes to disarm this bomb and I don’t have any training. It takes me hours to realize that it’s a clock and another 30 minutes to build it.
I built it.
I breathe for the first time that day,
and my memory is wiped.
I’m told that I have another bomb to disarm next week.
I enter my living room and I look at my brother, sitting in a desk chair with his face too close to the screen. He’s playing Fallout. He fires his laser gun, killing a death claw, and returns the wasteland to its tense peace.
I see him in this hot, barren, radioactive landscape as I stand on Battell Beach, smoking a joint in the dark, watching neon lights flash in windows.
I shiver. It’s so cold here.
Cold like my brother’s eyes when he shuts down and his vision glazes over. The world is loud but I can see, I can feel, the static raging in his head like a scanner. The objective has been lost. There’s no life detected in this area. Move on.
But the pulse of the party music’s bass thumps in rhythm with his heartbeat.
I know his joy. I’ve seen his excitement to learn before it was murdered. I don’t know who the executioner is, and I don’t know why they decided that I belong here and he doesn’t.
Those who paved the frozen sidewalks of the Northeast, the sidewalks that funnel gilded children into Middlebury, won’t hear mute screams. They built themselves a fort of scrap metal, and they will ignore the clawing at the door until the beast breaks in and bites them.