The Godliest Tower
(Hi everyone, I hope you're all taking care of yourself! This one contains mentions of intense child neglect, drug use, abandonment, and everything really. Please take care of yourselves!)
What was another thing on my mind lately?
That's right.
I have always had an obsession with radio towers, base stations, electrical stations, transformers, and anything which creates that humbuzz.
As a kid, out of all the places I lived at, there was one apartment complex which existed when I was very, very young.
It's where I learned my ABCs, how to ride a bike, and where I garnered a love for the electrical buzz.
ah uhm...what is that thing? oh it's gobul from monster hunter 3 hi sweetheart!!
It seems I got distracted....
Probably because my mind can't stop thinking about The Godliest Tower
It's never in my dreams, most likely due to the fact that it's always at the forefront of my mind these days. No matter the day or time, school or not, work, biking, I see it there, unmoving.
I try to catch glimpses on street view...but I can hardly capture it.
Its scale was far beyond any other base station or radio tower.
This photo from street view doesn't do it justice.
Even if it makes me feel sick, and even if it turns me into sine waves, to dying fuzz on deadened televisions. From behind me, and around me, how much freedom did I feel everytime I saw that radio tower? And those big trucks driving around that industrial park.
Is it in operation still?
Will I be able to grasp it in the end?
It's also on my list of places to revisit one day.
Because...
I keep trying and trying to grasp it like it was right next to me. Or in front of me, or right outside after sneaking out the door.
Smoke filled the house and it hurt my head really badly...the whole place reeked of nicotine and weed.
I may not have lived at this place, but it does go back, all the way back, to something primal again.
The early apartment complex I spoke of, and if I recall correctly, it had a peculiar layout thinking back on it now. I was learning to ride a bike...spinning around this incredibly tall parking lot.
We lived on the second floor, just me and my dad at that place. It was three floors total and although not a drug den like some other places I lived, it was the cheapest housing possible, but of course it was luxury to me!
To be content with any living situation minus the person I am living with, is a specialty of mine! mwahahah!
...
So near the back of this complex was, if I remember it proper, a steep decline into a strange substation. I remember watching honeybees float by those green transformers and I remember it going a bit far back...rattling chainlink fences and all that?
Going to the store was an exciting privilege. This was during the time I was moving a lot, and at a different house each week. So my times at this apartment were strange and distant. There was a rubber laden playground, and the school bus which carried me far away from there. For how insanely cheap the housing was, namely due to it being a community specific for extremely low wages (under 20 K i believe? or 30 now?) there were three bedrooms in that apartment. My time there was generally okay. I do remember the many people coming in and out of the house at times, and the few times my mom lived in and out of there. One time when I was a super young baby she was living there with her boyfriend at the time who would later end up getting her to do meth and heroin. It was said they had so many people come in and out of the apartment while I was in my crib that people thought it was a crackhouse in its own right. They fought and yelled in the other room as I was just a baby. I heard this from everyone involved.
But when I got a little older, enough to remember, even from a super young age, I started to understand the environment. There was always someone else living at that apartment. One time it was two friends of my dad's, who were both always addicted to something as well, and I never felt super comfortable around them when my dad wasn't home. One also kept stealing my fruit snacks... wahhhhhhhhhhhhh!!!!!!! not my fruit snacks!
hehe.
Anyways, there were also scenes of violence too. One time my stepdad and mom were living there too, they would argue, scream, and hurt each other at times. I remember standing there and watching it all. I watched food get desecrated, something I was taught to hold so sacred...so I wondered why they were hurting each other and why they were so strange. It was the drug use of course, the distant, slurred speech, the glazed eyes, the emptiness of wondering if anything is there at all, when you're just one step away from being punished, yelled at, called stupid, or anything.
But there was the greenery outside despite everything. I never cried much I think...but it did really hurt me.
Song of the night: Sometimes Memory Fails Me Sometimes - Everyone Asked About You
I can vaguely envision the electricity back then. I can see how it was interwoven with each place I stayed at, over and over, and over. Then one day something appeared, that radio tower.
The allusions to it in this blog are more apparent to me each day, even if my eyes grow heavy, my mind wanders down my memoirs and burnt papers, from almost destroying the staircase with my old desk, to staring down at the highway again, wanting to kill myself.
But I don't want that, not at all! I am done, truly, from wanting to kill myself this year! At least that is part of it all. The mettalic taste of blood and spit, do I yearn for it again? Something so horrible and so enrapturing? Pretending I could stare at it until it made a difference...because in my head that radio tower wasn't ever seen from my old house. Stop. Listen to yourself. You'll quickly unwind and end up as another unfinished retrospective. This isn't to die. This isn't for anything. But this is for feeling, to live, and to breath, to bee able to turn around, even with your sad eyes. Victoria, you can keep going. You can better that horrible blizzard, frostbite threatening death; wade through that sweltering mesa, your skin pustulating as you are naught but bone. But consider this: You are still alive, you will be then. You're hurting yourself even now...it's scary I know. You want to run away forever, try to avoid it while facing everything else instead. Just remember you don't need to stab yourself,you can just keep living...as long as you can. Don't stand in headlights again. Just hold your breath, you'll make it back to that place eventually. Stay strong Victoria. and yet even while considering its distance, it maintained the zenith of every principle possible. Dare I say, it was like a parent to me? Is that how forgone the notion is? Not in the slightest! I gave it a personality, an idea.
It could act as good as any other parent.
To me, I call it Godliest due to its stature, and its emptiness. Why..why in the middle of nowhere was there this huge tower? The answer is obvious, of course there is a base station in the middle of nowhere; to provide cellular.
When everywhere feels cold, it feels special.
"It's all we have to survive this world."
I'll wrap a bow on my dreams for now.
- Victoria
Dedicated to another memory to revisit on my bucket list.