My Trust Issues Came From Childhood Trauma. And From Three Beehives.
The beehive changed my blood. The house changed something else.
When I was seven, I found a beehive in the garden.
Found is the wrong word. I approached it. On purpose, slowly, the way you approach anything you want to understand. I wanted to see the system. How they built it, how they organized, what made the hum.
I got too close. The hive came after me. I ran, I got stung, I recovered.
A year later I did it again. Different hive, same curiosity, same result. Swollen hands, tears, my mother shaking her head. Didn’t you learn?
I had learned. I just hadn’t stopped wanting to know.
The third time I was ten. By then I knew better, which is different from doing better. They caught me mid-retreat. Twenty stings, maybe more. My throat started to close.
That was the time my body decided it had collected enough data.
I’m allergic to bees now. Medically, boringly, the kind you carry a shot for. That is the half a doctor can write down.
The other half took a house.
The house was marvelous. The house of wonders, I called it, and it was. She was the mother other kids wanted. Beautiful, bright, funny, electric. And then she wasn’t. Not always violent. Sometimes just a shift. A cooling of the air, a silence that had teeth.
Unpredictable can hit you a certain number of times before it turns repulsive.
I was small when I stopped walking into rooms she was in. As an adult I went back, for years, and I meant it. We gardened. We cooked. She has an imagination like nobody else. I still miss her.
The beehive changed my blood. The house changed something else.
I’m allergic to lies now.
Not the big ones. Those are easy, they announce themselves, they wear costumes. A big lie is almost a relief because you can point at it and say that, there, that’s the thing.
It’s the small ones. The performance. The I’m fine that isn’t. The story someone tells themselves so they don’t have to look.
I can’t tolerate it. Not even from myself.
When you develop an allergy you don’t just carry a shot. You sterilize the room.
So I did. I built rooms where you don’t have to perform to be seen.
But some people can’t stop performing. Not villains. People who never learned to take the mask off. And I can’t be near them, not because they’re bad, but because I need to know what is inside.
I can see it now, instantly, the way some people hear pitch. The moment someone starts building an overlay, I know. The moment a question isn’t really a question, I feel it.
People who don’t know me think I’m difficult. People who know me feel safe. Both are true. Same thing, different angle.
Here is what nobody tells you about getting out. You don’t get to go back to who you were before.
The allergy isn’t a flaw in my recovery. It’s the recovery itself.
I love her. I’m not going to act on it.
I’ll take the trade.
The Keeper of the Mundane · A memoir.
My grandmother’s stories. My mother’s cosmology. My record of both.