PEG

(PEG stands alone on the stage)

All I have-all I've ever had is memories-just memories. . . and memories of memories.

I was raped on my twelfth birthday.

I was twelve years old and as innocent at that caricature of a neon pig dangling over the Flying Pig BBQ.

I remember wearing a pink taffeta dress and twirling, twirling, twirling. I remember girls giggling. And boys. I remember the boys.

I remember clowns and cupcakes and candles. I remember blowing out twelve candles shaped like tiny pink ballerinas, wafting away a lifetime of innocence. And the next day I woke up, remembering nothing but the sense of helplessness . . . the hopelessness of despair.

And that's it-other than the nightmares and the fleeting glimpse of two dark shapes racing into the blackness of the night-that's all I remember. That's all I've ever remembered. There are just too many dark gray paths leading nowhere, too many shadows, too many muddy footprints to sort out and all my memories are of shadows, pink shadows, taffeta shadows and other than that, there's nothing! Nothing!

The following year I was in Gloucester, Mass and it was my thirteenth birthday. Mother lit a candle and stuck it off-center in a Hostess cream-filled cupcake and the filling oozed out the side and dribbled over the plate. And I watched as the chocolate melted, reeking of tar and it was something so strange, so macabre, that it was unforgettably . . . forgettable. My yellow cat, whose name I've racked my mind trying to remember, the one with three white boots and a dark brown ear, struggled from my lap, whacked the candle with its paw, licked off the white icing and devoured the creamy smooth filling and I didn't care. I just didn't care. When I looked around, I realized something was gone and I didn't know what it was back then-but I know now: it was my childhood. My childlike soul had been stolen in the middle of the night. Puff, gone, kaput, snatched away forever.

I woke up a woman, a lost soul struggling to find the missing puzzle pieces of my life. Now all I remember is that mysterious smell, never quite able to breathe deeply enough to know what it was-not knowing who I was or who I am even though I've spent the past ten years searching for those lost memories, sniffing for that smell, looking for that winding gray path, all I ever find are a thousand narrow lanes funneling into nothingness as each moment fades into an abysmal color of gray-black, black-gray, ebon-black-gray . . . into the blackness of the deepest, blackest black hole. And I wake up alone and screaming in the dark gray night, in a place where white and black are smudged together, obliterating, eradicating, erasing everything inside me, erasing my memory, as the paths and the smells morph into a noxious . . . an obnoxious smudge pot, filling my soul with pungent gray smoke, inundating me with soot.

And then it ends. The last flickering bits of memory fade and I'm left wandering in the woods alone . . . alone and unprotected. And those are my memories. My memories of memories.

But I survive! I shall always survive!

That's who I am! That's what I'll always be!

The End

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