I Was a Teenage Pyromaniac

CW: self-harm, burning stuff for fun

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It always strikes me as something funny when my older Gen X friends attempt to explain being a latchkey kid to me. Did I write the book on it? Nah. But instead I had the delicious and contradictory cocktail of no other siblings or even pets, overprotective ethnic parenting and also latchkey experiences starting when I was 11 or 12.

I liked to burn things. Didn’t discover the fun of burning myself til much, much later. But at 12 I was a cutter. It was all the rage. You were even cooler if you carved alternative band names in your skin. I didn’t make it that far, but I tried some other stuff. Still have a few scars here and there to this day. Thought of doing all the run-of-the-mill things everyday teens think about doing to themselves. Or are they? Well, as the younger siblings of the Prozac Nation, they certainly were back then.

It was because of this that from about 11 or 12 onward, my mother stuck me walking home from school with an embarrassing Russian lady who didn’t speak much English. Let’s call her Anya. Imagine being at that age when you both care deeply what others think, and think nothing of it, all the way to oblivion.

So at that age, I was forced to walk home from school with some stranger who barely spoke my language supervising me. A humiliating fate. Around the same time, math tutoring from another younger Russian lady. Watchful eyes of Russian ladies everywhere, surveilling whether I succeeded or failed. Then summer with my neighbor friend whose family was from Belarus. Charles in Charge. Blossom. Star Wars Monopoly, hardball style, where you tried to grab the dice before the other player made a decision. Times when Pizza Hut was tasty as hell and I actually got on the winner’s list playing arcade Street Fighter II there so of course my choice of initials were either A-S-S or F-U-K.

Eventually, I was such an asshole about Anya walking me home from school that the accompaniment stopped. I was free. Long as I paged my mom when I got home at a reasonable hour, I was free to light all the candles I wanted, and do all number of things to myself. As the flames grew, something inside me soothed. Fire, fire, echoed Beavis and Butthead. The grownups thought MTV made us do it. How unoriginal they thought we were. Sometimes, at sleepovers we sprayed hairspray on a lighter.

It was a miracle I didn’t burn the house down or end up in the ER. It probably was for all of us, back then. We knew the world was sick, and no one was doing much about it. Better to watch the flames sooner rather than later.

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