The first few memories I have are all incredibly similar, so much so that I can’t distinguish if they are one continuous memory or if they were days or months apart. The hatch opens and she climbs down the ladder. She lays a bowl and spoon out in front of me, a hash with gray mashed potatoes and too-hot canned ham. She begrudgingly guides my clumsy child fingers onto a remote, she’s frustrated I can’t figure out how to use it.

I remember her fumbling with that a lot, she came up with some inane singsong method to help me remember how to work that television. I didn’t speak yet, so it was this soulless bird-chirp-voiced gibberish jaunt across the buttons of a remote speckled with dried oily fingerprints. I saw a lot less of her once I figured out how to work the TV. Sometimes I pretended I forgot how it worked to try to get her to come down more often, but it didn’t ever work.

That was my only company for a long time, the clunky television in that hot basement. It was my teacher, more than anything, all of the shows that flitted across its CRT screen. I learned first that there were people with short hair, there were people that wore sleeved shirts and whose lips were pink or brown or red instead of black or blue. It taught me that this wasn’t how families were, after it taught me what a family was. I learned how to talk, but it took a long time. I learned what a birthday was, that revelation made the three times I had been given a single slice of cake alongside whatever food she walked down to me for that meal. I didn’t fully understand how age worked, though. I had gotten cake three times, so I must have been three. With much more knowledge now, I know that I just didn’t get any until she decided I could handle it. At six years old I thought I was three.

I would stand in front of whatever show was on and practice talking like them. I learned to read because of shows for kids years younger than me, then I obsessively read and reread the serial number and instructions for the TV and the tags on my cheap mattress and blankets and pillows. From as young as I could understand that my conditions weren’t normal and that I was strange, I was determined not to be. I would go through a routine every time I woke up, despite there being no windows and me not knowing if it was day or night. I would have pretend phone calls with my made up husband or kids or my best friend Joy. I practiced making my bed and keeping my room clean, I memorized food recipes and what people tended to talk about.

Discovering the Spanish channels was really important to me. I saw people that looked like me, like what I could see in the reflection of the screen when it went black. People that looked nothing like her, who spoke in a way I didn’t understand. I learned Spanish and I soaked in those channels’ dramas and action movies and the like. I became convinced that I was adopted, which I of course was. I found religion because it was what the pretty women that were on TV did when they felt lost.

Sometime when I was twelve, though back then I thought I was nine, she woke me up and asked something of me. She led me up the ladder and out of the hatch. I acted astonished at the bright sunlight and the dirty walls of the car shop, both because I was amazed to see it and because that’s how people acted in the shows. She showed me how engines worked, how parts connected and the problems that they could cause. Even with how much I despised her, I relished these moments outside of my room just because they were outside of my room. Sometimes there were other people there too, mostly men with mustaches and shaved heads or ball caps. They would pay her to fix their car, and I would help. She was appalled when she learned I couldn’t write. I could read perfectly, but without anything to write with I was simply unable to learn. She taught me that, obviously bothered, so that I could write notes and receipts for customers. It felt good to work with the customers, I could pretend I was older and at a job, I could practice talking to other, actual people. They were weird and pushy a lot of the time, but I ignored it for the sake of my own growth.

I started demanding things for my room. A workbench for my own tinkering projects, a couch, a VHS player, books and pens. I ended up being the one that cooked food for myself and her. She always took what I made to her own room and we ate separately, but it felt good to cook for real nonetheless. Sometimes I snuck onto the landline to call some random number. I remember one day she left and I had the chance to look through all her things. I found a wedding invitation with the number of the wedding planners on it. I was so close to calling it, but I chickened out because I knew she would be home soon. She scared me, even though she never did anything. By the time I started registering this as fear, I had seen enough shows of older people with that dark feeling she had to know that disobeying them was always a bad idea.

Those last few years, she gave me textbooks and lots of paper. She said she wanted me out by eighteen, I knew she was going to say that sometime. I would spend long hours poring over the textbooks, filled with writing and information that a television would never cover because of its mundanity. I would burn through the dense books immensely quickly, because if I didn’t I knew I would just wallow in my own sorrowful fantasy. By this time, I already knew that by engaging in my little fake family I was making myself more strange, not less. There was a lot of effort on her part for this final stage of when I lived there. She made absolutely sure I would get into a college and be whisked away into some faraway dormitory. That was the most obvious she showed how much she didn’t want me. It was a hollow life, really, putting in such a major amount of effort to appear normal even if nobody saw. Knowing the one person I saw more than once a week hated me.

If I had been spat out into the outside world instead of into this deeper nothing, I would have been so unbelievably unprepared. I still live without huge amounts of important knowledge. I haven’t learned the proper way to kiss, I haven’t learned why only children use straws, I haven’t learned why people are so eager to touch one another. My heart always yearns to be back, to be in a place where I could host and contribute to a family. My brain knows that I’m better here. Living in a practiced illusion is torture, having to pretend that I’ll ever have an emotionally touching conversation or tender moment is exhausting. In this dark, there are no illusions of that. It’s just me.