“Lichtenberg Figures”

Graphic by claire evans

content notice: abuse, drugs/alcohol

Sometimes, when lightning strikes a person or when a person gets seriously electrocuted, a pattern is created on their skin. These lines — Lichtenberg figures — start at the spot where the person was struck and branch out from there. The lightning creates a copy of itself on the skin as a signature — a reminder. 

I endured years and years of abuse as a child. I don’t have any physical proof of what happened to me. None of it occurred on the physical level. But people tend to understand physical proof better than a retelling of firsthand accounts, so I will draw you a diagram and you can touch the lines on my hands, on my face. I know what happened. I need you to hear me, to believe me — and so I will hold my arm out and you can feel for yourself. 

My mother was the storm front to end all storm fronts. She was a woman of a million volts — a lifelong addict. She drank, she smoked, she took painkillers by the handful. All of it fueled her. 

She would insult me, my father, and my sibling in deeply personal ways, scream at us just to scream or get drunk and leave us to fend for ourselves. 

She got into car accidents, stole purses from department stores, passed out at the dinner table, went to jail, went to rehab and through it all, she tried to break us. She tried to break me, over and over and over again. 

In perfect circumstances, getting struck by lightning doesn’t happen. It just doesn’t. In the rare instance that it does happen, though, the ideal is that it’s a once-in-a-lifetime occurrence. An accident, a bizarre phenomenon and one that is never repeated. 

We can’t all be so lucky. 

I was struck hundreds of times. I accepted the currents as they came because I was a little kid, and I knew that if I didn’t sit there and take it, things would only get worse. I kept getting electrocuted, and the lines appeared in new places until even my face and hands were littered with them. 

Maybe, for a time, many years ago, there was only one point of origin for these lines. I’d only been struck a couple of times, only had the live wire touched to my skin in one spot. I don’t remember it, but I can imagine — every brilliant masterpiece begins with a couple strokes of paint on a blank canvas. 

When my mother died, she struck me one last time — a crushing blow to the chest, one that branched out to the most remote reaches of my spirit. She didn’t have a will, but she had me. She had her prized possession, her third-page carbon copy. She had a designated recipient. All the current she’d been carrying was shot directly at the center of me. 

This is the way of systems, of cells, of the world at large — energy cannot be destroyed; it can only be passed along. She had no use for it anymore. Someone had to take it, or else it would be released out into the universe as heat, light, and anger. My God, I wouldn’t wish that on anyone. 

One final strike. Thousands upon thousands of volts. For a fraction of a second, I was illuminated with white-hot power, lifted off the ground with sheer force. It hit me so hard I cannot remember the feeling of impact, but in that moment, I became the terminus for all the anger that passed through her. My mother’s electric terror ended with me, in me, because of me. 

The lines started to scar over in the months following her death. A tough web of collagen and sorrow formed around and through my body, my mother’s signature becoming indelibly etched into my skin.

In the same way that someone could determine the age of a tree by its rings,which seasons were hardest, and how well it grew, I could illustrate the history of my abuse through these lines. The full story is illustrated directly on the surface of my skin; no fainter than it was three years ago, the imprint of my mother’s fury covers me in my entirety. I am her living mural. 

Now, though, the lines aren’t made from gnarled scar tissue. The collagen has given way to something sweeter. 

The lines are drawn in glittering ink, and they sparkle as I move, light dancing on my skin in every color imaginable. They’re pretty, not by way of how they were created, but as a function of sheer determination. They’re pretty because I outlived my mother and because I wanted them to be. Because they’re mine. 

They don’t match up with my nervous system, nor trace my blood vessels, but create a dendritic map all their own. They cross and they conjoin and they split in a million directions. 

Sometimes the lines crackle, a little refresher on how they were formed, and it hurts; it’s hard to breathe for a moment. When the moment passes, I look at the back of my hand, and the lines aren’t fresh, red and raw anymore. Little rainbows are refracted back at me. This is how I know. This is how I know that I don’t live like that. 

I don’t live like that anymore, but I did. For more than 17 years, I lived in that state. I will be in my 30s when the balance shifts — when it stops being a majority. I did live like that. I am a direct product of having lived like that. 

The human genome does not lie. It never has; it never will. One half of the matter in my body was made by her blueprint. I am a direct product of my mother. Patented, sold, signed-sealed-delivered. Were it strictly a matter of matching up nucleotides, I would not have broached this subject. There wouldn’t be a point to make. 

I know this, and I contend with this. What I also know, though, is that looking on the cellular level gives you an incomplete picture. Microscopically, yes, I am my mother’s daughter, but in the same way that nuclear fusion creates daughter isotopes.  

It is not lost on me that I was my mother’s daughter. I say “was” here, instead. This is intentional. I am not attempting to erase anything or to disown her posthumously. What I mean is that I was defined primarily by the hold she had on me, by the ways we intersected and overlapped and by the joy she felt seeing herself in the graying mirror of my face. What I mean is that now I can decide how to refer to myself. 

She had to have seen the lines on my skin, the ones she’d created, and I wonder if she felt pride for having marked me so. I wonder if she was grounded or if she felt every shock in full as it passed from her to me. I don’t get to know. 

What I know is that I was my mother’s daughter. I was her great discovery, her lightning rod, her Manhattan Project. 

I say “was” here because I have worked tirelessly not to erase her existence from this world, but to become something that is completely my own. I am committed to reclassifying myself — to renaming myself in my own language. 

However dedicated I am to revisions, a glaring truth remains. 

Energy cannot be destroyed or created. It can move, pass between systems, and transform into something totally incomparable to its original form, but that energy is still there. It still lives, and it still runs. 

Every single volt of my mother’s electricity still rips through me at alarming speeds. An obscene amount of voltage was shot into my chest when my mother died, and I have been carrying it around for three years. 

What I am loath to reveal is that because a great deal of energy still zaps around in my body, I am perfectly capable of shocking someone the way my mother did to me. I am perfectly capable of hurting someone the way she hurt me.

It is a conscious choice I make, every single day, to avoid this. 

I have to perform the conversions. There’s nothing I can do about the voltage within me, but I can transform it, such that it isn’t electric and harmful and violent anymore. When energy explodes from my hands, it does so in the form of love and of light in every color and I know that it will not hurt anyone. 

If you wanted me to, I would place electrical tape over my fingertips. The danger is there — so is the worry. I know it is. It is hard to trust someone whose voice crackles with lightning when she speaks. 

But look closely. Here, on my hand, you can see the lines. Look how small they get, capillaries branching off of capillaries. You can see what happens when someone gets electrocuted once, twice, countless times. I know what it feels like.