Ill prepared

I feel like I got dragged out the womb, not even born yet. They said I came forth with a spray of blood, and maybe that’s fitting for whatever I am. I didn’t ask to be. It feels like a cosmic joke, one that’s not even funny. I’ve spent a lot of days in this room. Ticking time away, waiting. People wait for special events, yet here I wait for time to pass me by, for time to run out. But it doesn’t. I haven’t waited long enough yet.

I remember the black and the people crying. “I don’t know her”, I thought, “but she seemed like a bitch”. I was 8 and people kept introducing themselves to me like I would remember or care. I don’t know what they thought. I wondered then how you become so bitter and angry and end up dying that way, but now I don’t wonder anymore.

I’ve laid bare to enemies, screamed at gods, fucked to oblivion, yet still it feels like not enough. There’s this empty, sinking feeling, like everything important got swept away with the tide. Each day is a cold morning at the beach where the wind blows the sand and it stings your face, backlash for some unpaid karmic debt I didn’t know I owed. Maybe I owe something, maybe I don’t. Maybe there isn’t a tally and it’s all in my head. Probably.

A tiny cat died and now I should explode the universe, I think. Daily. A big red button. I can lay here in this bed, know things but not change them. But maybe I want to change everything.

I know my parents set me up to fail. Belittled and picked away at, because they had no meat on their own bones to pilfer. They stole from me instead. I paid the pound of flesh, and I feel enslaved by it. I don’t blame them anymore. They’re too stupid to know better. Self awareness is a constant state of pain, and who would want that?

A masochist, probably. Maybe that’s what’s wrong with me. But does it matter? I just want to shed my skin and start again, but then I realize it’s an infinite loop. Nothing is ever complete or finished. Nothing is set in stone about me. I can shift and change and become what I need or even what I don’t. It hurts. Each change is worse than the one before it, each step an agony I think I can’t take or do again. But then I do and I surprise myself. And I look back and laugh and say, “they were wrong, don’t you see?”

I want to break them like window panes and hear them shatter. Like throwing glass bottles down the recycling hole. But the unwilling don’t learn, do they? It’s a waste. Lesson not learned. Metamorphosis abandoned. Forever little lumpy caterpillars with no ambition, no illusions of grandeur. Maybe that’s my problem.

I left therapy again because it was the same. The same as the one before it. I see things I didn’t before and I don’t like it. I’ve spent too much time here contemplating. The ceiling is giving me answers. It’s written in the spackle that’s shaped like little animals if your brain is melty enough.

I’ve been dreaming. Three nights in a row now. People from the past, tiny crawling bugs under my skin. They seem like the same thing. I had another one last night. I don’t even remember now, but I was attacked by something and woke up sweating and anxious. It’s strange that all these ghosts decided to haunt me at the same time, like I’d forgotten or something. I don’t forget.

My friend’s sister would always take off her clothes. She would start talking to me as she removed her top, pulled down her underwear. I remember being afraid and confused all the time and that she would always bully me, yet find excuses to sit on the bed next to me while she carefully, slowly, removed her clothes, and posed and asked me if I thought she was pretty. I was 6 years old and thought she looked like some ancient, marble statue—long and thin and pale. I liked the way she smelled and I wanted to touch her. But I also wanted to push her into the river and see if she’d drown. She’d be out there too sometimes. Always taking off her clothes, or barely wearing any. She’d walk along the rocks and startle me.

Then one time she told me my friend was out in the woods and I believed her. All I found was a pile of bloody, white feathers. I ran across the bridge by the river and looked down into it. I wondered what ate the chicken. Maybe the weird sister did. She talked with glee about how the neighbor would chop off the chickens’ heads and they would run around, aimless bodies flailing about, no brains to be had. Sounds like real life.

The creek flooded once. I used to wish it would wash them all away. I guess that’s what happens to a family when their mom spent her childhood getting hit with a belt and stuffed in a closet.

I want a life that’s different. I’ve had so much in so little time. It’s just a past of landmines. Going back feels like a death sentence, but not a quick kind. Maybe I’m a coward for not revisiting those things. Fuck. I don’t know. I want to move forward, but I have to drag so many chains. I want to let go, just hold onto what matters, but every shackle seems attached to something else.

I was so determined before. But now I too am bitter and angry.

Cold

Do you ever feel like you stepped back? You’re suddenly where you never thought you would be. I thought about that today, looking out the window, watching the shapeless white go by. This is a place I could never see myself. Every day can be treacherous. It’s cold and uncaring, a flat expanse of nothingness.

It’s a white out. You can walk outside and die. I think about that every time I get sad, that I can open the door and lay out in the snow and die if I want to, and it would be of no consequence to this place. Another death, something to feed the scraggly animals that have defied the odds.

Would I sit here in this house? Not leave for a week or two because the weather is too bad? The isolation appeals to me somehow. The cold, cruel grip of it is so familiar. I can see now why she chose here. I never understood before, and even asked her today. She said the “independence” was what she loved and why she stayed.

She gave me her will today. And I had to think for a second how it could be. And would I stay too? To escape? To get away? Because that is what this isolated, tiny little house is. She ran away from it. She ran from the reality of it all, to the actual reality.

I had a dream I was on the run. I was being pursued. I ran. I hid. I did not want to face what was coming, whatever that even was.

You are all you can rely on, is what this cold place seems to say. I guess you can call that independence, can’t you?

The right thing

It’s hard when it feels like you’re time traveling to the past, going toward something you don’t want to do, but is the right thing to do. I don’t live my life for other people anymore, but I did, once. A long time ago, I did whatever they told me to do, acted and behaved as was expected of me.

And now it feels like chains and confinement, and different parts scream and cry out more than others at the injustice of such a thing. A promise was made, yet in this moment it feels broken. It was a promise I made myself to be myself, and I’m the only one that doesn’t break them. But here I am, breaking one.

My therapist was right, but it doesn’t matter. regrets come with death, and I will have none of those. There are things for me here, but only if I am open to them. I could use it to heal or use it to lament and suffer, or perhaps even both. Time dies and worlds change, yet something inside never shifts.

It holds strong, for reasons unknown. I feel I must do this thing, something more than just “right” says so. Something deeper.

Maybe in a few months I’ll know what it all means. But something in me thinks this could be the last time I get to see her. If there are debts to be settled, the time is now. I can only hope that I am wrong.

Please be wrong.

Parts

They glued my incisions instead of stitching. It’s tempting to peel the glue and see what’s in there. They gave me some photos, just a bunch of wet, pink insides that remind me I too am mortal. I’m glad it’s done. Nothing can grow here now, and that’s just how I prefer it. However long this line has gone, I’ve burned it through at both ends. The only child, the only heirless child. It all ends here, as they say. It makes me smile. I’m free from that which binds. The blood is all mine.

Pain is such a close friend sometimes

Even my teeth hurt. My jaw. My head is pounding. It’s hard to type. My spine is on fire and my legs feel like they’re being prodded inside with daggers. It’s been hours and it just gets worse. Bodies are a prison.

A strange feeling

I got my biopsy back, and it wasn’t cancer. It was a relief because that is one of the ways I don’t want to go. I’ve seen too many take years and years of suffering to go, and I hope that for once, my passage in this life can be done without my self awareness or pain. Just gone. That sounds like a fantasy. When it gets too hard here, it’s a comfort in the dark, that at some point, it will all be no more.

It’s been a lot of paperwork and worry, lately. I’ve realized that worry is just a state of mind. Oddly enough, I’ve been compartmentalizing better than I ever realized I could. Whatever comes, I will just have to face, like all the things before it. It may go in my favor, or it may not. All I can do is try.

I know bad things are coming. I can feel them, like how your skin prickles when it’s about to storm. I have so much trouble admitting fear. But this is a different time, and I am changing. I am afraid, but I am steady. Death is coming, but I’m not sure who it is taking. I expect it will surprise me. I sound like a lunatic—like a crazed fortune-teller fear-mongering, but deep down, I believe it. The feelings keep telling me and I’m afraid.

I’m afraid because they keep being right.

I know I can’t change things, not really. But I do love to lieutenant Dan it, and scream to the storm and yell at god. How else can you quell that hopelessness? There must be some pleasure taken in this life, even if it is in one’s own misery.

Repeating old mistakes

This therapist seems a little better, though admittedly I’m not hopeful. I think I’m just going along with everything for now, waiting to see what will happen. I still feel like there’s some sort of otherness that I may never shake. Or maybe I’m too caught up in my own visions of grandeur, the ones that make me think they couldn’t possibly know anything I don’t. But if I truly believed that, I wouldn’t be trying, would I?

I want something else. I feel adrift. And instead of fighting it, I’m content to lay listlessly and let the tides take me somewhere new. Wherever they want. Somewhere far away. I’ll dry out in the sun. My skin will crack and blister. The salt will sting my eyes. But it just doesn’t matter sometimes.

I’m waiting. I know I’m in the eye of something. It’s unsafe. But so be it. Let it come.

What lesson is this?

I feel like I can’t hold onto anything for very long, not with any real conviction. Because, like everything else, it gets ripped away. I feel like I’m paying a debt I don’t owe, or being punished for a crime I’m not guilty of—yet the catch is, I get to always feel guilty regardless. I didn’t do it. I could write it in my flesh, but it makes no difference to the universe. Maybe it laughs at my misfortune. More than likely, it feels nothing at all. We’re just apes on a spinning rock in space, and of what consequence are our pointless little desires and needs in the face of something as monumental as that? A grain of sand on a beach, I’ve heard it said. The spectrum of that feels overwhelming. I want to be more than just a grain, more than just a piece of a whole, but yet we are what we are, aren’t we? We can fight and rebel and scream contrary, and then write a new reality in our sad little projector-brains and hope that it sticks and the mindwashing is thorough.

The new therapist gave me a book to read and I feel insulted. As though picking up yet another book hadn’t occurred to me (hilarious, after I spent last session asking for practical approaches rather than books; if I wanted to read my way to a degree, wouldn’t I just do that?). More talk and no doing, it’s the way of things, seems to me. Guilded promises to rope you in, but all bottomless lies.

The resurrection

Did you think you were funny? Did you think I wouldn’t catch you in a lie?

Look at you writing letters to me. And all that flattery. I forgot how frustrated one can get when young and in possession of a pair of testicles.

I’m amused. And I’m so fucking dead inside, I’m going to rip your heart out and eat it in front of you.

Not for any reason.

Simply because I can.

Let’s see how much more you can grovel first, though. And send the package. I do like presents.

A rebirth and a death

I wandered away from the pain for awhile. My mom had a stroke and had some damage, my cat died. Everything feels upside down. I can’t tell if my emotions are slipping or if I’ve insulated myself so well, that I can’t hear my own screams.

It’s weird how something so small can hurt you so much. It’s made me realize how much stock I placed in a small animal, something so fragile. Everything good seems to leave. I don’t really know what’s left after. I get these short little bursts, and then it gets taken. And I ask myself it if it was worth it.

I know he was. He’s one of the only things, and that frightens me. I’m sad I couldn’t be with him that whole time while he was scared and alone with a bunch of tubes keeping him alive. He died so fast. I’ve heard that the brain can still process sound for a short time after death, maybe just seconds. I don’t know if that’s true or where I read it. But I whispered in his tiny ear, and petted him until he went cold, and his reflexive breaths ceased. I petted him, even when he was limp and they carried him away, just like he was sleeping.

My poor little thing. I wanted more for you. You deserved more, and longer. I’m sorry it didn’t work out that way. I’m sorry your life was so short. I tried to make it full of love and happiness. I tried to give something in this awful place some kind of kindness. I wanted you to feel warm and safe, like I’ve never felt. I wanted to give one tiny life some kind of perfection. I know perfect isn’t a real thing, but I like to think we got pretty close to it, that cat and I.

Even the deaths I’ve seen, the human ones, they didn’t hurt like this. They didn’t hurt like this, because I’ve realized I have no intention of being vulnerable with people. I see no reason to. Why give precious energy to man, when you can give it to grateful beasts? Tiny things that love you just for feeding them and giving them affection.

My roommate made this horrible sound. My mom made the same sound on the phone when I told her. I had to say it aloud because he didn’t understand. I said, “he’s dead, he’s died. That was his last breath.”

I think I made that sound too, deep inside. But there were people near, and that sound, that awful sound when you’ve learned something precious has been taken, is like a siren call to the predatory. I hide my pain. I hold it close. Sometimes it’s the only solace here.

I miss him galloping around and being underfoot. Sleeping in the crook of my arm so my back got stiff. I miss having him sit on my lap when I cried. Now there is no comfort but my own. And I know I won’t seek it out.

Comfort died in that room. Now the walls feel like they close it. Everything is sharp and jagged. They told me I had to go the path of the Hermit. I just didn’t know it would be so literal.