Hello darlings.
It’s the first day of what may very well turn out to be my last year. It’s a premonition I had when I was 16, this early ending. It’s not a choice I plan to make, though the quieting of breath has always had the lure of a silent room after a loud, shouty exchange.
I digress. This premonition occurred when a friend of mine died one day, on her way to a high school football game after getting ice cream. Her name was Whitney. I had a crush on her best friend. She was kind and silly and we were both awkwardly trying to make it through high school. I was 16, she was a year younger.
I aged and she didn’t. I went to group counseling which was a sad joke of everyone sitting around trying not to actually be vulnerable. I said out loud, to my accounting teacher, (who must’ve at some point have been qualified to counsel bereaved teens, right?) that this was my mid-life. That I was 16 years old and had accomplished nothing and that there was not much time left. She looked at me as if I was utterly mad. I knew then though, that 32 was an utter certainty. That the year would mean death. I hope not. I’m just regaining control of my skin and mind. Often times death can mean re-birth. I tell myself that on good days, that rebirth is an option.
That death will be a part of this year, I knew/know as truth in my core.
I sometimes wonder if Whitney and I would still be friends now. I think back on those days and the friends I had and think she was the kind of person I searched for and hadn’t found yet, one of the real ones. I think we would be friends.
So here goes day 1. I will try my best to be coherent, not too self loathing/deprecating or masturbatory. On that last one, aren’t all blogs a bit masturbatory though? It takes a special kind of arrogance to think that little old you could have a damn thing to say that might be of importance to the world.
I guess that I’m doing this – in case that premonition was true. So that my little band of family can have something left if I go. Something they aren’t expecting. And if I don’t die, well I’ll have a record of the bullshit that happened, which I’ve never had before and I forget so much that it might actually be useful.
I spent yesterday – my birthday — at Ro’s. I spent several of the hours I should have been sleeping quelling the urge to run away. I almost ran. I had made the decision. I went upstairs to tell him I was leaving, I had packed and psyched myself up to be pouty and needy and I got up the stairs and he was awake already. I couldn’t have my breakdown fit, because I didn’t want to leave. I just wanted him to pay attention to me. And he did, and I stayed. If ever there was a moment when someone else’s actions changed the course of your life, yesterday morning was one of those moments for me – his awakeness. How simple and innocent.
My loneliness makes me act impulsive and makes me want to guard and run away to lick my wounds in utter self-perpetuating depression. It takes so much self talk to not give into that impulse.
I’m learning new muscle memory now, re-training that reaction. I suppose it will take time, and acknowledging what the actual underlying feeling is, rather than settling for the one my mind concocts to justify my behavior.
Trust and loyalty.
They are very different things, but being able to rely on what we think we know about people is a part of our support structure. Learning that when our parents leave us that they are not leaving forever is the most basic of these moments. There was a moment this weekend where I realized why broken trust is such a hard thing for me to overcome.
My mother went to a beach bonfire, with an old friend who’s family she has sort of been a part of for 40 years. I grew up with the next generation of this family, and while there is no ill will – we aren’t close. I didn’t go to the party, despite being invited. My mother, when pitching the excitement of the event said, I thought we could maybe use it to celebrate your birthday.
Co-opting the event of people who do not love me for a celebration of my existence. That sounds like a terrible, intensely-selfish idea. I am not strong enough to demand others care about me. I didn’t tell any of this to my mother; I just didn’t go.
My mother, and the 15 year old girl who still lives inside her, once she realized I wasn’t going to go – proceeded to tell both her generation and the next that I had some inexplicable falling out with one of the girls there. That I was mad for some unknown reason.
I remember being young and telling lies to make myself the center of something. I remember that brief flicker of feeling included, it must be what it’s like to be popular, to actually be organically included. I have so much frustration woven into my relationship with my mother. I love her. I beg her silently every day to love me back. I can’t tell if my begging works.
It’s midnight folks. Signing off for another day in paradise.
The Forces Underlying 