18 Years of God Damn Bullshit: A Memoir

New Era 2/5/22

Today I walked into a new era. I noticed it when I went outside for the first time since yesterday and saw the sun. It looked brighter and I could feel a freedom, a release. I felt I was ready to let her go and leave her in the ground to be happy and live my own life like my family and everyone else who is out there living without her renting half their head out. 

I clung to her as soon as I realized this. I want to let her go I want to be happy in theory but I’m still just not ready for it. She was my whole life for my whole life so to speak. Letting go feels like being picked up and dropped in a whole new setting and I hate change. I get uneased by it even if it’s good change because I can’t handle the constant uplift. More than positive change I want stability. For fucking once stability would be nice. 

If I can be happy without her in this world what does it mean? That we were never soulmates? That we were never two halves of a whole like I’ve felt in my bones since day one? Who am I if I am not a portion of her and her of me? My face is gone from me then. My blood is discarded and my hands are unassembled. If I am not the compilation of bits and pieces like I used to believe, then what am I?

I used to think myself something. A writer, a poet, a weirdo, a ghost. I used to think I had purpose in caring for, in holding rather than being held.

“Grant that I may not so much seek to be consoled as to console; to be understood, as to understand; to be loved, as to love.”

That is the prayer I said the day I found out she had died. It meant so much to me then with that, “Continual inability to make sense of the pain.” I knew what she meant when I read it. I think of her posts much like little notes she left. Small signs she might’ve posted thinking I’d see them in time. Me or anyone. 

They would never see her because they stopped looking a long time ago. I’m sorry you died that way. Without the world looking when you were born to shine. I know that need to be seen, we all possess it in some light. Not so much to be watched as to be understood, to be seen in the sense of being known. I crave it. You used to know me mother. You used to know my face and name, you used to know what I felt, and what I wrote. Maybe you even knew too much. There was a time after that when you didn’t know me and it hurt because I wanted you to. I wanted you to see my pain, my anger at how I’ve been wronged in this life. But I think you couldn’t see it anymore because you were doing the wrongs. Not all of them, but much of them. And though I don’t blame you for this any more than I blame my brother for ratting me out as a child or my work for having to get done, there is a cavity in the place we hold. A dark spot that will never earn back because you are gone and we never got to speak of it.

I’m hoping to avoid this with my father, but it’s looking like I won’t be able to for a while still. For now we are like acquaintances, something for which I am both dissatisfied and accepting in. I want to bridge the gap but without acknowledgement there will be no understanding, and without healing there will be no forgiveness. It will take me time before I am able to stop being hurt over the ways he has left and invaded my life since I was younger. I know this was partially your fault and partially not. I can blame you for manipulating me because you always wanted to hold me closer but I can not blame you for the way he left, and certainly not the ways he has pushed me away for fear that I would hurt him again. 

You were broken and pieced yourself together haphazardly for most of your life. You were not perfect as most people who learn dysfunction are not. You learned incorrect lessons, many for which I’ve been forced to pay for. In this respect I have adopted much of what you left behind. I would not get letters, I would not get heirlooms or leftover clothes and little household belongings like some would come to expect from a loss. I do not think I want them though. Of course I want them but would they make the loss less painful? Would they make losing you more real? I think it would hurt to see the clothes you wore just two years ago. It would burn to know how alive you were just a moment before you stopped breathing forever.

I forgive you. Again. I forgive you for having me at 19 instead of getting an abortion, I forgive you for abandoning me as a child, I forgive you for stealing away my adolescence, I forgive you for hurting me then stuffing me full of apolagetic love. I forgive you for turning the knife inward because it just hurt too much, because I have felt that pain, regardless of how you’d deny it because there’s no way anyone, especially not me after all you’ve done, could feel pain on such the level you have. My body is not worn, my mind is not fractured, but I have known pain.

You have caused me pain, I have experienced loss and trauma and mental anguish the likes of which have drove me to the knife many times. And nearly every time I’ve somehow managed to keep myself here, to measure how much I’m willing to lose myself. That does not make me superior to you, I think it just makes me strong in my own regard. You were strong, perhaps stronger than me for the years you have survived until you couldn’t any longer. I wager I can do what you couldn’t though. Maybe this is petty, but I do not care. I can and will outlast you because you can not bring me with you to where you've gone, not yet. I do not want to live, but I have to. It is this drive somewhere to keep my heart beating for no sake other than instinct. It keeps me breathing as I sleep, and makes my feet move to new places even when I’m terrified to take another step. 

I cannot be afraid of this world even though I am. I am afraid because of you and her and him and so many people I can’t expect apologies from because I know they will never admit they were wrong in the first place. This makes me feel as though I am not worth an apology sometimes. Sometimes I question if I was the problem but I know this can not be true because if it were it would shatter my world. If I deserved every bad thing to have happened to me then I really should off myself. I will keep the balance. I will maintain stability until I feel I can step off my carefully worded narrative and find whatever other truth I can accept. I can never know if it is the final answer. The curtain is continually lifted and I am continually changed. As I live and breathe I take in newer perceptions and beliefs until I find the one that makes me glow, the one skin the cloak of many colors that is the very best of me. I will find it from somewhere deep within my blood, some truth so basic and human it will be the last thing I learn of my reality. There will be one life I live this time, I can not think of others after it.

I search for that truth I hope to find somewhere in the middle. Not too soon before I have found meaning yet not too late that I would give up beforehand. The truth that will settle me into my personhood like a perfect reclining chair ripe for old age and retirement. It will be the reason to accept my life as it were and as it is before I accept whatever it is that will be my end.

In my life I have many times thought it to be the end but it’s so funny how it tricks you that way. You accept death and again it does not come to pass and you think, “What now?”

I ask again: “What now?”