Friday, January 8, 2010

Lost

I get lost.  In my own head. 

According to my husband, I have been alarmingly quiet lately.  I don't mean to.  Really.  It just happens.

After a screaming match culminating with said husband telling me to get the fuck out of my head; I told him that I am lost in the darkness of my voices.

I have my friends.  Best friends that I have had for years.  Our friendships have endured the well-worn time and lately I have been spending an increasing amount of time with them.  While I read, sew, crochet, quilt, and even sleep, they are there and we talk.  They are my comrades in a perpetual war; one that never stops, one that has wounds that never heal just right.  They know me and they understand me.

But they are not real.  And that makes me weird and quiet.

I have nothing audible to say.  My voice is locked inside my thoughts, my hurts, my scars.  I hurt but how does one verbalize horror?  Horror in the movies is simply expressed in screams both silent and audible, twisted faces, running, backing into a corner, all until one is consumed completely by the evil.

To say that I am scared is an insult.  I am terrified.  I am haunted.  I live in horror.  I have joked before about what kind of writer I could be and I always conclude that I would be one hell of a horror author.  I love Stephen King yet I can read very few of his books because ironically, they scare me.  However, when I can, I have to wonder what happened to him?  Horror does not come naturally to most human minds.

I am struggling at this moment.  What I wrote in my previous post has sent me reeling.  It is horror in black and white.  Black and white that is vivid color in my memory because it is my life.  These silent times are when depression grows taller and wraps its dense, dark grip around my mind, my body, my eyes.  The darkness is in the corner of my eyes, just out of sight, no matter where I look.

I paint a smile on and talk to people all day long.  But in those same dark corners on my eyes I have to wonder what if they only knew.  And if they did know would they be as lost as me?

Wednesday, January 6, 2010

Angels

*I wrote this along with Nobody.  We share this experience, with her carrying the bulk of the hurt, so it's only right to let her write and share her part as well*

Dead angels.

I have heard that screamed every day and night for years.

There are three of them.  Three dead angels.  I was bad; a whore to be exact.  Tiny orange pills were to keep me safe.  Green ones gave my body a break.  I did not take the pills like I should have.  They made me sick. 

After one dead angel I was supervised.  I became the master of the hidden pill.  A bitter taste swelling under my tongue was worth the deception of a calm stomach.  I didn't really understand the mechanics of the orange and green.  Had I known, perhaps the nausea would have made sense.

Sinner... whore... murderer... hell... bloody images...

Their words, their signs, their chants, their pictures; they seared my young heart.   Perched on a metal chair, next to my angry mother, I really had no idea what to expect.  The room was filled with other anxious women, a few boyfriends, out of date magazines, and somehow all eyes followed a crooked path to me.  I did not belong.  I was just a kid with a really big secret. 

It was my turn as I blindly followed a nurse behind a swinging door.  With a hushed and hateful whisper my mother sent me off alone. 

You disgust me...  I know.  Me too.

In another metal chair I said that I understood what had happened and what was going to happen.  My mother's hurried signature allowed them to take care of my problem.  No one seemed to care how old I was and no one ever wondered how I got into this mess.  They knew what I had known for years.  I was a whore, no questions asked.

Two dead angels later, I knew what was going on.  Tired of metal chairs, The Christians, flimsy gowns, and whispered assumptions, I hid this one.  With no real plan I dressed a little bigger and prayed that something would save me.  And save the angel.

His wandering eyes and hands caught me this time.  She refused to take me.  She refused to be humiliated again.  It was his turn. 

This time it was different.  He was caring and concerned.  He rubbed my back and I was scared.  This angel was older and this was not as easy.  Pain... more bleeding... heavier sedation... stay home from school... I pretended not to hear these medical suggestions.

Quietly the room began to shift.  The walls began to twist and soon I did not mind the flimsy gown, the bright lamp, or the gasping machine.  I was not alone this time.  He stood next to me and stroked my hair.  I closed my eyes and another angel died.

In the car, we did not go home.  I waited in the car and he checked us into a motel.  Relieved that I did not have to go back to school this time, I closed my eyes again and woke up in a musty room, naked on a tortured bed.

He was sitting next to me and as my eyes focused, I could squarely see the reason we were there.  He stroked my face and placed his hand upon my cramping stomach.  The warmth of his hand felt good against my pain.  He pressed harder and leaned in closer.  The care had left his eyes and though I searched, all I could find was lust and selfishness.  I wanted to go back to school.

I closed my eyes again and wished for more sedation.

*I(Nobody)  open my eyes and he is fucking me.  He likes the sloppy remnants of the day.  In and out until his eye squint and lurch up into his head.  Bastard.  He fucks us up and now this.  I fucking hate him.  I am Nobody and I have taken her place.  Enough is enough and now he gets to deal with me. 

He is finished as he withdraws and with a sneer he says that he doesn't have to worry about knocking us up.  What a nice day for him.  I feel like shit so I close my eyes to rest. 

I awake to find his stubby hands running up and down the body.  I try to ignore the pain but it is not going to go away.  In he is as I wince and grit my teeth with pain.  He thrusts harder and I don't know how long I am going to be able to hang on.  With my hands I twist the scratchy sheets to cling to something.  In a quickened moment he is out as I feel the body's insides collapse into the void he left.

In one more moment his face is buried between our legs as he forces them further apart to make more room for his bastard body.  He is there, at the near-center of the pain.  We aren't the filthy one; he is.  I am becoming more and more upset.  I don't do upset but this is just fucking awful.  New secrets are being born today, those that I will have to keep for myself.

My mind drifts away as he continues his play.  I don't understand the point of this or what pleasure he is getting.  He is a freak and I want him to stop.  And now, as if he heard my thoughts, he raises up and I am horrified at the sight of what is on his lips.  I raise up on my elbows and dig my heels into the lumpy bed only to escape into the headboard.  He crawls forward and leans over and towards me.  He forces his face upon mine, lips to my quivering lips, and he thrusts his putrid tongue into my mouth. 

I feel as though we will suffocate and I begin to hope we will.  I twist my head to get away and that makes him fight even harder.  After minutes of eternity, he pulls away.  Hot tears are streaming down my face and I have lost my cool.  I have failed her.  He sits back on his heels and smiles a bloody smile.  I smear my tears away as he leans in again. 

As his lips near mine again, he tells me what I already know.

Taste your baby...

Fuck him.

Monday, January 4, 2010

How

As I consider the New Year, I consider the typical responses.

 A fresh start... a better year... putting to bed a bad year... this year will be better.

I have never seen a new year as anything.  Perhaps an excuse to get drunk and maybe not alone.  That is the extent.

A fresh start is a foreign body to me.  To do that would be to erase the memories, the scars, the voices in my head, the shadow people in the corners of nearly every room I enter.  All are impossible.  Especially when there are many, many memories below the frozen surface of my mind.  Frozen in time; so cold that it hurts. 

A perpetual brain freeze.  I wish for just one day without this pain.

No fresh start for me.  What I can do though, is obsess over the how of my life.  I have pretty much given up on the why.  There is just no good answer there; at least not at this point.

How doesn't have to do with other people.  It has to do with me.  How the fuck did I survive?

There are a lot of awful childhood verses sung; a creepy uncle, a leering step-dad, a secret priest, an angry mother, a lost and groping sibling.  Each verse different yet fraught with painful similarities and fragile coping. 

And then there is me.  And others like myself.  I am shattered and still standing yet I have no idea how I got here or how I figured out that this was a life worth surviving. 

How did I not give up?

How did I put one aching foot in front of the other, day after day?  Night after night?  

How did I barely sit down at breakfast each morning believing that our dance in the dark was a household brand?

How did they know just how far to go?  Close enough to fearful pleasure.  Far enough from impersonal death. 

It is a precarious how.