Lump

I find myself tangled in the lump of my throat.  Trapped somewhere between my mind of logic and my twisted and aching heart I am dizzy with conflict.  I am worth something.  I am worth nothing.  I am worth more than words can offer.

That familiar lump squeezes and twists my weary emotions as I grasp for a momentary breath of logic.  A thought that reassures what kindness says; an understanding that I am so much more than what they said.  But in that moment their words, their actions; they come crashing down on me as the lump threatens to engulf me.

Pain and bitter bile wash over me and the choices seem so non-existent.  Why else would their hatred spiral?  Why else would a child so young bear such deep and burdened scars?

It must be because I am worth so little.

The secrets that we shared.  The secrets that I keep.  These are the fuel to ignite a burning lump of torture.  I struggle to move on and I struggle to let go while the lump clutches its tiny treasure.  How do I feel my worth when all I feel is the pain wiping away even the smallest doubt that they might have been wrong?

I want to breathe.  I want to feel the full capacity of worth expand until that lump of disbelief is pushed aside for good.  I want to exhale until I know that they were wrong.

Sick

Broken babies everywhere.  Fraught with shredded suffering, nothing soothes or makes them calm.  I am so afraid that I have a very sick mind. 

They scream.  They hurt.  My head throbs with psychic suffering and torment.  I am so very tired of having this twisted space of devastation within me.  Normal is relative but with simple confidence I can say that normal people do not have these images of pain.

Most memories are ones that I can endure but bleeding babies push me towards capacity.  Common people smile at me while daily acquaintances are kind and complimentary. 

If they only knew... 

If they only knew the poison that has washed over my mind.  If only they knew the images that I can never shake.  The oily suds of sin that froth and foam, they will never wash completely clean. 

I wrestle and I twist with these faces until I am overcome with the fear.  My bitter stomach churns as I reach for a familiar metal.  My hands shake with forward reaching regret until the warmth of release stings when mixed with salty tears.

My mind lurches forward as the flashbacks of the past find me unsuspecting.  The mental whiplash leaves me lost as the jarring shock brings me to my knees.  I am begging for an end; a present firmly rooted that is able to withstand the forces of his latent life. 

I am begging for relief before I am sick like him.

Vices

I started this blog with the need to be honest.  Good or bad.  I write a lot about my past, my secrets, my hurts, and a little about my feelings. 

I have a present tense life as well.  However, my present has always been wrapped up in my past.  And my future, well I honestly could not imagine one.  I have never been one to even dream of a day down the road.  I grew up living day to day.  Even moment by moment.

My father's death has changed a lot.  I held my breath with every phone call, knock at the door, even a familiar cologne or voice.  I don't have to do this anymore and it is the strangest feeling.  I have a present life.  And possibly even a future.

So now as I look at my present I see that it is a tangled mess of feelings, numbness, bad habits and addictions.  I have never cared about these things before.  Because I had no future.

Here is the ugly truth.  My husband told me that I am an alcoholic the other night.  I told him that he was full of shit.  After discussing my drinking habits in therapy last night I asked my therapist if I was one and without a taking a breath or even a pause his answer was "yes". 

Nice.

And another ugly truth.  I eat too much.  I guess that's called binging.  And then I throw up.  Purging.  And then I won't eat at all.  And after that I will binge again.  I have done this for years.  My food issues run very deep.  Food is one of the earliest ways that I remember my parents abusing me.

And yet another.  I cut.  That one is pretty straightforward. 

I know that all these things need to stop.  They hurt me.  Some worse than others.  And worse, these things hurt the people who love me.  But I would be lying if I said that replacing these habits doesn't scare me shitless. 

Food.  Alcohol.  A blade.  These things have been constants in my life.  My friends.  What I run to when I'm sad, hurting, numb, lonely.  Even happy.  So I am looking for some new constants.  Healthy ones.

I don't really know what I want by writing this.  I suppose I just want to be honest about where I am and where I need to be headed.

Friend

What's that line... hello, darkness, my old friend...? 

My friend is making a raging comeback.  Yippee.

I do not know exactly what has brought this on but I am knocked down, sideways and can't get up depressed.  Those irritating Cymbalta commercials showing depressed people sucking at living?  That's me minus roaming around aimlessly in sweatpants because I don't wear sweatpants.

I just stay in my pajamas.

I don't have the luxury of sleeping the day away or even lying in bed with my eyes open praying that a spontaneous lobotomy will occur.  I have a kid, I have a job, I have judo, gymnastics, and swim team to attend, and I have a rather important (to me) husband who occasionally would like to see me out of pajamas and showered with a smile on my face.  It's a rough life these days.

The thing is, I do shower, smile and dress nicely.  It's my mind that is still wearing pajamas and perhaps that is where the conflict begins.  I am fucking exhausted and I honestly believe that there is not a soul on earth that understands where I am coming from.  Try as he may, my husband doesn't get it and he substitutes his confusion with anger.  I don't do anger so I just shut up and stay quiet.  I certainly am not talking to my daughter about this and I don't have any girlfriends to call up and bitch about my fucked up life.

So here I am.

I told my husband this morning that I am a really fucked up person and it is really hard to live.  His response was to yell at me that I'm not fucked up.  Right.  Everyone he meets hears voices, sees people who aren't there, and wishes they could carve the feeling part of their brain right out of their skull.  Right.  I'm definitely not fucked up.

Love him.

But seriously, I'm tired.  I walk a mental high wire, balancing with hate in one hand and sorrow in the other.  And then I crash with only my pretend friends to catch me.  The reality of my horrors catches up with me on occasion and now is one of those times.  I can't sleep, I can't eat, I can barely think.  The Shelter is screaming and I can't help those babies enough.  I am getting that familiar feeling that I am not the one made for this job.

What this boils down to is that I hate my parents.  I hate what they did and I hate what they allowed.  That hate is consuming me and I feel myself getting angry so I turn the hatred on myself.  It is easier to hate me.  It is safer.

Until I run out of room for cutting.

And I'm there; I have no more hidden skin available.  This is usually where I retreat deep inside but I'm not OK accepting that this time.  Problem is, I don't know where to go.

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?

Hugs

Lately, many of my thoughts have been surrounding my mother.  I have never given much thought to our relationship or who she was as a person.  Perhaps wrongly, I have given her the designations of... she was mean...she hurt me a lot... she let others hurt me too.  Beyond that, I have thought very little about her.

I was the firstborn.  I have always wondered how she felt when she was pregnant with me.  Was she excited?  Did she dread becoming a mother?  Was she nervous?  Did she feel much of anything?

She always told me that she wished I had never been born, she should have aborted me, I was the result of an affair, I trapped her into being married to my father, and when my sister died she told me that she wished it had been me.  Not knowing what to fully believe, these things she spoke have defined me as a daughter. 

I am someone's wife and that is good.  I am someone's mother and that is good.  I am someone's daughter and that is devastating.

I have allowed myself to think beyond the surface of my mother.  I remember going into her bathroom as a child and spraying her perfume on myself.  It was Chanel No. 5.  I can still smell it faintly.  Having her scent on me was like a hug.  It was the closest I got to a hug from her.  When she caught me smelling of her expensive perfume, I paid.

But it was worth it for a hug from her.

I remember watching her get ready for a party; I was sitting on the corner of their bed. My mother was a beautiful woman.  Thick and straight blonde hair, fair skin, a beautiful smile... I look nothing like her.  My sister did.  I am the lucky one who looks exactly like my father.  Her hair was perfect, her makeup was flawless, her dress was red, and she was wearing her perfume.  She called out a goodbye as she walked past me and they were gone.  No hug, no kiss. 

So I sprayed my own hug.

It's funny; the smell of his various colognes will still make my stomach lurch or worse.  But the smell of her perfume still gives me a warm feeling.  At best, perhaps his evil was different than her evil.  In reality, it is probably because he gave me too many hugs while she gave me none.

More frequently than not, I have hated my mother more than my father.  I also find myself loving him more than I have ever loved her.  I feel badly about this.  My mother was broken far before I came along.  The remaining shreds of her sanity and dignity my father ripped away.  Pity isn't the right word for what I feel.  I try but I cannot put my finger on what I feel toward her.

I just don't know.

Toxic

What do you do when you love someone toxic?

Every time I speak with him, he poisons a little more of my soul. One step forward, two reeling stumbles back. I shouldn't love him. I shouldn't give him a second of my time or even a second thought. I shouldn't even speak to him.

But he calls and I answer.

Maybe today is the day he will tell me how sorry he is; how wrong he has been.

He tells me how sorry he is, just not in the way I wish. Thirty seconds, that is all I gave him. In thirty seconds he has reduced me to his whore, his obsession, his hole.

My head and my heart scream to hang up. I do and I go about my day pretending that I'm fine. In reality, I reek of shame and self-loathing. I am toxic and I fear the fumes will reveal who he has wished me to be.

I hate him. I hate what he did. I hate what he does. Yet, despite my hatred I am addicted to hope. Just one last time, one last chance. I will answer one last time. But deep inside I know what I have always known: he is never going to change. He is sick and he is toxic.

He does not love me. He loves to control me. He doesn't even love the idea of me. I have never even been "me" with him, only an object. From his mouth he spews words and phrases that should never be uttered aloud. Or to your own daughter.