Prolonging

I need a break.  A respite from my feelings.  I know that must sound strange assuming that most like to feel; it's how they know that they are alive.  Me, my feelings taunt me and remind me that I'm not dead.  Flashback after flashback invade my frazzled mind and body until my pounding heart is breaking in the wake of no relief.

How long have you felt depressed?

I don't remember not feeling depressed...

When was the last time you felt happy?

I have fleeting moments of happiness...

When did the abuse begin?

I don't remember not being abused...

I started seeing a new shrink and those were some of her questions and then some of my answers.  There was a rhythm to my replies which involved prolonged misery. 

I want to feel better so I go to a shrink.  I take medication.  I see my therapist.  I feel and it hurts like hell but I think that I am working hard and at some point it will pay off.  But then there is a lingering suspicion he knew that even after he was gone his evil would still haunt and hurt me.

What kind of person brings a child into this world and shapes her childish life to know nothing but confusion, pain and sadness?  Terror that she longs to stop even after you are gone.  I bet he's laughing now knowing that I'm still pleading with the hurt to end.

Feelings

I have been doing a lot of work with my feelings lately.  I have avoided them for most of my life because, well the bad ones outweigh the good ones. 

The rest of them were fucked or beaten out of me.

I have always believed that my feelings only led to trouble and pain.  A simple feeling stated as a child sent me tumbling down a rabbit hole of horrific pain.  An innocent smile was interpreted to be nothing but filthy desire.  A frown was nothing but blatant rebellion that had to be dealt with.

My thinking is extremely black and white.  Good or bad.  Right or wrong.  But what I'm learning is that feelings don't fall easily into any of those categories.  The classifications that I have used to reason my life into some semblance of order do not work for feelings.

So walking in this grey area is very difficult for me.  I cannot make much sense of what I allow myself to feel and if I do, I get stuck.  The detachment I have felt to my memories is slowly being bridged by the missing feelings.  And that is terrifying.

I have always been able to share, matter of factly, the details I have chosen to disclose.  And I'm very afraid that those details were the easy ones; the ones I could disconnect from and push the feelings onto someone else.

Remember those rabbit holes?  When I find the feelings associated with that pain it's like falling down that hole bound, gagged, and blindfolded.  My logic was my only means of control and I've lost it amongst the feelings.  The only way to climb out of that hole? 

Literally feel my way out.

Celebrate

Today is the fourth.  Every fourth of June we used to celebrate my sister's birthday.  But now the fourth is filled is guilt.  Hurt.  Anger.  Sadness.  Anything but celebration.

She would want you to celebrate her life...

This is the type of phrase often turned by the grieving left behind.  I don't believe that this is true about her and I don't believe she would have ever desired such a celebration.  I cannot celebrate a life so shattered, so damaged, so wilted that it funneled down to one eventual option of death. 

Our lives closely resembled one another until she shot a hole in that toxic fork in the road.  How do you celebrate a life gone by when you can't even celebrate your own?   She's dead.  I'm alive.  I consider myself lucky and nothing more.  Not exactly reasons to reflect, release some balloons or even visit the final marking of her earthly existence.

And then the selfish side... I don't want to fucking celebrate a person who placed so much responsibility, need, and cries for soothing squarely upon my shoulders.  I gave so much but in the end perhaps I gave too much.  When she left she took a piece of me that I cannot recover.  Now I'm left with the scar of death barely stitched together with the thread of hope that I truly did all that I could do.

How do I celebrate a life passed too early?  How do I remember her with anything but painful regret?

Fingers

My mother has the prettiest hands.  When she isn't hurting me with them.

Long and slender with perfectly manicured nails.  Her fingers always seem so skilled to cook, sew, and play the piano.  Those are the things she does when she isn't so crazy and angry.

Today I'm a dirty girl.  He has left his stinging warmth behind and it must be washed away.  Shame has a color and it's red.  I try to hide it but she sees.  I can't pretend that she doesn't already know but it's the game I have to play. 

Look at you... what a dirty girl... you are getting blood on my bath mat... you disgusting whore.

Her words sting just as bad as he does.  I wish her hands would help me.  Comfort me.  Love me.  I stand in the tub of water waiting for her to tell me when it's time to sit.  Her calloused hands touch my shoulders as she forces me backwards onto the tiny corner of a ledge where the tub meets the wall.  My head hits the tiles and my eyes burn with tears.

I am sitting on that little ledge as her beautiful hands force my legs apart at the knees.  Her slender fingers no longer feel so slender.  Her manicure is razor sharp as she plunges into my shame.  I shift my eyes and work to melt into the calm, white tiles around me.

Look at me...  watch what you make me do.

Her manicure is red as she writes my words on the tiles.

dirty...

whore...

I tear my eyes away and feel flush with those tiles.  I sink even further as those cold, white tiles become my greatest comfort.  I feel her hand but only as a glancing touch.  I hear her screams but only as a whisper.  I watch that little girl so far away and I am numb to her hate.

I wish that I could stay this way forever.

Breath

I have never paid much attention to breathing.  It is just something that happens without thought, without reason.  This air is hardly important until it ceases.  Because then we are dead.

I talk very little about my sister.  And even less about those moments prior to her death.  I am still racked with grief and guilt if I allow myself the time to submerge my heart beneath the surface of the day-to-day fine.

She used a gun I owned.  A gun my sister offered to keep because I was too nervous to have a weapon in my own home with a baby.  That perpetual chain of events still takes my own breath away and leaves a putrid grief filled vacuum behind.  Guilt laced air is what I breathe now.

In her final day or so she was not much to look at.  A piece of her skull removed for swelling left her tragic head misshapen and uninhabitable.  It was an unnatural symmetry to watch her chest rise and fall in rhythm with machines.  I knew she was gone yet there she was lying in a shallow and selfish grave. 

I go back to that moment often.  For some strange reason I grasp at the fading memory trying to recall if she ever exhaled the final breath she drew.  I do not know why this is important.  And never mind that it is certainly of no consequence to the circumstances I find myself within today.  But still I wonder.

Did she give something back or did she steal that tiny piece of air never to reciprocate again?

Thinking precisely back to nights in that big, white, and wooden bed I can hear her breathing.  Nearly nose to nose I match my breath with hers and we share.  We share the space and we share our secret burdens.  And we never say a word.

Growing siblings often fight as they learn to share.  But we were forced to share and we did so brilliantly.  We never fought over who was fucking us.  We never fought over who betrayed us.  I held her collective breath and she held mine.  But in the end we did not share survival and I will always wonder why.

We both grew up and with her final stolen breath our secrets died with her.  Every minute of every day I breathe and if I'm mindful I can feel the pangs of the memories lost with her.  She should be turning a year older soon but she never recovered from that last breath of toxic shame she took.