An Inconvenient Truth.
Careful, Dark mood breaking contents.
I’m sitting in my tub, laptop in hand, and I find no courage to use it. It all, for some reason, feels just like yesterday that I did not give a care in the world and took her for granted. She was my world and I never told her. Now that I think about it, I should have told her everything I ever thought about. But all I can do is write, it’s a little late now. Nevertheless, while hoping for another chance I’ll write…
What can I do if you’re not here? I’ve tried searching for you, and from time to time I thought I found you, but it was never you. At nighttime I’d look at my life and what it would have been if you had stayed. I know I have to let you go and live my own. That’s what hard with stories like ours; the type that‘s already done before it begun; memories strangle me, souvenirs suffocate me, but I use them to survive, I need them to carry on. Perhaps I’ve cried enough.
You said “One day I’ll see you, someplace it’ll continue” You promised we’d see each other again that “neither the heavens nor the stars would keep us apart”
Now that I think about it, I should have told you. So whilst I’m sitting, hoping that you’ll come back to us … I carve:
“We were partners in crime; there was none closer then you and I. You were the one who was going to make me who I should have been. Mother told me so, but no one will ever know. It hurts inside to not know when I’ll see you again. Today or tomorrow? It’s killing me to live in the past with so many regrets. You swore; neither the stars nor the skies would maintain us apart. And while I am waiting for your arrival, I’ll tell the wind to carry this to you soul “our memories keep me from living but often, I need them to survive”
Since she left I read Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton and all kinds of other gloomy stuff. Girl Interrupted; that book that got made into a movie with Winona Ryder. And Angelina Jolie, whose name and role as Lara Croft is too close for comfort. Too much like her, “super-heroine-saving-the-day” kind of shit. And wouldn’t she be upset to know how I’ve been cursing, (even though most of it is just in my mind…and when I do say it out loud there isn’t anyone to hear it…so does it matter??!?)
God I miss her.
It’s hard to lead a life where she has no part… It’s her silhouette just a faint sickening, “beating my heart down-putting it trough a shredder-erasing my smiles” kind of shadow that follows me wherever I go. She’s become an inconvenient truth; what everyone avoids, what everyone has given up upon, and I try hard not to remember but it slaps me rigid every time I look in the mirror. She’s a shadow. Mine.
The first cut was deliberate, desperate.
I needed to prove to myself that I was real - only a real person would bleed. Right?
And if it wasn’t blood that came out of my veins for being so weak, so heartless… then maybe I really was crazy…maybe these kids would after all be speaking the truth… Maybe I wasn’t even here. Maybe I was a weirdo… Maybe she never even left. Or she’d come running and realize I need her, maybe mom and dad would know that I need her.
The second time was horrific, lurid.
As soon as the knife was in my hand I knew it was the end…princesses didn’t have cuts on their arms, princesses didn’t cry, but God! … I needed to prove myself that fairy tales weren’t real. That, Snow White was poisoned, Sleeping Beauty couldn’t care less, and Cinderella was dreamingly sarcastic. Yet, it wasn’t red enough, it didn’t hurt enough, and it wasn’t fair. I’d only been “alive” such a short time, and now I was “dead”. Still standing, still breathing, still bleeding, but lifeless. Carelessly wiping the red away and inaccurately settling into bed.
I didn’t think until later about how funny it is (- you know, funny-strange – kind of way.) That I could be bleeding and still be alive and dead, all at the same time…but I’m getting get used to it. Of course now, it’s not that strange. It feels kind of normal, actually.
The third time was spontaneous, toxic.
I was sitting in my tub, like now. Listening to Billie Holiday’s “don’t threaten me with love”… Dried tears lost somewhere on my cheeks , fresh ones dying on my lips…I was alive and thinking about the way that life is so short and so fast and the whole thing is kind of a blur.
I was hating everything and everyone and it hurt too much and not enough and I needed to rip the pain out of me before it ate me. So I sliced a way out.
Inside my thigh.
But the pain didn’t leave
I keep doing it now, but I have to avoid my cat because he’d smell the blood on me and that’s not the point. I’m not waiting for something to stop me. And I don’t want to die. I’m just trying to make a space big enough so that the pain can get out. It’s clawing at me. I think it wants to go. It’s just up to me to give it a way out.
Plath talks becoming essential like the blade of a knife. Sexton talks forgetting who she is. And I’m envious, because I can never forget, even for a minute, what I’m missing. Who I am. Even when I’m remembering what it was like to live with a sister, I can’t forget that none of it was real enough to last. I wonder if someone else in this world feels like that. I don’t know how to stop wondering, the more I think about it, the worse it gets. I think all the wondering is just feeding the pain, and it’s sitting right underneath my skin, lurking like a monster.
And I know how to take care of monsters. That’s what the dagger is for.
AND writing