I've had a fairly easy life all in all. No massive tragedy, no particular long-term agony, nothing you'd think of as the Real Bad Stuff. But I did realize something today: There is not one person on the face of the Earth who I can give myself to completely. Maybe that's why I have dogs, the whole unconditional part of the love would be lost on me without them.
Don't get me wrong--something that seems to be going on a lot around here just now--I have a husband who loves me, kids who are capable of being spectacularly amazing, and a few people who smooth the edges for me from time to time. (Telling perhaps that none of those people inhabit the same time zone as do I.) But none of them could stand me without a mask or two on my persona, none of them could face what I see in the mirror. Maybe it's that way with everyone and I'm just late to the reality party. I'd like to think that's not the case, but evidence over the past 24 hours points in the glass-half-empty direction.
Yes, I'm feeling sorry for myself, and pissed, and disillusioned, and paranoid, and everything on either side and in-between. I guess that's what you get when you have a flat tire, ride a rim to a closer point of abandonment, walk home, then discover someone you considered a friend has given you a verbal rim job without benefit of lubricant. Maybe I deserved it, maybe everyone does, or perhaps no one does. Who knows? All I can say for sure is I really don't have a friend I can count on for anything, no matter what. But, by the same token, I cannot say for sure whether anyone would write my name down on that blank of their own life story either. Life's closer to Mad Libs than we would perhaps care to know.
I don't know what happens next. I feel like it's those ten years of torture in school again, like the decade I don't remember. The time I was afraid to speak, and to share, and to feel. I wish I could throw my phone away, change the number, go into the Witness Protection Program, or at least change the locks on my heart. I wish I could unknow a lot of things, and I really wish there were things I'd never admitted to anyone in a moment of misguided affection. I need to kick the vending machine and unplug the computer, take the card out of the DVR and wait five minutes, change a battery somewhere. Re-boot, as it were.
But there's never an easy way out with people. People are messy, fussy things that require constant sunshine and watering. They don't take a stormy day well even if you really need the cool-down. They won't just wither quietly if you ignore them, rather they become the plant from Little Shop of Horrors. Charming mo-fos, aren't we?
And there's this dumbass "People's Distemper" I've decided to come down with for some reason. Talk about charm, it's like having a lobotomy without anesthesia, like Alzheimer's without the grace of being oblivious. You know exactly what's happening to you and you still can't do a damned thing to change it. You can't walk out of the worst movie you've ever seen, you have to sit there and watch the cast of bad actors with unrealistic emotions parade past for day after day with no relief. It's your own one-woman show from the screenwriters in Hell.
But you know what? There are people out there with Real Problems, with scars and afflictions you can see. People who cry when they're wounded. But those of us with "mental-emotional-chemical-hormonal" illnesses are invisible to The System and to each other. We don't scream when you shoot us, don't bleed when you take a stab at us. We're more like the fish you pull out of a mountain stream: We just stare at you quietly with our mouths open, gasping for a reason to explain what's happening, flopping around in seizure until we finally suffocate on the irony of all we thought our lives could be.
Or not. Whatever. Screw it.
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