I feel like I haven’t properly written anything in AGES. And this here little space in the blogosphere began as a source of therapy for me to just sit and type… rant… share my meager opinions on things… and if someone liked what I wrote, GREAT, and if not, that’s fine by me.
But I’ve not just sat down and properly written anything in what seems like years. I know it’s not been that long, but it feels like it has.
I have been under such a significant amount of stress this year, as we all have. I have not wanted to write in forever. I’m not even tinkering with my characters anymore, and that used to bring me such joy (most of the time).
I have twenty-five cents in one account and twenty-three dollars and thirty-five cents in the other. I opened some veins of credit because I thought I was finally mature enough to handle that… I’m not. My Apple, Amazon and PayPal accounts are maxed. I haven’t been sleeping well so I went to Macy’s and got one of their Hotel Collection super-firm mattresses (the kind you can flip over as well as rotate because I am OVER the single-sided mattresses) and one of those adjustable bases. So now, in addition to my student loans (which I may be able to repay before I die… maybe), I’ve amassed another six grand or so in debt. Huzzah! I have become addicted to Seekers Notes: Hidden Mystery and Design Home and stupidly keep throwing the little money I have away on those damned apps instead of paying off my debt because I. AM. AN. IDIOT.
My mother had open heart surgery on September fourth. She’d been in A-fib since December first of ‘seventeen, I think. She’s had that shock procedure done three times, now, and the second time was the only time it worked (though temporarily). She also had mitrovalve prolapse, and doctors had thought replacing that valve might be the thing to correct the A-fib. It wasn’t. And now her seventy-nine-year-old chest hurts literally as well as figuratively. She thinks she’s failed as a wife, mother, daughter and friend. And the only grandchildren she has, my brother’s twins, live in Natchez, Mississippi. She thinks they don’t want to see her. She thinks my brother doesn’t want to see her. She thinks a lot of miserable things.
I’d always thought she and I were vastly different women, but I’m starting to see just how much we have in common. I miss my mother… the one who could pull herself up by her bootstraps and carry on with her day, making the best of the bullshit. All she wants to do now is mope.
My father had heart surgery on September fourteenth. He’s back to his chipper-cherry self. My mother couldn’t take him to the hospital. She was sorely disappointed that she could not; her brother had come down from Colorado to stay with us for a while, and he and I insisted that she should stay home. So I took my father. I, the one who is phobic of hospitals, did. I managed well enough. Amazingly so.
This year… these maladies… the unnecessary and hypocritical violence of which I see and hear in the news… all the bullshit is wearing on me, and as strong as I am…
My left leg has decided that THIS is the time to rebel. For nearly fifteen years, the spastic cramping caused by cerebral palsy had limited itself to my hands, shoulders, and upper and middle back. About five years ago it increased its area to include my calves.
Two weeks ago, while I lay in bed in the middle of the night, awakened probably because the Tylenol PM or whatever I’d taken that day had worn off, I got a cramp in the left side of my knee. I’d been coping with pain in my knee for about a week, and that pain had begun to radiate into my hip and ankle.
I’d broken a trophy at work the day this fine instance occurred. I suspect that the stress caused by the circumstances of the past few weeks had manifested itself in physical pain and localized, at first, in my leg and then spread out. And then I broke the trophy–not one we’d ordered but one a soldier had brought to the shop for the purpose of fitting it with a new name plate. It’s one of those trophies that had been passed down from soldier to soldier for God knows how long, and I banged the edge of the eagle’s wings on the counter, and a sliver broke off. A sliver. If I’d been able to see better, if my hands worked better, if I weren’t in such pain that day from my damned leg… I couldn’t think past it, yall. I. could. not. think. past. it. I was ready to go home. It was past time for me to do so. I was in a hurry. I was negligent. I broke someone’s things in my carelessness. Something of great value. I broke a trophy. And that night, I guess the shame I’d felt in doing so, the regret, the helplessness I felt morphed into this giant angerball in my knee.
I had such a bad cramp that it twisted my leg in unnatural ways.
Friday, I’ve an appointment with an orthopedic surgeon. I am not looking forward to it.
I feel beaten, yall. In all the years of ugliness I’ve known, I’ve never wanted to be held by a good man more than I do right now, and there’s no one. I can’t even get a jackass to hold me for a bit.
Exhibit A:
Exhibit B:
These conversations occurred some months ago–the former on May nineteenth and the latter on June first.
I’ve been off and on Bumble. I’d signed up for Silver Singles (because I’m OLD, yall), then canceled my membership the next day (and luckily managed to get my fees refunded).
How many men have given up on me? On how many men I have given up?
I’m tired. I feel like roughened, crinkled sandpaper. I’d been thinking, wishing for quite some time, that I can’t cry anymore. I’ve done more crying in the past month than I’ve probably done in the past two years.
Every time I read I gave up on you, I get a little pissier. And pissyness does me NO good WHATSOEVER.
I don’t want to do this by myself. I don’t want to grieve the loss of my parents, which seems so much more inevitable to happen sooner rather than later. And this body of mine… this broken body has begun careening downhill toward contorted, twisted mass. I won’t be able to take it on my own. I won’t.
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