Weathered

Teetering violently on the edge of life and death I wonder if being gone will be less of a burden to those around me if I just let myself fall off the edge completely. It’s been quite some time since I have felt so desperate, so frustrated, so misunderstood. I forgot for a short while how it felt to hate myself so much. Unfortunately that loathing has come back with a vengeance all of its own and I hate myself more now than I ever have before. 

I look at my scars and I wonder why I am still alive. I wonder if next time the scars will go deep enough to end things once and for all. I glance around the house and know it wouldn’t be hard to end this pain and every moment the temptation becomes stronger and more intense. One moment I am looking forward to the future and the next I am looking forward to the end. I am like a yo-yo and I hate it. I hate myself more because of it. 

I can’t win. 

I think it is fair to say that I am very much feeling like I am under attack by everyone and everything. My dreams haunt me while I am awake just as much as they do while I am asleep. I am exhausted all the time both physically and mentally because of the constant anguish that has become the only consistent thing in my life. I trust a few people but when paranoia strikes it strikes deep and I even begin to doubt that. Like everyone is out to hurt me. History is bound to repeat itself so I pull away and retreat into my shell where I feel ridiculously safe from the fear of those around me hurting me the way I have been hurt so many times before. 

I have come to know that I am my own worst enemy, sabotaging myself and the relationships I have with others out of pure genuine fear. What have I become? Why do I feel like being six feet under would be so much better? Who would even miss me and my constant whining? I am at a loss for answers and maybe that’s for the best.

Detaching from those around me seems to be the only thing I am half decent at. I am otherwise useless at pretty much everything tossed my way. With crushed dreams and a broken heart it’s impossible to find the physical and mental energy to achieve anything. I just want to sleep. Sleep sounds good. I miss sleeping all day and night not caring about the rest of the world. Now I am involved and I am in pain.

So much pain…

The tears flow freely brought on by the present and the stresses of the season. I look in the mirror and I am disgusted by who looks back. I am a murderer. I am a bitch. I am gone. I feel the chains tightly encasing my wrists and my ankles, the collar locked tightly on my throat making swallowing a chore. I remember it all and I wonder if anything other than my tears will ever truly be free?!

“The sun shines and I can't avoid the light
I think I'm holding on to life too tight
Ashes to ashes and dust to dust
Sometimes I feel like giving up
Yeah, I say... Sometimes I feel like giving up” –Creed

Fallen

Yesterday I walked down the row in the cemetery in which my grandma lays and I approached her headstone with little emotion or feeling. I wiped the freshly cut grass off the headstone that was blocking some of the writing and I wondered when my grandpa’s side would be filled in. On the stone they have a sketch of their home and property from the lake and it looks like they used my drawing of the property as their outline for the etching. I am not sure how I feel about that.

I still couldn’t talk to Todd; I couldn’t fix the light I placed from being crooked. Too many emotions right now wrapped up in certain people. 

I was able to stand at the cross that marks the grave of a friend I briefly dated when I was oh so young. Someone placed an angel statue next to the cross that marks his resting place and the angel was covered in grass. I had to pick her up and wipe her clean and pull the long grass surrounding his marker and the angel away, then returning the freshened up angel to the place where she was set by someone who cared enough to get it. It was hard to stand over his grave and clean it up, knowing that only a few feet below me was his burnt body from the flames that killed him. 

I care. I care to a fault at times. I care to my own detriment. I hate that about me. I hate feeling responsible, especially for the dead. Each one of them is like my own child. It’s like I have adopted these graves to clean because I don’t have markers of my own to visit and care for. My babies are lost now and forever with no place to mourn except in my head. 

As a mother this has been a very hard couple of weeks for me. My cousin crashed his plane 2 weeks ago on Saturday and amazingly lived. He scalped himself, broke his neck, burnt his feet in fuel, and somehow still managed to get out of the plane and onto the pontoon. He has no memory of what happened before or after. Not until he was in the hospital.

It devastates me because as a mother I can’t imagine getting that news over the radio. Not knowing where my child is and then hearing that he has been located and is alive. The long ride to the hospital and then the longer ride to the city, six hours wondering and worried if your child is still alive, if he will be paralyzed or not, if he will heal, as a mother I cannot imagine the anguish, the fear and the prayers that would have been going through my mind on that journey, as a mother I cannot imagine feeling so out of control.

I have been strong since I found out, until yesterday that is. Now the planes flying over my house give me nightmares and visions of the crash and feelings of trepidation and panic that my cousin must have been experiencing as he realized he was going down. The thought of swimming or even seeing the lake makes me sick, the one place I have always felt safe and secure is the water and now I look at it like a jail cell that has no air. I wonder if he struggled to get out of the plane or if he jumped before impact. I wonder if he was trapped under water. I am thinking about everyone who I have heard of around here who has drowned and the ultimate panic you must feel as you know that you cannot breathe and if you don’t breach the surface soon you never will. I think about the burns on my cousins’ feet and the irony that he was burnt by fuel because he was in the water. Water is supposed to protect us from flames and heat and burns, yet his feet sat in the fuel that floated atop the water burning him regardless of the water surrounding his crash site. 

I personally need answers; I need to know how this happened and why. I need to know so things can go back to normal, so I can trust the planes overhead not to fall out of the sky and hurt anyone else, so I can feel safe in the water instead of fearing what it contains and how dangerous it truly is.

I don’t know how to move on and heal when I don’t know what it is I am moving on from. I wasn’t close to him; if I was I likely would be less traumatized. It’s the not knowing that hurts and cuts so deep. 
He has been released from the hospital for a week already and although he has a long journey to heal ahead of him I am sure he is healing. I don’t understand why I get stuck in these places, with these thoughts, unable to move forward and heal and grieve. This is just another thing that leaves me locked in the shackles that bind me to the place in my mind that ensures that I am never safe.

I wonder how you fall out of the sky and have the dumb luck to be found and rescued before you have even been reported as missing. Right now I wonder a lot of things. I wish I could attribute good fortune to the hand of god but it’s hard to say it was god who protected him when it is the same god that allowed his plane to fall in the first place.

My glass is perpetually half empty.

Laws

I had a rather interesting conversation this evening about human rights, parades, protests and breaking the law to get your point across. It was brought to my attention from the side that doesn’t believe that these things shouldn't occur, that many times these events illicit nudity and other crime that is inappropriate for both adults and children to witness. I can’t argue with that as we have all seen it. 

However, I do argue that sometimes laws need to be broken in order for there to be a demand for change to be taken seriously. When we go back into recent history we have many people who broke laws to help their race or color. An example I used was Rosa Parks and her refusal as a black woman to move to the back of the bus for a white person. By law she had to but she downright refused and because of her bravery and action and breaking the law change is still rippling through the continent as people of different races, religions and sexual preferences all were given a voice because of people like her. 

I also pointed out that many states not only have sodomy as a law but they have also prosecuted and given gay men jail time for having consensual sex. Many straight couples enjoy sex in all of those interesting ways and are never prosecuted because it is easy to just assume that everything is missionary style between man and wife. 

Another interesting law has to do with sex toys, like vibrators, whips, restraints, etc. In many places owning these things for a purpose outside of being a novelty is illegal. This means that if the police bust down your door and find your vibrator in your bedside table or dresser drawer you are breaking the law, but if you have your toys hanging on the walls, sitting out on the shelves as though they were decoration you are fine as this implies “novelty”. This is why many websites or stores say “novelty item only”. 

I believe that what I want to do in my bedroom is my business and no governing force should have any choice in what goes on between consenting adults. It sickens me that I am Christian and I am ashamed of it because of the way Christians are known to pass judgement and hate towards groups of people based solely on who or what that person is. We are taught that “he who is without sin may cast the first stone” yet Christians seems to forget this. We are told “judge not lest ye be judged”, again forgotten. We are told “another commandment I give to you, that you love one another as I have loved you, that you also love one another” and here we sit living surrounded by people who preach these words and know exactly where they are in the bible, people who claim to be Christian but forget immediately that it doesn’t say not to love certain people. It says love everyone and to leave judgement up to God.

Those of us who truly leave it up to God are few and far between. One can only hope that people change their mind sooner than later about race, religion, sexual preference, etc. so that we can live in a world with a united front.

The bullying needs to stop, the anger and hate needs to end, and love needs to be given a fair chance at life. Until then remind yourself of love, even if you’re not religious no one can experience or give too much love. 

You Learn

As I look around the house and yard pondering where to begin the final clean up and what can be packed away now and what needs to wait I think about how alone I am. Two sets of hands are always better than one and the amount of chaos around me, under me, above me and in the sheds outside is overwhelming to say the least. I am also realizing just how much pain I am actually in. My body aches deep into its core causing moans of pain, shudders as my body reacts to the pain and goose-bumps as I am completely overwhelmed by it all. 

It’s been a few days since I wrote that first paragraph, nothing has changed though. I squared away some paperwork and got some things, like my coupons, organized. I am still being the professional procrastinator that I have grown to be. I have dreams of grandeur and no money or means to do any of it. I do feel like I am heading in the right direction by stepping backwards for now. Hopefully, I will be married soon and I can get back to the life I have always dreamed about and wanted. 

Simplicity. Is that really too much to ask for?

They finally placed a headstone on my grandma’s grave. I haven’t gone to see it yet but when I drive by and see it I feel nothing at all. No desire to pull in and take a peek. I feel worse that I don’t care then I do about her being gone. I still feel when I go to visit my cousin Todd that she is watching me and judging me and hating me the way she did when she was alive. I wish she wasn’t buried so close to him because I now feel like our private talks aren’t so private, like she is listening, watching and judging my every thought. 

Sometimes I wonder why I am so dead inside about certain things or people and other times I am crying about something completely ridiculous or that has nothing to do with me. I think the loss of a child is the hardest thing and because I empathize with that I am hurt the most by it. It is so easy to bawl my eyes out to a soap opera because someone lost their baby because I can relate to that feeling, even though they are acting.

I am in emotional turmoil most days of the year because I am thinking of my angels and where they are at and how I am not there. I know they are in a better place than earth but it brings little healing to the hole in my heart where each of them should reside. I tend to believe that people who had the opportunity to meet their children before the child left the physical realm shouldn’t feel so much devastation because they had those moments, those memories that I never got. I know that’s not a fair or rational way of thinking though. I know that loss is loss and it hurts no matter the stage of life. I am envious that I don’t know what my children looked like, what color their eyes were, their hair, and the sound of their giggles. I have no pictures to reflect back on and nowhere to go when I need to mourn.

Is it any easier to have those things? I reckon it isn’t. I reckon that driving by a cemetery every day and knowing your child is six feet under rotting and being consumed by bugs is just as hard as it is for me to have nothing. I would like to think that these parents, these mothers, remember their children in a better light, in the smiles, giggles, and cry’s and pictures. The images emblazoned into their mind for all of time.

I know deep down we are both haunted in different ways. I also know that the guilt and anguish is the exact same. Pain is pain, the cause or thoughts behind it are fairly irrelevant. I see mothers who have lost their children in the last couple of years and how broken they are, how their soul went with their child and I can empathize, I can understand how easy it is to quit caring and go through the motions of life with absolutely no clue or care about anything around you except for the fact that you are in pain.

“Experience is a brutal teacher, but you learn. My God, do you learn.” –C.S. Lewis

MIA- Missing in Action

I haven’t written in a while which is odd for me considering I have been doing more. I guess I am trying to passively avoid how I am feeling and touching on the hundreds of subjects wandering about my thoughts. Sometimes the pain is so great in the depths of ones’ soul that you shouldn’t try and express it, rather you need to experience it, feel it, ride the inevitable wave back to solid ground and have hope that when you hit that you are no worse for wear then when you started. 

There was a storm yesterday. Thunder and lightning most of the day causing my power to be out so I went out, when I returned the rock cuts had waterfalls pouring from them down onto the road, forcing traffic over into the next lane, not knowing if we were going to fall into a watery grave or hit a fallen boulder. It is interesting how we need water in order to survive but it can so easily steal your life from you, in only a few short seconds. That in which we relish, we also fear. I suppose that is what makes each of us human.

As I write this the rain has picked up again watering the plants, nurturing the fruit trees and making the cat look 5 pounds lighter. If only I could look half my size when out in the rain, I would pray for rain every day!!! The cat doesn’t mind the rain though like most cats. She seems to enjoy it, at least the fact that she tries to shower with me makes me believe she enjoys a good rain. The poor thing can’t manage to stay attached to the roof though as the water flows off; it tends to bring her with it. She hasn’t got hurt by this, yet, but her ego sure feels it.

My medication got screwed up rather badly this week, making me feel quite sick. I am pleased that this week I get to rest for the most part and get back on track with things. I hope that I will feel better once everything is back the way it should be. 

I bought all of my plants (I think) for this summer. I have decided to plant nothing new in the ground this year and see what comes up from the last couple of years instead. I bought several different things to fill my big flower pots. I had planned to plant them this weekend but the rain hasn’t been too kind, so I will wait a day or two. A morning glory has already decided where it will be planted as it has started its long ascent up the trellis without any prompting. Growing up, I used to get up every morning and run outside to check my morning glories! By the time lunch came around the flowers would be well on their way to closed for the day and I would have another long night of waiting and hoping I didn’t miss them the next morning.

The water is still cold, I walked on the beach the other day and when I got into the lake up to about my knees the cold started to hurt into my bones. Unless I plan to swim in only six inches of water, the lake is not ready for me, yet. Soon enough I will be diving off of docks and not caring about the cold. I feel natural in water, I feel weightless, and I feel like it is where I belong. I feel like I am me.

School will be out soon and life will become more hectic than I like. Simple things like going to the store become an issue because of all the people and their bratty children making so much noise and closing in on me. The added population here in the summer is enough to drive anyone nuts, never mind someone who already gets bad social anxiety. I have driven to stores before and been overwhelmed by the amount of vehicles in the parking lot and left without even shutting the car off. Anxiety is a very strange thing as it creeps up on you when you don’t expect it, and when you do expect it and feel prepared it never shows its face. It’s like when your car is making a funny noise until the mechanic checks it out and calls you crazy.

The past weeks I have had many cries, many emotions both good and bad. I have dreamt of life, death and everything in between. I have had astral dreams which were just weird to say the least and I have felt pain deeper than I have ever before. Just when it feels overwhelming, too much to bare I somehow muster up strength I didn’t know existed within me and I continue to survive, to live.

I just don’t know why…