Me, A Name I Call Myself

It’s funny, the things we remember, isn’t it?  Most forget what hurts them, choosing to remember only the “good times.”  I’m quite the opposite.  It’s like I was born with this built-in eraser that clears the chalkboard that is my mind, leaving only “Life is pain” written a hundred times in neat, repetitive lines.

Some think I suffer from depression.  Surprisingly, I don’t.  The only mental disorder I’ve ever had was believing in others.  How does one trust nobody, and yet believe their false words at the same time? 

Step right up – ten cents a peek at the Girl Anomaly.  See how she hisses, see how she strikes!  See how she cries.

A walking soap opera am I.  Writer of my own salacious, sappy dialogue.  Casting director of my own fate. 

“You need to take it easy for awhile.”

“I haven’t ever had an easy day in thirty-nine years.”

“C’mon, you’ve had some…?”

No, it’s never been easy to be little old green me.  Things were complicated before I was even born.  I was supposed to be a twin.  They discovered the undeveloped fetus when my mother had a hysterectomy some time later.  It wasn’t until years after she told me that I felt the weight of it. 

And every single day of my life has been filled with questions of “what the hell is so wrong with me that I can’t be loved?  Wanted?”  These aren’t questions that I reached and pulled out of my ass..  These were ideas planted by many, but I’ve always sucked at gardening, so constantly trying to weed them out has been a never-ending and futile effort.

“Here’s something to think about – do we ever learn anything when things are easy?  Comfortable?”

Oh – I do love a challenge.  Here’s your answer, Doc:  Of course we don’t.  I’m the Diane Chambers of learning – the perpetual student on a never-ending quest to “find” myself.  There isn’t a day that goes by that I don’t learn something about this big, bad world.

Do-re-mi…  Connect the dots for you and for me…

What I find is that most of what is learned is only a more painful truth than the day before.  I told a friend tonight that I may have recently discovered the identity of a stalker I had from twenty years ago.  He was my first. 

A girl never forgets her first. 

“Okay, so what did you learn?  Why does it matter?”

I’ve learned that if you’ve ever been watched.. if you’ve ever been followed… obsessed upon.. if you’ve ever been the unwilling desire of someone, when “crush” becomes “destroy…”  you’d never, ever, ask “why does it matter?”

Being haunted by such things is very much a chronic condition.  One that can be managed, treated, and medicated, but rarely cured.  I have so many ghosts, the closet door won’t ever close against their ghastly screams, their outreached limbs trying to pull me in. 

Do we ever learn anything from calmness?  No, it’s the storm that we remember, not the calm before it. 

And that will bring us back to do…

God's Anthony

I really don’t mean to seem selfish here, but is it too much to ask that people I care about take a rest from dying for awhile?

I see the quizzical or sometimes blank stares when I take my firm stance on how everything happens for a reason, yet refuse to give someone named “God” credit for it.  The only thing about God’s Will I ever took a shine to was the song from Martina McBride. 

Just before the holidays a few months ago, I came across an old phone number scrawled on a cardboard coaster in a box of personal notes.  It was a number for a friend I hadn’t spoken to in over a decade – don’t remember the whys or whens, but that it was some silly argument or other.  About five years ago, I’d asked the one friend Lisa and I had in common if she knew her whereabouts, as my searching online had come up unsuccessful.  Dori said no, they didn’t speak anymore.  This past December, I had a renewed desire to find Lisa, to know where life had taken her.  It was intense, and weighed on my mind for weeks.  Another search of all the social sites turned up nothing.  Not sure why everyone is so paranoid about The Power Of Google – I can’t ever find shit when searching for anyone.

So, one night about two weeks ago, I’m talking to Dori on Facebook, and we’re reminiscing about the good old days of the bar she worked at and I frequented.  “You know, I still can’t help but wonder about Lisa.” I typed.

“She had a stroke about a year ago.  In fact, she died just last month.” 

*          *          *          *          *

It was a few days before the numbness wore off that I could text my minister friend, Anthony, to ask “Do you believe in God’s will?” – already knowing his answer, but wanting him to ask why I was asking. 

The next day came the answer: “Yes.”

And his ball hadn’t even begun to roll yet. 

I still find it so ironic that I have mad love and infinite patience for a man of the cloth.

It was a week before I received a call from Anthony, telling me he’d been in the hospital for the past several days, with a neck fracture, and his cryptic message lured me to a place I dread more than anywhere:  “I’ll explain the rest when I see you.”  The next day, my frustration taken out on the hospital staff wasn’t all about the revolting parking situation.  The clinical smell, the lurching elevators that only seem to exist in this house of horrors, the heater blasting dry, useless air throughout the rooms in an attempt to warm the patients that really did nothing but make me wonder who didn’t know it’d been 75 degrees outside that day?

Oh.  The people stuck in this place, that’s who.

God’s will.  Had Anthony not had his neck ripped apart by his quack of a chiropractor, he’d not have learned he has cancer. 

Sure, he may have found out at some point, but not “in time.”  In time for what, I haven’t a clue.  He’s explained the prognosis to me with a weak smile on his handsome face, citing the Lord’s grand design for him as his faith that things “will be alright.”

Understandably, he wasn’t asking why I was asking.

The Blues And The Whys

Elton John - I Guess That's Why They Call It The Blues

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I guess that’s why they call it “the blues.”  It seems that your whole world is shaded by blue trees, blue clouds, but never a blue horizon.  Kind of like how, even in the hottest part of summer, it always seems to rain at a funeral.

I’ve been saying for a while that I need to take some “me” time.  It’s been a whirlwind couple of years – putting myself out into the world after a long absence, then in typical fashion, realizing I overdid it.  It started off with writing, then realizing, then came the editing (while at the same time learning, in therapy, not to edit), the organizing, the teaching, the friending – with all of that comes responsibility, and when all of that becomes too much, I’m left with a big fat pile of failure. 

How do I continue to write about myself without ever getting tired of hearing the sound of my own voice?  It’s not easy.  It takes work.  So when you also wonder why I spend much of my time with online fraternization, posting on the high-profile walls of strangers, networking with people I may or may not like – it’s much for the same reason as anyone else.  It’s my work.  It’s what I do. But I get frustrated, just as anyone else does, when my work, my words, are not appreciated.  I rant and rave about people I’ve never met, which unnerves my husband to no end (this I know from the argument we had last week) and boggles the minds of friends whom I’ve known for decades. 

It’s a good thing I’m not a doctor – I couldn’t ever be objective enough.  My work becomes quite personal at times – as personal to me as my past, which is never far from my present.  Friends that may be scattered pages in a wind that is constantly swirling about in my head, dancing through the gray skies that are my thoughts – I carry them like the blood in my veins, always. 

This is why it feels like another razor slash to the skin to learn that another one of these friends has died.  All I could do was stare at the screen in horror when the words flashed before me.  “She died – just last month in fact.” 

Ouch.

And it’s been too much time on my hands in recent days to sit, and think.  Death, rainy days and thoughts about both are a lethal combination, it is not recommended for the weak. 

The world should fear the day that I am weak.  Like the apocalypse, it is coming.  Pin all the dates on it you want to, you’re never going to see it coming, and like the earth, nothing will never be the same after.