The Weeds

I grew up in a meadow.  A beautiful meadow with high flowing grasses, flowers that tickled my nose, and buzzing bees that filled the atmosphere with music.  The sun glowed down onto my freckled cheeks.  My blond hair blew up into the bright blue sky.  I remember it clearly.  I remember love and happiness, despite the circumstances.  Mom and dad made sure I ate and when it was cold, dad would have given me the last blanket in the world even if he had hypothermia and I didn’t.
That’s always been the way I have lived my life.  The bright side girl.  Years ago I sat in a psychiatrist’s office next to a man who accidentally killed his son.  His wife was crying next to me.  His other son was crying next to me.  The psychiatrist looked at me and said, “Nicole, you are his little ray of sunshine.”  I looked over at the man who took the life of his son unintentionally and he suddenly had a smile on his face.  The first smile I had seen grace his face in a long time.

I went throughout my life skipping like one does while playing hopscotch.  I missed the places where I wasn’t supposed to step and I stepped exactly where I was supposed to step.  And now that I’m older I realize how lucky I was, at least in that regard.  It was easy to repeat my parents’ mistakes given my upbringing.  Mom and dad were never around because they always worked hard, long hours in factories and cold docks.  Mom’s fingers were cracked and dad’s back always hurt.  They weren’t perfect.  They did drugs, dad was an alcoholic through a long portion of my childhood.  Our house was in shambles because they worked so hard for nothing.

But somehow I always smiled.  I earned the nickname “giggles” growing up.

Well, universe, now I am twenty-seven and things have changed drastically.  I am no longer in a meadow, as the grasses all dried up and burned up.  I feel as though I’m sitting in an uncomfortable chair in the middle of this dried up meadow because it all hit me at once.  It’s like a criminal entered a bank that I was in, hit me over the head with a bag of bricks, left with my money, and no one in the bank even batted an eye.
Okay, let’s recap.  My parents did drugs.  My dad was an alcoholic.  My mom had me while she was married to another man.  I grew up in a house with water damage, leaking pipes, mold in the basement, cracked lead paint everywhere you’d look, broken windows, broken doors, stained everything.  There were dad’s little white pills, the briefcase under the bed, drunken idiots falling all over the living room, nighttime trips to the park in my onesie so dad could get the paper bag being passed through the car window, mom crying on my bed.

And I’m going to be blunt.  I have also been through more than my fair share of hell through my adult life thus far.  And it hurts.  It makes me feel like there is something seriously wrong with me.  There must be, because I am the common denominator.  I feel as though I have done everything in my power to escape this terrible path that I was born into.  And recently I have given in and tried accepting the fact that I won’t.  I have to accept the path, but that is just as hard as living through it, if not harder.  I am not okay with any of this stuff that I have had to live through.  I didn’t ask for it.  I tried hard to be a good person.  I tried hard to be normal.

And now I’m at a point where I look in the mirror every day and hate the person staring back at me.  The woman who isn’t worthy of a normal life.  And I have finally given in.  I am not “giggles” anymore.  I am sad all of the time.  I have cried more in the last past year than all of the previous years combined.  It’s like the past caught up with me.  I’m making up for lost tears.

So here I am, sitting in this dried up meadow surrounded by dead weeds.  I don’t see anything of value to the north, east, south, west.  I am burned up, I am not happy, I look down and I see a used up woman who is losing her beauty with each day that passes.  But more importantly, if you were to cut open my chest, it’d be as bare as possible, no soul residing inside of me anymore.  It floated up and away to dance with my relatives who were lucky enough to have passed away.

So what the hell is there to do?  I have asked myself that question every night since April of last year.  I am exhausted but bored, so I gave myself a new task:

I’m going to start picking the dead weeds and putting them into a trash bag.  That’s what.

There has to be something beautiful underneath.  Something that calls my spirit back to it’s earthly existence.  I’m hopeful.  Somewhere in the depth of my empty body there’s a little glowing ember that’s not giving up.

It’s going to be okay.

New Theme

I review my poetry frequently to analyze my growth and evolution.  I evaluate my rapidly changing style, my quirks, my downfalls.  I have been writing creative pieces since I was eight years old.  Eight.  I said, “Mom, I want to be a writer when I grow up.”  Well, I am one.  I write all day at work and then I come home and usually continue writing.  When I’m not writing, I’m reading, stuffing new knowledge into my already-jumbled brain.  But that’s what you do when you want to improve.  You have to saturate your mind to capacity and practice every single day of your existence.

Well, I do that.

It’s Easter and I am home alone sitting on my futon.  The sun is glowing through the window.  I hear some birds chirping and the cars racing past the building.  I sat here for awhile and read my old pieces, and instead of criticizing the words that I read, I sort of just let them flow off of my tongue to see what they sounded like.  An important part of poetry is the sound, the rhythm. During this exercise, I realized that it’s time for another giant shift.  I have always paid close attention to my finished products and which ones fit together.  When too many start to fit together, it is time for a new shift.

My poetry has taken on a professional sound that I am not fond of.  In addition, the new structural canals that I am now stuck in are beginning to bore me beyond belief.  These both aside, the most annoying part is my writing’s underlying theme…

It is shackling me to a thought that I don’t want to think anymore.  “What am I to you?”  I have been nothing for years and I am still nothing.  Who wants to think about that every time you allot time towards your passion? I am an empty space: that’s what I am to you.  I am the air that brushes past you that you forget about instantly.  I am the broken toy that someone left in a muddy gutter somewhere, a missing eye and fluff busting out the seams.

I am sick of hearing myself say it.  You are nothing.  You are nothing.  You are absolutely fucking nothing.  It has been drilled into my head so far that I’m not even sure that I have a head anymore.  There is nothing above my shoulders and the dust on the ground is all that’s left for crying.
A theme that stuck with me for years was “you are what you surround yourself with.”  It was a beauitful theme.  And then I realized how unbeautiful I had become, so I abandoned that theme for something more fitting.

Now I am sick of the shoe that fits and I am ready to delve into a new topic.  I am damaged goods.  I know this.  I am broken more than I ever thought that I would be.  THAT is what I am to you.
But how do I change that?  How do I take this damaged woman, plant her in the desert with no plant food and no water, and expect her to grow?  How does one take a home that has burnt down and build a mansion with no money, no tools, no dreams?

Easy.  Magic.

Microseconds

Every single microsecond is so painful that the blond hairs on my pale skinny arms are constantly sticking up.  My goosebumps are constantly alert and my eyes are constantly burning at the corners.  I cry on the way to work and then I cry on the way home from work.  As I sit on my kitchen floor wearing my cute apron, chicken baking in the oven, I cry.  When I blow out my candles, cold tears are dripping onto my breasts.  When I lie in bed, it's cold, and I don't even bother to put on a sweatshirt.  I freeze.

I wake up and it all begins again.  Again and again.  For a little less than 365 days, this has been it.  I've had a few smiles in between there, mostly while intoxicated.  Mostly while I was so distracted by the dark atmosphere of the bar and the people buzzing around me like working bees.  Those were the times where I fit in a smile.  I smiled when I forgot how alone I truly am.  I come home to nothing.  I have nothing.  I sleep alone, I cry alone, I eat alone.  I go out to dinner alone.  I drink entire bottles of wine alone and I smoke cigars alone on the stoop outside, unless you count the companionship of the bugs flying around the dim yellow porch lamp.

That is it.  That's all that I have.  Is this all that I deserve?  Will it ever end?  I have spent so much time complaining, yes, but I have spent even more time trying to change things.  And nothing, absolutely nothing can change this.  I have been working diligently towards a light at the end of this miserable tunnel every single day for an intolerable amount of time and even when I think that maybe I'm approaching even a small glimpse of light, I feel as though I get pushed back to the beginning of the tunnel.

I admit to it- I have finally found reasons to love myself, but that does nothing to fill in the void that is in my heart.  They say that you should not base your self worth on other people.  Okay, I get it.  I value myself.  I love myself.  I think I am okay.  I am loving, I am caring, I am intelligent, I am hard working, I am a friend to those in need, I am charitable, I am fun, I am the first to start dancing at a party, I am the first to run to my friends' sides when they need me for anything, anything,

but that does nothing.  Nothing.  I still come home alone.  I still have an empty passenger seat in my car.  I still lack the physical affection that humans naturally desire.  I am still the only single person when I go out with my friends.  I am still the only one sitting alone on a Friday night.

This is it.  This is all that I have.  Self-pity is not attractive, I know.  But bottling up your emotions is just as dangerous.  Years ago my dad told me that he wanted to buy me a gun.  I turned him down and  I turned him down because I was afraid that I might kill myself one day.  I am so thankful that he never gave me that gun.  I am gunless, alive, and thankful for that.  I will never own a gun in my entire life.  I saw how easily Brian was murdered because there was a gun in the house.  I stepped over the blood on the basement carpet.  I experienced it.  I went to jail once a week on Thursdays for three months to talk to the man who murdered him in the house where I lived.  The blood stains were literally a few feet from where I slept every night.  

I am a woman who has experienced so much.

Why have I had to go through so much pain?  I just don't understand it.  It is not fair.  My sister said, "no one said it would be fair."  Yes, but I'm just asking for a break.  I am thoroughly exhausted.  I woke up crying, fought back tears all day at work, came home crying..

And I just want a fucking break.