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.