The Broken Ones

I am mentally ill. People don't want me to say that. They don't want me to define myself in that way. After all, no one says "I am cancer." They say, "I have cancer." And there, really, lies the difference. I don't have mental illness; it has me.

 

I am broken.

 

There are different degrees of broken, not unlike degrees of murder I suppose. Even then, a murderer is convicted of a particular degree of murder and that doesn't change. Degree of broken changes. Most of the time, until recently, I've been like a chipped china cup; pieces broken off around the edges but still essentially intact. Serviceable. Useful.

 

But then things happened.

 

My father was seriously injured. I quit my job to move home to help him. An enormous strain on an already taut relationship. My mother is angry about supporting me financially. I fear I will never find another job. I discover a dear friend has died. Another dear friend dies.

 

Every one another chip until I am more pieces than whole. The stress breaks me into more and smaller pieces. Any whiff of the control I think I have is carried away on the laughing wind.

 

Somewhere in the chaos, I found another broken one, one I knew I should have stayed away from for a variety of reasons. The moth is always attracted to the flame that will be her undoing.

 

Instead, I clung to him like driftwood in a hurricane.

 

Broken people tend to collect each other, you see.

 

No one else really wants us anyway, not the way we are. Others want to fix us, make us whole, but it's like trying to put together a puzzle that's missing some of its pieces and has extra pieces from another. And did I mention the picture on the box is of another puzzle entirely?

 

The thing about broken ones that makes us so attractive to each other is that we don't try to fix each other. We respect each others broken-ness.

 

Instead we listen. We understand the unbelievable agony of becoming broken, of being broken. We understand that no two are broken in the same way and we ask questions about the other's broken-ness. We want to understand them, to know their story and love them in spite of it. We understand what a rare gift it is to feel understood, to be accepted, to be valued in spite of your damage, maybe even because of it. We want to give them these rare gifts.

 

He gave me those gifts and, I hope, I gave them to him.

 

This other broken one and I became something to each other. Something utterly beautiful. Something extraordinarily precious. Something intense beyond description.

 

Then we crossed a line that we both thought we could ignore, I think. Or maybe we just wanted to ignore it so badly we convinced ourselves we could. The lies we tell ourselves are the easiest to believe.

 

We were wrong. We could not ignore it and, having crossed it, one of us could not go back.

 

He will not see me.

 

He will not speak to me.

 

I asked him if it was okay to remember the good things, the laughter in the diner, the profound things said. He never answered. I fear he will burn me from his memory entirely, exorcise me like some demon, like the evil that I am.

 

I am shattered.

 

It seems impossible to find two pieces even large enough to fit together and I don't want to fix it anyway. If I do, the fact that there is a very large and very important piece missing will be even more apparent, the large and beautiful piece of himself which he gave to me and which he took away with him when he left.

 

The pain is unbearable. Indescribable. My soul has been dipped in acid and left to sizzle and pop in the window of a chemist's lab somewhere. I physically hurt, all the chronic pain intensified, my skin prickles with thousands of tiny explosions of hot pain. Sleep runs from me, then catching me from behind, tackles and smothers me. I wake from strange dreams with strange and intense pains, only to be dragged back down into more. These wonderful, beautiful memories haunt me, taunt me. I know he still remembers but I know too that he's killing me off a memory at a time. I can feel him murdering my memory. I stop on the stairs for no reason, suddenly wracked with sobs that literally bring me to my knees, and I know he's burning a memory of me.

 

All I have left is a period. On the night he told me he had to cut me out of his life like a cancer, I burned his period on my wrist with a cigarette. Three, actually. And if it doesn't scar, there will be three more. I would have done a tattoo but his religion forbids them. A scar is more appropriate anyway.

 

A period is supposed to mark the end of one sentence and the beginning of another. In this case, it is only the end.

Failure To Rise

In my inbox, I have an email from Fandango. The subject line: How did you like The Dark Knight Rises?

It is not an easy question.

It was, for me, a particularly difficult movie to watch and enjoy. Especially during the scenes involving gunfire. I just couldn't help thinking about those who died. Like me, they were just trying to see a movie. I thought about not going, but then I thought that lets the bastard win. Truth is, he killed twelve people; he already "won."

Driving around town, I noticed all the flags at half mast. It's nice to think that we care enough about each other to honor the dead in this small way, but the cynic in me knows it's just the big corporations playing the sympathy card in a way that brings them positive attention. It's the story that everyone is talking about, at least for 24 hours.

But this will all go away soon. We can't stand to look at it too long. We cluck our tongues and we marvel at the evil and the tragedy and we wonder why someone didn't do something, and then we turn away.

As for me, I had a meltdown in a Wal-Mart parking lot. Seemed as good a place as any. I was listening to this song: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=shUB20PpYyY

How many is this? Columbine, Virginia Tech, we give them names and drag them out when the next one comes, parade them around a bit, make comparisons and contrasts and try to read the tea leaves to determine where we should lay the blame. But nothing changes.

Oh sure, maybe we'll pass a law or something. A fat lot of good that ever did. Wasn't murder against the law on Friday night too?

It's not the law that needs to change. We do. We can no longer look away. We can no longer avoid getting involved. We can no longer expect someone else to do something. THERE IS NO ONE ELSE.

On the way home from my meltdown at Wal-Mart, I passed a homeless man, a veteran. He had his veteran card clipped to his "please help" sign. The song was still playing, asking "is this the best that we can do?" And I was again ashamed of my country, the way we treat those who served, the way we treat those who need, the way we marginalize and minimize and ostracize until people are meaningless.

We are, or at least were, the most powerful, wealthiest country in the world.

Until there is no hunger, this is not our best.

Until there is no homelessness, this is not our best.

Until there is healthcare, including and especially mental health, for everyone, this is not our best.

Until there are no Columbines and no Dahmers and no Sanduskys, this is not our best.

Until we remember that the only things with meaning are not things at all, but people, we will never be at our best.

And until we can look these events in the eye, until we can look past the labels, until we can see that the marginal matter, and matter more than the wealthy, the powerful and the famous, we will never be our best.

We have let each other down. We all deserve better.

A country should be judged on how the most marginal, the weakest, the most helpless of its population is treated, protected, and cared for.

We are failing, emphatically.

CTRL + ALT + DEL

I was playing Bejeweled Blitz and I realized that the game needs a button. It's the same button my life is lacking, actually. It should read: I have done fucked this up and I'm going to need to be starting over now. Right now, if at all possible.

Not a small button, either. A big red button so you could find it in an emergency, because, really if you need a button like that, well, you are having an emergency. Like the shut-off switch for the gas pump. My life is burning down and I want it stopped. NOW.

See, the thing is, I know everything happens for a reason. Trite but true and I really believe it. Just once, though, I'd like the reason to be that I planned it that way. Smoothly is not an adverb with which I am intimately familiar.

Yet everything does seem to work itself out eventually I guess.

Today, though, I am in the doldrums. There must be more to life than waiting for next weekend. Especially if it's still this weekend. Sometimes I feel like I am rushing along through five work days just to get a little closer to death. That's what tomorrow is, after all, one less day to live.

It's not regret as much as it is wonder. What if I had chose door number 2 instead of curtain number 1? Would I still have the haunting feeling that I chose unwisely?

I think the answer is probably. Some days the only reason I'm hanging around is to find out how it all works out in the end. Like a book I can't put down.

I've been working on a book actually. It's not going well. It's autobiographical, which is I think the problem, because I don't know where it's going, and I haven't sorted the plot yet. Oh, and the main character is non compos mentis.

But there are things I want to say and I just.... can't. I'm not afraid or embarrassed. They just seem stuck, like when you try to remember where you put something and you know you know the answer but it escapes you. It gets lost along the way.

It's horribly frustrating. I feel like there must be some meaning to my life. Some days I feel like I'm closing in on it all, but then it just vanishes. Like trying to catch a ghost.

Frustrating, too, is that everyone around me seems to be so much more... You know these people too, right? Couldn't fuck it up if their very lives depended on it? Where do those people come from?

My friend, Julie, is one of them. (Sorry, Jules.) Some car dealership gave her a car. A car! An Audi R8, no less. Okay, well it was just for the day apparently, some Twitter promotion, but come on. Seriously? That kind of thing would never work for me! An actual car! Audi would bring me a die-cast replica. Maybe. (By the way, Julie routinely scores 500k in Bejeweled Blitz. I don't know how she manages that either.)

Me, on the other hand, I've been praying to win the lottery. Well, I won. Seven dollars. See what I mean?

Is there a point to any of this? (Yes, I'm wondering that, too.) I don't know. Probably.

If you figure it out, tweet me or something.

It's tough being the mom

So today is Mother's Day, the first one I have ever spent away from my son.

He forgot.

Sure he sent a gift, which has not yet arrived and was purchased by his father. I am sure he was involved in some way, but I know it wasn't really from him. Or if it is, that it's an obligation present, something he put no thought into whatsoever.

You might be thinking I'm being awfully hard on him. He is, after all, a teenager and preoccupied with all things which occupy a young man's mind like girls, video games and You-Tube. Besides I am several states away and out of sight is out of mind after all.

See, the thing is, he forgot last year too, when I was there right in front of him. It's not like Hallmark and Kay Jewelers stopped advertising. When I called him on it, he went and found a card he had made in kindergarten or thereabouts and regifted it - the ultimate regift: to someone to whom you gave it once before - saying it's what he meant to give me all along because he really didn't understand the meaning of the card when he made it. It made us both feel worse because that was a lie and I knew it and told him as much.

Really all I wanted was a call, just a call and an I love you. I don't know whether to be angry or hurt and frankly, I'm both. This is what I signed up for I guess, the bad and the good. Still...

I sent a gift to my mother months ago. Dad stuck it in a drawer somewhere until today. It was a nice gift, something she wanted but would never have bought for herself. But I think if you asked her the really gift would have been the phone call.

You see, I thanked her. I thanked her for choosing me, for taking me home with her and giving me a good life. I've said many things in the past, many mean things, about being adopted including, I am ashamed to say, you're not my mother. But I never said thank you. Not until today.

And to my other mother, the one I can't remember and don't know if I ever met, the one who let me go, who hoped I would find a better life than the one I might have had with her, thank you, too. And Happy Mother's Day. And, I miss you wherever you are.

I am sad this mother's day, for things I've lost and things I never had, missing my child when he's not missing me, for never saying thank you before now, for missing my mom and my mother.

And especially because I know those whose moms are gone for good. I know one day I will share in that particular sadness. One day, hopefully years from now, there will be a mother's day where I am motherless. That mother's day will be so much harder than this one.

On Being a Dire Warning

I could die in my sleep tonight you know. People do.

Perhaps they've an undiagnosed heart condition or throw a pulmonary embolis, who knows? But I wonder, perhaps, if they just stopped wanting. Or, more likely, have tired of wanting. Wanting things they cannot have, love, friendship, acceptance, kindness. To mean something to someone who means something to them.

To matter.

Matter. Matter is anything that occupies space and has mass. And that's the crux of it, really. We want to occupy space and have mass. To have a place. A space. To be missed when we're gone. To be welcomed home. To be important. To be that thing that has space and occupies mass and without which someone cannot do.

I am not matter. I am ethereal. A mirage. I mean nothing. I am Nothing. And I am tired of wanting, and tired of pretending, and tired of being tired.

I probably won't die in my sleep tonight. I haven't looked it up but I am sure the odds are fantastically, depressingly against. Usually, this would be a comforting thing. Usually.

Not tonight. Tonight, I hurt and I want to be done hurting. I want it done, this life, and I no longer trust God to take it from me. Apparently, He doesn't answer that variety of prayer. Or perhaps only for the deserving. Those who have been Something.

Two things keep me here, tethered precariously to this life, hope, a fickle thing that comes and goes and for long streteches fails to come at all, and Bailey. Bailey who has learned more about life and how to live it in his 15 short years than I have in 42 and am likely to in 42000.

"If you can't set a good example, be a dire warning." And that is my Something. I am what not to do, what not to wear, what not to eat, how not to love. I am his dire warning.

The Hokey Pokey

It really is what it's all about, you know? When you die and meet God, He's going to ask you, "Did you put your right foot in?"

Did you live you life, really LIVE it, or did you sit on the sidelines and watch it slip by?

The Hokey Pokey is a one of the great metaphors of our time, an instruction manual on living. Start with just a little bit, put your right foot in, test the waters. What do you think? Does it interest you? Maybe put your left foot in. Still good?

At some point, you put your whole self in. Or not. Maybe it's not the right thing for you, the right career, the right relationship, the right life. But how will you know if you never put your whole self in?

Life is risk. We engage in constant and sometimes subconscious risk/benefit ratio calculations and we strive to minimize those risks. It's why cars have seat belts, why there's an FDIC, why we buy sunscreen.

But risk is unavoidable. You can hide inside your bedroom in the darkness and try to escape it. But when the plane crashes into your house, you're going to wish you went out and enjoyed yourself instead.

The Hokey Pokey tells us to take it slow, a little bit at a time, just give it a try. When you find the thing you like, then, by all means, take the risk and committ. You'll find the reward was worth the gamble.

And, you'll have a great way to answer God when you get to heaven. Yes, Lord, I did put my whole self in.

Huh...

Well, it's been awhile, hasn't it?

I have jury duty today. I have to say, I'm already tired of this damn courthouse. I was just here for the first of what looks like many court appearances regarding the dissolution of my marriage.

I just want to be done with it all.

I've never been called for jury duty before and the walk from the juror parking lot to the building seemed impossibly long. And there were stairs, of course. My knees have been better since I've lost some weight but stress and no sleep are taking it's toll today. It looks like rain too, which is never good for knee pain. The bottom line: ouch.

They are checking us in now. I don't know exactly how I feel about this. On the one hand, it would be very interesting to sit on a jury. On the other hand, I have so many things I could and should be doing. Work included.

I did bring some work and I am sure I'll actually get around to doing some of it eventually.

Maybe.

Right now I'm reading "Hate Mail from Cheerleaders" by Rick Reilly. Great book. Funny and poignant and thoughtful. Reminds you what's good in your life.

And I'm thinking. I have more to say. Stay tuned.