Things I Hate

This blog is inspired by Dave Anderson. He was two years ahead of me in high school, and his senior year, he took my yearbook and labeled all the people in his class that he hated and why. Thank you, Dave. I hope you're having fun in France, doing... whatever it is people do when they move to France.

THINGS I HATE:

• People from BU (except MK)
• People from BU that howl at the moon while drunk at night during the week. or at all. who howls? who does that?
• injuries
• the smoke monster
• being fat
• having to wait a week between Lost episodes
• Jack Shephard (I'm sorry, he's SO ANNOYING. I know everyone loves him, and I know you're going to judge me, but I am ALL ABOUT SAWYER. I know. Surprise, surprise. Leah likes the bad boy with a heart of gold character. Color us shocked). 
• the fact that I'm losing weight, and as a result, my boobs are shrinking
• winter
• cold
• car payments
• my hands. they are bitten bloody and raw.
• this week
• luck

Fraud

FOR TEN MINUTES, I'm going to let the pressure out. 

I'm so scared. I realize now that I am a complete fraud. Every time I've comforted someone who's lost a loved one, every time I've cried over someone's death, none of that compared to this. Every single word I've said.

My mother is the most incredible woman in the world. I love her so much it physically hurts. It is painful. And this week I had to face the possibility -- I can't type it. Every time I try, I sob so hard my body bucks forward and I have to gasp for breath.

I've been so lucky. No one I know has ever left me in a permanent way. I wondered about it for the first time when I was quite young, and the longer it lasts, the more I worry. When someone leaves me I don't know if I'll make it. Given how I'm handling this now, I'm not too optimistic.

She looked so awful today. Her whole face was waterlogged, puffy to an extreme level I've never seen. She seemed so frail. My mother. Force of nature. The strongest woman I know, the person in the world with the most fire in her. SHe was helpless. Everything I say is wrong. I wanted to say it nearly killed me, but I can't. Oh god. This is too much.

I feel like I can't talk to anyone about it. Everyone I know has gone through real loss in a way I haven't, and I have this fear that, no matter how genuine they are in their care for me, they will resent me for it. And I can hardly blame them.

I felt her eyelid today. It was puffed out twice its size, filled with fluid from the swelling in her brain. It felt like a tissue-thin water balloon.

There's too much. I can't let it all out it's going to choke me and drown me and I can't take it. Ouch. Oww. I am silently screaming, hunched over, abs crashing into each other, back curled over my keyboard, mouth wide open, eyes squeezes shut, silently screaming. That is exhausting.

I don't feel resolved, but I do feel drained. Turns out the advice I gave my dad about setting a timer for ten minutes and letting the fear envelope you for that time isn't half bad advice. I'm still terrified and overwhelmed, don't get me wrong. But I feel drained. And starting now the pressure will start building up, and I'll do what I did today: everything I can to keep moving. I cleaned my room in a more thorough way than I have the entire time living here. I even cleaned my dresser. I just couldn't stop moving. I kept telling myself that I was being absurd, but in my head I knew I had to keep moving, for fear of what would happen when I stopped.

Now my eyes are dry. My face is a work of science. The skin that still has the night cream I use on it is stiff, but the rest of it is covered in streaks of saltwater that wiped it clean.

Times like this make me understand those people who completely shut themselves off from the world and lock out all emotion. You know, the people who DON'T believe it's better to have loved and lost than to never have loved at all. Right now, I understand the logic. I still don't believe it, but I can see why people would.

And I feel like a hypocrite. They say she'll be fine. She's supposed to be swollen - she had brain surgery. She's supposed to be out of it - she had brain surgery. I believe she will recover. I worry she won't, and I think of our conversation about GD, and I'm going to need to push that down again. Shove. Smush. Push. Close. Lock. I'll explore that with my ten minutes tomorrow.

Monday Night, Midnight, 2/15/10

REMEMBER * book idea * book of letters, book of dear ____s *

testing

...Does it work?

Snow Memoir

I remember cupping my hands against the glass, trying to block out all the light, and squinting through the window. The first floor roof always obscured my view. The trees along Solomon Pierce didn't help much either. Eventually, I would creep downstairs, carefully stepping on the outer edges of the squeaky steps. I'd push back the curtains on our front door windows and strain to see the tiny dots of white against the black backdrop of night.

What were those special curtains called, the ones that were attached at the top and the bottom? We had those curtains on the front door. Mom always yelled at us when we touched those curtains, but it never stopped us. "They'll turn yellow, look, they're already looking worn," she'd insist, but the second she turned around, my brother and I would go back to casually pushing back the sheer fabric to check if our friends were at the door. Eventually, she gave up and stopped telling us how much they were. Years later, they are noticeably yellowed on the inner edges and seriously stretched out of shape, but I doubt my mother cares.

In my head, I imagine the moment she changed her mind about the curtains. One minute, she glances at them and sees the money she's wasted on curtains we inevitably destroyed, and the time she's wasted trying to convince us not to. The next minute, in my vision, she looks at those curtains, yellow and pulled out of shape, and they conjure images of the two of us, young and eager, pulling back the fabric, looking for friends, butterflies, snowflakes, and car headlights. In her mind something shifts, and those curtains become the children that grew up tugging on them, the children that are now grown up and gone with curtains of their own to pull on and snowflakes of their own to chase.

I always loved snowflakes. There's something soft and comforting about the way they fall from the sky. I remember squinting through the window at the street lamp on 1 Solomon Pierce Road, trying to see tiny dots in the light it cast. It was always tough to tell if it was snowing, or if it was just an illusion created by flecks of dust on the window.