Monday, December 27, 2010

Changes

It’s like nothing has changed. My family is not fazed by my brush with death; they still dismiss most of what I say; act like serious things are nothing serious. Had I died I doubt it would have made much of an impact on them… the adults, anyway. I lowered my expectations so low, yet I am still disappointed. I came home from war and no one got excited to welcome me here. I find the comfort of being with my friends is helping me to ignore my family’s lack of apathy. I am an island, lost at sea, floating and floating… I find myself, back at the house I grew up in, feeling my mom all around me. She is everywhere; in the pictures on the wall, in the way they were hung, in the furniture, the food in the refrigerator, the boxes of random papers scattered everywhere throughout the house… the shag carpet, the wood paneled walls, and in the dolls on the shelves. She is this house. This house is her. I come here to find her, but she’s not the same, yet nothing has changed. Anywhere else I go I can imagine my mom here in this house, watching tennis on TV or watering her plants in the back yard, but when I am here I have to face that, despite her presence still lingering within everything she left behind, she is gone. Gone forever. And I am here. I am here, trying to smile through the disappointment; trying to cling to my sanity in the land of the insane; trying, with all my might, to be a better person than I was before cancer. Being in this house may not be healthy for me. I’m pretty sure this will be my last visit here. At least for a very long time. It is time for me to let it go and move on; to live my life for me and no one else. I know I needed to come here, but I don’t need to stay. I can choose my own path and it is not this. I am learning every day to be okay with what I do have, and if I want something I can simply go out and put all my strength into getting what I really want. I am an island, and I will float alone. If anyone wants to join me then great, but I’m not changing who I am for anyone but myself. Because, despite the fact that nothing has changed for my family, everything has changed for me, and I am determined to make the most of it. This place no longer defines me. My mom is here, within everything, but I am not. I don’t exist here. I’m okay with that.

Friday, December 3, 2010

Friend

The other day I was very lost. My mind was all scattered and I was dizzy, and I was trying to keep track of simple things but couldn’t figure out what I was doing. I needed help but wasn’t getting it. I went to the library and they were so rude. I felt like half my brain had fallen out and I couldn’t explain why I was so upset, I just was. I couldn’t explain what I needed and I wasn’t being talked to like I mattered and it was so difficult because I knew I was in a hurry but I couldn’t figure out how to go fast enough. It was like trying to fit together a puzzle with pieces from another puzzle. I was scared. I thought I was losing my mind. A friend of mine was in the library and I saw her and hoped that she could help, but when I approached her in the midst of my desperation she responded as if she were a wall of brick; she told me to “breathe” and then she just sat there like I was some crazy stranger. I wanted to die. And it struck me that—well it struck me later since, at the time I was barely able to see straight, let alone be struck by something. At the time it just crushed me— It struck me that my therapist is right: I choose the wrong friends sometimes. She told me weeks ago to stop being friends with this girl because it's not healthy and she is very negative and mean, which is the last thing I need. I said I’d consider it; that it wasn’t like I was best buddies with her but we have some common qualities, and when she’s not being mean and moody she can rather nice. But I see now that compassion for others is not one of our commonalities. This girl doesn’t want me to cry around her, and obviously my cancer, surgeries, and my recovering from the hardest struggle in my life is either too much for her to deal with or too deep for her to understand. How can someone who knows that I’ve been through battle and that my brain is damaged from it, treat me so callously? Even if she didn’t know me would she be meaner?

Honestly, it’s not much of a loss. She fucked me over several times in the past and never apologized, and she interrupts my stories or things I do to avoid hearing I was sad or to avoid being around me when I cry. It’s so immature; so selfish really. I thought we had so many things in common and that was nice. I felt supported by her for a while, but now I realize that she is much like who I was before my mom died, and I never really liked myself back then. But even then I had compassion for others. And I knew how to say I’m sorry when I was a dick to others. At least I learned something and I’m just letting it go; she’s not important enough for me to waste energy feeling sad about. She really is a damned bitch.