leaveten's Diaryland Diary ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- mad about it. I decided today I was going to do my homework assignment. I was going to look in the mirror for 5 minutes, I was going to think of 5 things I’m grateful for, 5 things I like about myself, 5 people that I love. I was going to try to aim for 10 because even though goals are supposed to be achievable, I am an over achiever. But it’s been hours. I’ve been looking at you for hours, trying to find me. I didn’t eat. I haven’t slept. I’ve been staring so long I’ve counted all the freckles on my face, found a white hair on my head, and watched the light on my forehead move and fade with the sunset. It’s night time. My back hurts. I’m not hungry the way I’m supposed to be. And I can’t think of 10 things. I can’t even think of an honest 5. I’m not an over achiever. I’m not even good at therapy. I want to say I’m grateful first for Rayna because there are 168 hours in a week and 6 months ago every hour every week was horrible. I know that there are 168 hours because every Monday I would start my countdown. Monday mornings, 161 hours. When Janet would plan movie nights or sleepovers, I would count down days and realized time moves faster when you have something to look forward to. But this one was different because Sunday night the clock just resets. No prize. No movie. No escape. Reset. There are still 168 hours in a week, but without meaning to I stopped counting down and the only thing that changed was that for 1 hour out of 168 I get to see Rayna, and she lets me talk, or not talk, or sit outside. And I feel almost complete. The idea of hope used to feel like trying to shine a flashlight in a black hole. 1 hour out of 168 is not a lot, but it’s enough to make you believe life is a dark room and not a black hole, and some day you might be able to walk out the door. I want to be really happy about this - but you tell me I can’t be. You remind me light travels slowly and darkness is infinite. You tell me the hope isn’t real. Relationships are artificial. Everyone is replaceable. You’re the vacuum, you pull me back. You remind me, there’s nothing to be grateful for. There never was for me. What are nice things I can say about me? Maybe that I’m brave. Everyone has always said I’m brave. It’s not true. I’m always scared, just not of the things I’m supposed to be afraid of. I’m not afraid of spiders, or bugs, or monsters under the bed. I’m not worried about being rejected, embarrassed, or alone. All these things that are supposed to be nightmares are actually my fantasies. I think I’m kind of sick that way. I just think sometimes, how nice would it be if the scariest thing was a bug I could smash with my feet? My monsters don’t live under my bed. They don’t disappear when you flip the light on. They’re right next door. They’re downstairs cooking dinner. In the car driving me to school. Even when I get away, parts of them come with me. Telling me I can’t be good enough, I never was, I never had a chance to be. Reminding me of all the times they came for blood. I don’t use a night light to keep these ghosts away. I hide the wire clothes hangers, keep scissors out of slight, place pillows in corners of my room in case I need to block my face. I don’t cry anymore. I think we learn to do that when we’re babies because it works. You cry, they bring you food or whatever you need. When I cry, the monsters know it’s working. The tears only make them angry. I don’t try not to, it just doesn’t happen anymore. But the point isn’t that I’m sad, just scared. Scared to be awake, scared to fall asleep, scared at home, scared when I’m away. Scared knowing it’ll never end. It’s too late. They live inside me now in all the parts of me that are too permanent to cut away. I’m not brave. I’m scared of clothes hangers. People say I’m mature. I wish it was a compliment. Mature at 15 means you didn’t get to be a kid. I don’t have memories of playing in a sandbox, collecting dolls, dressing up. I remember teaching myself to skip lunch at school so I could sneak the food home in case I wasn’t allowed to eat. I could make a cookie last a day. I remember telling my dad not to throw boxes away when we built my desk because I thought it would be a good hiding spot. I remember going to school sick but throwing up quietly in the bathroom so no one would know and send me home. I remember wearing long sleeved shirts in summer so I could hide new cuts on my arm. I remember having one so big I wore a jacket for a long time and everyone laughed at me because it was so hot and the jacket started to smell after a while. My mom wouldn’t wash it. She said I deserved what the other kids were telling me. What was I going to do about it anyway? Even grown ups don’t deal with these things. So I’m mature to them. I wish I was just a kid instead. I want to say I love my sister and I love my dad. But I don’t really know how to love. It makes me sad because love is something good people do and I want so badly to be a good person. I want to believe I can be. What makes someone good or bad - nature or nurture? Because either way, odds are against me. I can’t love my sister right. I didn’t protect her, I can’t protect her and I make her life worse. By existing. That’s the story of my life. I can’t protect myself either. I can’t love my dad because I don’t really think he loves me either. We used to talk all the time about space, basketball, and quantum mechanics. Except really. I know about Boltzmann brain, the theory of relativity, dynamic heat transfers, wave particle duality, the Copenhagen interpretation, and geodesic incompleteness. I correct my physics teacher. He thinks I am very annoying. Lately, I want to talk about other things. My dad says I’ve changed. I think there are just more parts of me. Parts that don’t want to talk about thermodynamics or theories around parallel universes and just want to tell him about my day or how I’m tired of watching Daredevil because my friends are obsessed or how my Italian teacher has the most intense mood swings. He hates it. He says gossip is for small minds. I guess parts of me are small minded and that is not okay. But if you don’t love all of someone then you don’t love them at all. At least if you’re their dad. And if my dad and my mom and my sister don’t love me, then how can I love me? And if I can’t love me, then how can I love anyone? No one has ever showed me how. I don’t think I’m very good at therapy. These assignments are not fun. And sometimes I don’t think it’s going to work. I can breathe slower, I can squeeze my stress ball, I can read my coping statements, I can do that stuff. Maybe it will help a little. But she can’t teach me how to love because she can’t love me either. Honestly, you can’t love someone you only see because their parents give you money. She can’t change that I’m so scared because she can’t take back time (Einstein himself disproved time travel). I think we are putting a band aid on an open wound. Like the time I broke my nose. The band aid did not work. Surgery worked but my nose does not look the same. It’s different now. It doesn’t work like it did before. It broke once and now it’ll be kind of broken forever. Like me. I’m trying to be okay with who I am today, I really am. But I’m not what I’m scared of. I’m scared of tomorrows me. I don’t know how long I can hold onto this tiny bit of hope that people are good so I don’t get jaded and hate everyone for all the horrible things that happened to and around me. I don’t understand how my moms dad can live with himself and what he did to her, to all her siblings. He took children and made them monsters. He didn’t even know me yet when he created the thing that would break me. I can only imagine he must have hated me, but he didn’t even know me. I don’t understand how my mom could do what she did to me. To Anna, worse. How can you hate your own daughter? How can she give us a life sentence of living with all these scars, the memories, the ghosts? How can I learn to live with them too? Am I going to become a monster too? Worse than her maybe? I think about the future me and I don’t want to be her. I don’t want to look at her. I know the way this story ends. She’s going to hate everyone. She’s never going to love anyone. She’s going to be cold and distant and everything good will die around her because she can’t keep happiness alive. I see her. I see you waiting for me to come to you and time will take me there no matter what. I want to die sometimes thinking about it just to protect everyone I’m going to hurt one day too. Just like my mom you will find anything decent in a person and find a way to show them it’s not real and it can be destroyed. YOU are going to hurt people. in some ways you’re already here. I feel you. I feel you when I’m mad I feel you when I can’t stop thinking about how mad I am I feel you when I’m thinking about all the terrible things I wish I was brave enough to do and one day I will be. You will take over me and bury me deep. And even though I’m scared and have a million other problems I am better than what I know I can be, what I will be. I’m most afraid of that. I’m most afraid of you. 7:44 pm - 09-19-23 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
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