Sometimes at night (or more like early in the morning) I am so tired and want to sleep, but I just sit up on bed with weird, nervous energy. Like I’m scared something will happen while I’m sleeping. Even though nothing ever does besides weird dreams. I just want to do things and get things done, even if it’s not homework but knitting yet another scarf I don’t really want or need. I just sit up and think. But I need to sleep to do things and think straight tomorrow.
Sometimes I think about forcing myself into bulimia. Not because it would be an easy way to loose weight while eating anything and everything I wanted, but becuse it would be the most self mutilating way.
I wish I could get a puppy, who would love me because I’m me. A little fluff that would love me even when I can’t seem to love myself; something that would still love me especially because sometimes I can’t seem to love myself.
And it wouldn’t ask me questions, it wouldn’t try to help me or fix me, it would just love me. That’s all I could want right now.
Somethings you don’t want to look back on. But the thoughts I’ve had in the past occasionally haunt me, and remind me of how much happier I am. How much luckier I am now. How much more wonderfully beautiful and clearer life is after adolescence and teen-hood. Not that it’s all that clear to me right now…
It’s not that I am or ever have been masochistic, but more of too much of a coward to completely take my own life. I don’t really think I could outright kill anything, let alone anyone, let alone myself. I’m too selfish and considerate of other to take my own life. There’s too many things I want to do and want to have for myself in the world to cause my own premature death. And I don’t want the people I love to have to deal with it. Not just any mess I could make in the process, the body, my stuff, etc. But I wouldn’t want them to have to deal with the question: why did she do it?
The answer has never been that clear to me. So I don’t know what it could ever look like to anyone else. No point in people pondering what you’re not around to answer. I guess that’s why so many people leave notes – but I have horrible handwriting.
I remember one night in particular, the night I probably came the closest to bloodshed. I was about maybe fourteen, the early high school years get kind of muddled in my memories. Hell, this might have even been before high school when I was twelve or thirteen. But the age doesn’t matter, because the visualizations of actions I couldn’t complete are what’s imprinted in me, ever since they arrived that night, in whatever year.
My dad was drunk. Again. And during this time period he almost always was. My dad had the brilliance to happen to go through his worse bout of depression and drinking during my adolescence. The time frames are almost exact when it comes to those two periods in our lives. I feel so bad for my mom to have dealt with the both of us – and yet amazed that she’s still alive after standing between those two hurricanes of misunderstanding and emotions. I don’t remember the events, the specific actions and words, leading up to it, but I’m sitting on the carpet of my room. The door barricaded by my desk chair, because his sloppy shoving has broken the lock.
I’ve had enough. I find solace the not-so-great rock of Papa Roach, their songs, so aptly named “Broken Home” and lyrics like “Cut my life into pieces, this is my last resort…” are hymns speaking to my soul, saying to me that there are people out there who have been there, they have turned this pain in the beauty with scream-singing and electric guitars. I turn it up to drown out any pounding. Maybe even in hopes that neighbors will come over to complain – they will notice. Or even better, do what I can’t do and call the cops. I put it on repeat so I don’t have to get up later. The music illustrates the feelings that have always been in my head, the pain in my heart.
I take a Swiss army pocket knife out of my pocket and off of my keychain. When I was even younger, my crazy Uncle Bob gave my dad a white one, my mom a blue one, and me a red one. How fucking patriotic that it is the only weapon I conceal in my room. It’s dull as shit and I know it.
I won’t know what it’s like to be drunk until only a couple years later, but in this moment, like a rush of poisoned blood to my brain the childhood memories of chopping random backyard garden bits for playing “witches brew” with my best friend get washed ashore for the deep, pulsing idea of the window and the vast, open, freedom it presents.
But this night, I’m not thinking about running away, as I have though of and acted on before and after this night. I see the possibilities in the window. I see the possibilities of the window. I see the emergency room and all the people who will have to notice – the people who can’t ignore – that I’m in pain. The professionals asking the questions – to my face. All the answers I can give them… No, I don’t want to die. The whole point is that I want to live. And I just can’t live with the situation breaking down at my bedroom door. And I don’t really know what else to do about it. But maybe medical professional will…I just have to get to them. I just have to make people see, make them notice what’s going on.
I open the blue curtains my mom made for me the match the blue paint I picked out for the walls. A second, darker blue is on the ceiling. I stare at the window, I stare through the window, and I stare back at the window, and my reflection in it. I visualize red – it’s such a bold, strong color. Strong, unlike me at the time. It’s such a beautiful color and I want to see it in truth. I want to see it as truth. I want to hold it. My right fist is so much stronger, but my left hand is useless and better suited for sacrifice. I want to dress it up in a custom fitted red glove, sequenced with precious glass stones, embedded everywhere. Beautiful, bold, ready for a fight.
I want the red to reflect the pain. Doctors and nurses come up with all kinds of “measurements” for pain, but when it’s internal how can they ever tell the drug addict pining for drugs against heartbreak, or undetected tumor? Some people have higher and lower tolerances to paper cuts vs broken arms vs child birth. How do you know how much it hurts if you haven’t had it to compare it? But the red is visual. The red you could see. The stitches you could count. The pain would be measurable if I poured it from my heart and placed it in my palm, let it drip off of my fingertips to everything I would be alive to point out that hurt me, and drip down my arms, reaching back towards the source. The red would be triumph in still being alive. The red would be my father’s warning.
I press my fingertips on the glass and feel that it’s cold outside. I would still need to tell my friends and classmates what happened when I went back to school the next day, all stitched up. I see my mom’s face, crying and screaming, scared, and more hurt than the pain I could cause my self – and I know it would hurt me all the more to see her like that. Not just because her baby girl was crying, but because no matter how many times she could scream “Why did you do this?!” I would be horrified at the fact that I know she already knows. And she, baring the biggest heart I’ve ever encountered, would tragically blame herself, for being married to such a man who could drink his way into a monster, to the point he scares his own daughter towards death. She would clean the pieces of glass, drive me to the hospital if we didn’t call for an ambulance – and if the neighbors hadn’t already. She would tend to my mounds, and I would have to reassure her that it wasn’t her fault, and I would have to avoid that it is his, because he is married to him. And she stays married to him because she doesn’t want him to drink himself to death in a gutter on the street, because somewhere in there is a good man. He’s just scared of the red, too.
The swirls of thoughts and visions and possibilities crowd my mind. I press my forehead to the window to slow them down and cool them. Tears hit the glass in patters reflective of stormier weather than the clear darkness outside.
If I broke the glass with my fist, it would be more holes to fill. I would have to sleep in the cold. In the dark. In the loneliness I crave, I create, and I hate so much. I defeat myself more than I let anyone else. Not even my dad can fail me as much as I fail myself. I almost tear the curtains in rushing them closed. I turn the music off. I turn the lights off and curl up in the softness and safety of blankets and pillows.
- – - – -
I later learn that my father has also has craved the red. I find him another night, too drunk to finish putting his handgun back in it’s case. Too red under the skin of his face to compel his fingers to close the simple padlock. His syllables are beyond slurs. He calls my mom by an ex-wife’s name, from over 30 years ago. He calls out for his mother, who’s been dead for over 50 years, when he sleeps that night.
He doesn’t remember anything the next day. Or he denies it.
I don’t ask questions. I don’t pry or prod in fear of accidentally pushing.
Like anyone close to me would have thought in the aftermath that never happened for me, I don’t think I really want to know the real answers anyway.
I haven’t been able to sleep before 4am since he moved. (Oh, and from here on out, I’ll call the boyfriend/man situation by the name Daren.)
And I’m scared to go to my voice lesson tomorrow because I haven’t been practicing. I hate practicing. I always have. When I was a kid and took flute I never liked practicing. Which was really too bad because when I did practice, I was pretty darn good if I don’t say so myself. But I have this weird, stupid, irrational and self-conscious fear of people overhearing me practice. Whether it was my flute, guitar, or singing. And yeah, I am going to partially blame this on my dad. What cha ya gonna do about it?
Oh and by partially I mean the bigger part, you know, the one that matters.
He was – who am I kidding, still is! – so critical of everyone but himself. I always feared his criticisms. Just by the fact that he said it I would not want to change at all or get better. Oh, and he also had this one great criticism of my mom that she never said anything positive first, and that she always had to be critical and start arguments. I also always start arguments, too, according to him. Because when he’s wrong about something I’m not going to say anything? Please! I was brought up by him; the stubbornness wore off.
But the thing about practicing is that I want to feel alone. I want to feel like I can really let loose and be free. I want to be free to make mistakes so I can learn to correct them on my own. I want to feel like I am barring the mess I am to myself and fine tuning it to make it presentable. But when someone criticizes me while I’m in that process it kills it. Hell, even when someone compliments me during that process that is practicing, it ruins the privacy I want and need for it but confirming the fear that someone heard.
Practicing music is like a dressing ritual to me. You show yourself to yourself and it’s something no one else can see – or that only the very special hand picked lucky individuals can see. And than you place on the undergarments like boring warm-ups that just need to be done. You brush knotty hair and not as white as you like teeth in repetitive motions, like the exercises that bring the piece all together. Then you finally put an outfit on, but there’s always still adjustments to make. Like sometimes you just can’t find the right shoes because there’s one part you keep messing up on. But you re-do that part over and over and over again until you get it right. And only when you are ready can you show the final ensemble. Granted it’s not always final after that. Sometimes people you trust can give a second opinion on the fine tuning accessorizing. But when someone who wasn’t asked comes waltzes in during the middle of this sacred procedure, you look like a maniac and might be – if not fully – partially naked. That’s so inappropriate for a father to walk in on!
I practice singing in my car. My car is my greatest sanctuary. I feel like no one can see or hear me when I’m on the highway, so it doesn’t matter how loud I sing (scream during those rarer angry moments…) or if I’m off on certain higher notes, or switch between octaves in weird places when trying to sing songs sung by male vocalists. No one hears me. My car is to me as the garage is to Weezer back in the day when they rocked and couldn’t afford recording studios. Ah, now wouldn’t that just solve my problem….
But no. I still can’t sleep. I have a voice lesson in 8 hours that I haven’t practiced for since last week when I had my last lesson. Let alone slept for. And in the mean time, all I can do is miss Daren.
How can I not miss him? He’s the only person who really ever has inspired me to be me. Everyone else ever encouraged me to do my best or do what’s best, or were more passively supportive of whatever I ended up doing. But Daren somehow inspired me to figure out whatever the hell I want, and to go after that. I like to sing and I like to write.
No one can overhear me write. Especially when I do it at 4 in the morning.
I have been the translator for my parents since I was able to comprehend English well enough on my own. I never understand where my dad gets his crazy ideas and why he’s so stubborn with them, but my mom needed the defending so that’s where I jumped in. That’s where I always jump in. At least when I’m around.
I officially moved out about a year and a half ago. Sure I lived with a boyfriend for about 7 months when I was 19-20, and moved away for school in another state for one semester. But while being in the area and not having a boyfriend that lived nearby as well, I have been “on my own” for, well, longer than would let me return to the coop and keep any sanity I have left.
I can’t stand the way my father treats my mom. I hate the way my father treats my mom. She works eight hours days and he dares to demand dinner cooked, fully and perfectly, and at whatever time he’s conveniently hungry. And he sits around all day, watching the depressing news, reading, playing computer poker or solitaire games, and looking at porn masturbating. Well, the last part I’m not 100% about, since I’ve never actually caught him masturbating, but I’ve seen the porn on his screen. C’mon what else is he going to do while looking at it? Critique it? Well, that wouldn’t be so surprising with how critical of everything and everyone else he is.
Granted I can admit that my dad and I aren’t so different. That might be part of why he can get on my nerves so easily. He stays at home all day playing solitaire on his crappy PC that he’s been building up and re-building since the 90’s. While I stay home, or waste time when I’m out, playing solitaire on my iPhone. So the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree, but it falls from the tree and rolls around a little. If anything, that’s another argument we always get into. He always gets so pissed off when I have convincing arguments as to why Apple computers are better than PC’s. (And for you PC people out there, I also know the reasons why PC’s are good for some things that Apples aren’t as good for. As you read above, he doesn’t need that kind of technology. A man in his seventies can play simple games like poker and solitaire, surf the internet, use ebay, and look at porn just as easily – if not easier – on a Mac. He just doesn’t want to change and feels like his opinion when he originally decided to go with PC’s was a valid and good choice. And it was. Key word: was.) In some ways I can’t blame the old man. He worked in Silicon Valley my whole life and hated it. He didn’t get respect and credit where he deserved it – or at least so he claims; I believe him, but I also have my reservations as to how he came off to these people he worked with and for, and how they could have easily misinterpreted him and hated him for it. And I don’t entirely blame them.
I know he’s a very intelligent man. And he knows I’m a smart young woman. He even tells me this. But he rarely (if ever) acts that way or treats me like I am. He’s like the epitome of Mr. Right, and he’s married to Mrs. Wrong, and they gave birth to little Wrong me.
In the early 00’s (how do you express that time frame anyway?), a neighbor of ours that my dad always had it out for, let’s call him Carl, had his own business and advertised it on his van, with a web address. My dad being nosy and/or bored looked it up and had a good laugh. Which, admittedly, was warranted – it was a horribly done website. Excessive amounts of banners and buttons – to nowhere – page view counters, fancy fonts, bad pictures placed on the page by chaos. It looked like something I made when I was twelve years old. When my dad tried to explain that his laughter was from the fact that Carl paid someone a good amount of money to make the website I disagreed. There was no fact in this. My dad was speculating. When I tried to bring up the possibility that Carl didn’t have to and may not have paid any money to make the website, my dad immediately disagreed. I tried to back up my point by informing him that I myself made a (slightly) better website a few year back – when the technology was not even as good or available as it was at the current time. He couldn’t fathom that when I was twelve, without learning large amounts of HTML, paying for an address or web editing program, I made a website. He asked me why I never showed it to him – at which time I shook my fist at myself in my head, saying “If only you showed him! That might have learned him!” – but who honestly lets their parents know everything they do at that age?
I knew he didn’t think I was lying, he knew I wouldn’t make something like that up, but I felt like a part of him wanted to believe that it was a lie. He so stubbornly held on saying that Carl might have possibly made the website himself, and that’s why it was so horrible, but he had to have bought some fancy software, refusing to believe me that things on the internet could have the possibility of being free.
I don’t get it. My dad’s a smart guy. But it’s almost like he won’t let me be smart, too. As far as bragging rights I’m smart. I go to a good university, I went to a very good high school and was successful in other school programs. These make for great bragging rights and points of pride. But when it comes to engaging in a conversational disagreement, it’s like I’m not aloud to know jack shit about the world over him.
He won’t let me convince him that web browsers are free. He still uses Netscape. I’m not the crazy one in that!! I know this! But it makes feel crazy how much he can’t accept the changes in technology that I present to him, even though he fully understands that technology is forever exponentially moving. At least so he claims…
So, as mentioned before, I have an iPhone. I just got it this week, passed my old Motorola down to my mom, who wanted to pass her Samsung down to my dad, since it has bigger buttons that my dad’s LG. I switched all my mom’s contacts on to her sim card to put into the Motorola. For some reason she had some contacts saved to her phone, even though most were on the sim, and the Samsung lacks the beauty of Bluetooth. When I gave her sim card to put in her “new” phone, I forgot to delete everything from her old phone. She gives my dad he Samsung, not knowing that it still has some of her contacts in it, and now having all of her contacts in her new phone. I overhear from him asking her if she still had contacts in her phone, then yelling at her when she says no. Realizing that I didn’t delete the old contacts that were stored to her phone’s memory, I come in to the room to clarify that the confusion is my fault. That’s right, I come in to take the blame and translate the situation. But instead I get yelled at and told to stay out of it. I calmly explained that contacts can be saved on the phone’s memory and the sim card, but all the numbers are on the sim, and I forgot to delete the ones on the phone, so mom was unaware that things were still on the phone, and that some of them would show up when he turned it on and started yelling about “not knowing these people” or wanting their numbers. I was then told that my being there was pouring gas on the fire. Which besides his yelling, I and my mother were unaware was worth burning.
It’s just cell phones. It’s just sim cards. It’s just so damn infuriating, though. I clarified the situation for the both of them. My mom could see that, acknowledge it to me, and even thank me for helping her understanding of the situation: how some of her contacts still remained on the phone with out her sim card, which had all her contacts. Now, I understand that initially my dad was just making sure my mom had all the information from her old phone before he made it his phone. Which is a very nice and polite thing to do. It’s the right thing to do, really. But the way he goes about things… He raised me telling me that communication is about making sure the other person understand what you are saying – because that is the point of communicating. He raised me telling me that if you can’t get a message out to someone else in a way that they understand, then it defeats the point of communicating to them in the first place. He raised me, leaving himself open to misinterpretation in every way he communicates to my mom or I. He raised me embedding the idea that respect is a two way street. He raised me constantly demanding my respect and attention, even though he never gave it to me – or my mom. He raised me on alcohol. He raised me while depressed. He raised me with a generation gap. And yet I’m still grateful – and I gotta be grateful -that he raised me at all.
I stay with my mom, teaching her how to sync her bluetooth enabled Motorola with her iBook. She’s lived a stressful life. She still lives with him. She says to me, “What would he do….what would he do without me?” She says in a soft voice as she’s busying her self, organizing her clean and tidy things, “He just doesn’t doesn’t get it… One of these days, if I just…disappeared!…what would he do? He would fall apart. He wouldn’t know what to do.”
And I know she’s right. He’s told me stories of himself, back in the day before coming out to Silicon Valley, working in nursing homes and mental hospitals, and the kind of hell it is. I wouldn’t want to be there either. But he doesn’t realize he’s already in one. He just happens to sleep in the same bed, next to his personal nurse, who he doesn’t have sex with, but dishes out the (verbal) abuse to instead of receiving it. She doesn’t get paid extra for the cooking of his food, cleaning of the house he resides in, and laundering of his clothes, after her full time job. In fact, she’s paying for those things too.
He’s not a bad man. Not by any means. He’s always been supportive, encouraging, and loving. Just kind of contradictory at times. You know, the times that matter. Just kind of.
But after that tiff about the cell phones, as I’m leaving my parents house and saying bye to my dad, not really knowing what to expect, not really wanting to give him a hug like usual, he tells me in serious tones that I really hurt him. That I shouldn’t have butted in there and interrupted, and I should mind my own business. And he says it because without me there, my mom finds it easier to humor him, and let him be “right.” But I inherited his stubbornness. I just also have a touch of my mom’s consideration for others. So I can’t let him treat her like a doormat when I’m there. I’m stubborn in not letting anyone treat my mom poorly. I don’t see this as a bad thing or negative trait. But, to keep civil and avoid eruption, I laid down my arms at my dad’s comment about hurting him. I politely apologized. I informed him that I felt I was helping clarify a confusing situation, although it was wrong of me to jump in, and was sorry for not doing that for him, and even hurting him in the process as that was not my intention. I let him think he was right, I didn’t try to make him acknowledge the hurt he caused my mom by insulting her and yelling at her for something she didn’t know about, and I didn’t try to make him acknowledge the hurt he caused me by saying I was “gas on the fire,” that if anything, I was trying to put out, because I don’t want anything to ever burn my mom. She’s never deserved that and I do what I can to prevent it.
He told me this was something we should discuss later, as he did not want to “get into it” and explain his “hurt” at the time. And I said that would be fine, regardless of the things I felt. I left the house with all the strength in calmness I could, and let the chaos of emotion fall out into tears upon reaching my car. I love my car. It’s the safest place to me when I need to cry. It can isolate me from the world while letting me be anywhere in it. It’s a great place for screaming, when cruse control is set to seventy-three miles per hour on the highway, and no one can overhear or see you because it’s the middle of the night. If anything, it just looks like you’re rocking out to an awesome angry jam.
I pass the street my apartment is on and head to Safeway instead. I love the connotation of that store’s name. I love the bright lights and boxes everywhere for restocking. I love going to that store in the middle of the night. On the drive over I decided to become an alcoholic writer. Is there any other kind? I enter the store with my ear buds to my iPhone playing Blue States. I grab a basket with determination. I buy cheerios because I’m out of them and want more for breakfast, diet coke because sugar free is the way to be and the regular stuff is so bad for you and horrid on teeth. And I buy a bottle of Jack Daniels because he’s a good friend of mine and reminds me of the drinks my boy friend/lover/whatever you want to call him (now in another country) always had at my house. And I’m especially missing him terribly at this point. He always knows what to say – and I know people say that about their significant others, but really, he reads my mind. And like the back part of it that I’m not even paying attention to, but should be, so he goes in there, pulls it up and makes me pay attention to it because it’s coming out of his mouth.
I get home to my roommate on her 15″ powerbook (that she asked me to help her pick out and compare to other macs, because that’s what she wanted) and her boyfriend playing my guitar (he’s better at it than I am, plays it more often than I do, so I don’t mind at all). I put the Safeway bag on the table, gently take out my cheerios to put in my cabinet, and slam the Jack and coke on the table like I mean it.
Roommate: “Drinkin’ tonight?” she laughs.
Me: “Oh yeah.” I don’t laugh.
Another one of the reasons my dad probably gets to me so much is that depression, anxiety, and alcoholism are all genetic.
But I’m also not like him. Because after I put the coke in the fridge, I leave the Jack on the table and go to my room. Where I close the door, put on some Mazzy Star, and start typing. I pause writing the blog to write to the man I love and miss so much instead. And I write and I cry and I eat straight from the old box of cheerios. And I write and I cry and I don’t drink. I don’t get drunk. I don’t wash my troubles away. I write to my love the reasons I love and miss him, instead of getting drunk because I love and miss him. I write in this newly formed blog, this experiment in personal, anonymous honesty, instead of getting drunk because my dad pisses me off, and staying pissed off at him.
I may have decided to become an alcoholic after an argument about cell phones, but I didn’t follow through. Hope I didn’t disappoint with my misleading title.
Either way, probably not so much anymore. At this time it’s insomnia, but this morning (and afternoon…) it was my first hangover. Is it a sign of age, too much booze of which none was thrown up, too many different kinds of booze, or a kind of heartache?
What a strange celebration we had Friday night. My birthday and the going away of a man I’ve grown to love so much. Yet in this age of the internet, I can’t miss him hysterically. I’m an emotional person and I’ve been known to cry over far lesser men and things; but I didn’t this time. Was it because of experience that comes with each new year? The fading belief in true love, happiness, anything pure, or going my way? Or more because even as he’s hundreds of miles in another country, he can give me a tour of his new apartment via the internet. The spectacular city lights reflecting on the sea of his new world view couldn’t be captured by webcam as well as the real thing, but this point seems irrelevant when weighing the option against not seeing him at all.
Ah the age of the internet.
