Beaten

“No one beat you up. I don’t see any bruises.” His blue green eyes look at me steady. “Why can’t you tell me?”
We stand outside, like any other time, only my world is upside down and it’s all different. I am me, but I am not.
“Were you raped?”
I am silent, for a long time. Chain smoke, stare at the ground. “No.” I wasn’t, right?
No, I know I was not.
“Why can’t you tell me what’s wrong? What happened?”

I can’t tell. Or if I do, it will never be the whole truth. No one really knows how it is with me, how I feel my soul ripping out through my skin and my mind is flying away a thousand miles an hour. How my heart thumps so hard I can hear it, or then it’s just hollow, cored out. How I feel shamed, awed that I could ever feel such embarrasment that I would literally hide under a rock if I could.
Instead I go each day where I need to go and I face people that don’t know and they wonder what’s wrong. I’ve taken to sitting in my office with the lights off, watching people from my chair where they only see me there if they know to look. I stay there until I can’t. I get some illusion of safety there, of separation, and I can’t bear to get closer. I interact when I have to, and then go to my place I came from and cry. It hurts my skin to talk to people.

“I know a place where there’s no one, a beautiful place. It’s very remote, and there are a lot of trees and a beautiful valley. No one would ever hear you. You could scream. I’ll take you if you want to go.”
I imagine this. Try to see it as a comfort, a safety. I try to see him being there, keeping me safe. I don’t know if I can feel safe again, anywhere. With anyone. It’s so far away, or so far behind me.

I want to say it wasn’t that bad, that I’ll get over it. I want to say I’m stronger than this. But I don’t know how to be. I don’t have any marks on me. How can it be this bad? “No one beat you up.”
There are so many ways to violate a person, if you know how.

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The Faint of Heart

“Well. You are not for the faint of heart.”
-quote from a friend about yours truly and love

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Quirky

I didn’t know I was quirky. I look enough like a certain kind of person, you know, to pass for normal. I’ve done my best all my life, to be that. Normal. And all I ever wanted, was a normal life.
It never was. Normal. I never was, either. I’m not sure what I think normal is anymore. I just never hit the mark.
Yet, the way I look, seem, speak, allows me to go and be where I want. At first glance, I am a certain kind of person, woman. I am well spoken, polite, pretty, and have a professional approach, while keeping things to the warm side. I am approachable. I make a point of fitting in, putting people at ease, and not startling them with any jarring differentness on my part. I like to be easy to be around. It opens many doors, affords me opportunity, makes me a friend if you want one. It’s not calculated, just the way I navigate the world. While I do seem to wear my heart on my sleeve, I don’t wear all of me there. I like the freedom of not deciding for you who I am to you, but letting you decide how much you want to know me. It’s ok with me if you like me only knowing a part of me. It’s not like it’s wrong. It’s just kind of up to you. In a way, I don’t want to limit myself.
I am accepted places I have a purpose in being. I don’t have a driving need to be accepted anywhere that requires me being idiosyncratic. For sure, I’ve done my best to downplay any weirdness of me. It makes people uncomfortable. It makes people put labels on you.
Here’s the thing. My differentness, it’s not hidden. It’s just not front and center. I don’t like to lead with it, make it enter the room before I do. It’s like a woman’s hair entering the room before she does. It’s all anyone will focus on, remember about you. There’s a little more to me than my “quirks”. Finding the common ground gives me the opportunity to get to know you, get something done, let you get to know me, before you get a picture gelled about just what I am; a picture made because I painted it for you. Like the woman with the hair walking into the room.

All that said, I wonder where and when my “quirkiness” has become apparent, when I’ve learned to be quiet about it. This week, I heard it on two separate occasions. Quirky. Different. Pioneering. Visionary. Various elaborations on that theme.

It was said like a compliment, a recognition of something good. Inside I cringed, just a little bit. I could only think of all the years I worked so hard to just fit in, lay low, not make myself a target and not be a challenge to anyone lest I offend them.
And not paint myself into a role I don’t want.
Another part of me heard the affection and admiration, the statement of appreciation in it that I did or had something “different” and that that was good.

Here’s some of what Merriam-Webster online says about “quirky”:

Synonyms:
bizarre, bizarro, cranky, crazy, curious, eccentric, erratic, far-out, funky, funny, kinky, kooky (also kookie), offbeat, off-kilter, off-the-wall, outlandish, out-of-the-way, outré, peculiar, quaint, queer, queerish, quirky, remarkable, rum [chiefly British], screwy, spaced-out, strange, wacky (also whacky), way-out, weird, weirdo, wild
Related Words:
aberrant, abnormal, addlepated, flaky; extraordinary, fantastic (also fantastical), freak, freakish, freaky, phantasmagoric (or phantasmagorical), phenomenal; atypical, rare, singular, uncommon, uncustomary, unique, unusual, unwonted; conspicuous, notable, noticeable, outstanding, prominent, salient, striking; atrocious, outrageous, shocking; crotchety, idiosyncratic, nonconformist, nonmainstream, out-there, unconventional, unorthodox; baffling, bewildering, confounding, mystifying, perplexing, puzzling

I’m not sure how I feel about this….

About the only thing that makes me feel ok about it is when I read this-

Near Antonyms:
average, commonplace, everyday, garden, normal, ordinary, prosaic, routine, run-of-the-mill, standard, typical, unexceptional, unremarkable, usual, workaday; conformist, conservative, conventional; expected, familiar, knee-jerk, predictable; common, customary, frequent, habitual, regular, wonted

I guess I’ll take being the opposite of those…

A good friend once told me “If I were you, I’d wear it like a fucking CROWN.”
He was speaking about my “differentness.”
I couldn’t have thought of anything that sounded more uncomfortable.
Maybe I’ve changed.

I still don’t want to wear it like a crown. Not literally. I like my freedom, even if it doesn’t seem like freedom to some people. I still want to be able to move through the world wherever I see fit, for me, without assigning a label or a character to myself by being “different.” I’m not in a box. I sure don’t want anyone putting me in one based on a picture I gave them.
But yeah, maybe I’ve changed. A little.

How about you? If you’ve ever been considered “different”, and it wasn’t what you were trying to be, did it feel good? Or did you say, “I’m not sure how I feel about this…”?
Maybe you had the alarm go off inside you, the one that said “Beware! They’re on to you. Now you’re in for it!” Maybe you worried that you might be cast in a role; “The Different One.” It happens; it happened to me, long ago. I wanted some room to be, whatever. No one wants to play the same part, over and over, like there’s nothing else. They call that typecasting in the movies, and it’s kind of a dead end. People need to name things, and they’ll name you too, sometimes.

Quirky. It was said affectionately, admiringly. But that little cringe was there when I heard it. The small voice inside that warned, so long ago, “Don’t be different.”

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Respect Yourself

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Somebody’s Child-The Attic

I got the phone call, and she said, “Have you seen the paper? The front page.”
I heard myself, surprised myself even, because it was like it wasn’t my own voice. “No. Aw, God…no…Fuck. No. Please.”

I felt myself sinking down; a part of me hit my knees. But in truth, you could have watched me and seen. I kept working, only missed a beat. If you knew me well, you’d see I was pale, breathing hard. But I stayed upright, and busy with my hands and feet and eyes. The weirdness of carrying on, knowing the world might stop turning, didn’t escape me.

And then the rest she told me, what she knew. And again I wondered how I can care at all, when I know I have stopped caring. When I know that in the end, the terrible news will come. Just not this time, not yet.

They called you a wanted man. They spelled your name right this time; the same as mine.

Of course they got a tip. I told you long ago, “Your friends are not your friends.” You know that’s what happened. They will make sure you take a fall, because you’ve just got too much dirt, all of you. You’re not really safe, in or out. But out, we know there’s just no good end. If you don’t bring it to yourself, someone else will bring it.

They found you in the attic, underneath the insulation. Damn, that must have been itchy as hell. Especially since I’m pretty sure they dragged you from under it and all over the hell in it. Cops have a tendency to shove your face down in shit when you hide from, fight with, or run from them. I’d say from the look on your face in your latest [picture in the gallery], that didn’t feel so good. You don’t look really happy; like you just rubbed your face in fiberglass or something. I’ll bet you’re still itching.

You’re not dead. We’d heard you were, more than once. When the crazy bitch who says she’s your mother told us you were in the morgue, waiting for fingerprint analysis…a sickening wait…
You know she lies, you know not to trust her…but there it is. You hear things like that, and you go on about your business, knowing this time there could be a truth. And you just try not to listen.
Or I do. Try. You, you don’t give it much thought. She’ll still send you money, and that’s what you think about.

It isn’t over. Only the sickening wait of finding you is over-for right now. The wondering if you’ll be found just like you were, or in some unspeakable other way. And I try not to think about what else…what will be learned, found, tied to you. The only thing sure is that it isn’t over.

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All the Things We Know

Yeah, I can see it coming
Though I’d ask you if it’s true
Everything about us now
Is all the things I knew

Yeah, I can see it coming
Though you didn’t have a clue
Everything you say is black
I tell you, it’s all blue

And when you never saw me
Did I ever fade away?
And when you couldn’t find me
Did I ever lose my way?
When you didn’t hear a word I said
Did my words fall at your feet?
And when you said it wasn’t so
Did you finally see?

Yeah, I know it’s coming
And you’ll say that I won’t go
Everything about this now
Is all the things we know

I can see it coming
Though you didn’t have a clue
You say that it’s all white and black
I tell you, it’s all blue

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Voices

The words begin while I sleep. Sometimes the volume climbs until I cannot turn away, until I wake, scared and breathless. If I can’t trick the voices into silence first. If I can’t hear them coming before they get too loud. If I don’t have time to turn up the music and color I might be dreaming just then. This is why they catch me in my sleep. They have time to slither in, to make me look, to hear, to get my attention, before I know to tell them, “Be gone.”
Once I awake, they win, and they climb in speed and in their insistence to be heard, their sheer numbers, all saying something different, all demanding attention, and yet all saying some version of the same thing. Yammering, a cacophony of warnings, reprimands, condemnations. Be afraid, they tell me. It’s all up to you, they say; only you can fix all this.
But I cannot.
I sit with shaking hands then, and I pray. I call to the God I know, in all his glory, to put his covering on me and every single thing I see, touch, know, hold. I ask to see what is real, for my eyes to be healed from the pictures the voices conjure, pictures that are not true, but made to convince me I am lost, alone, crippled forever.
I ask for forgiveness for doubting, for hiding, for hating my truths, for buckling in the face of those voices and the world itself that tells me I am wrong. Wrong to believe, wrong to love, wrong to follow my dreams and my heart and my soul. Forgiveness for believing the torment, the words of the voices and the world.
It is only a torment when I stop believing the real truth, when I doubt.
I am not crazy. I don’t really think there are voices that tell me what to do, that tell me I am doomed, defective, unworthy; that tell me there’s no point in going on because the same things will always happen and I know I cannot bear a lifetime of that. They tell me that too; that I could never stand up to a lifetime of what I’ve already seen.
Everything they say, has a piece of truth in it. That’s the hard part, the reason I hear it at all. The voices; I know they are a part of me, the doorways to my brain and heart and soul that anything and anyone can use to crush me.
Everybody knows that the best lies, insults, threats, always have a little bit of the truth to them, even if they’re mostly lies. That would still make them lies. We, I, don’t have to listen. But it’s awful hard sometimes.
So, I thank him, for the power to say, “No.” I will not listen, I will not be defeated, I will not give in, give up, give out, and I will not be denied. And I swear, he hears me, he restores me, when I think I cannot go on again. He lifts me, when I think I will just lay down, and stop getting up. He heals my eyes, and I see the red tailed hawk that crosses my path each time I am here again; the night hunting owl, that shows herself, the recognition in the stranger’s eyes, the coincidence of the same song being played, almost uninterrupted, all the places I go. A seemingly meaningless thing, just for me. I see, I hear. I say, “Yes.” and I thank him. My heart soars, and I am grateful to feel, to know.
The things I see, hear, they are a blessing. Or are they a burden, a curse? They seem invisible, silent; only I know. They are undeniable, deafening, only I can decide. Blessing, or curse? But I can never say they don’t exist.

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Somebody’s Child

It’s not too late. Or is it? I should not tell myself a thing I would not tell a friend.
Things like:
It will get better.
Be grateful for the things you do have.
You’ll get over it.
Time heals all things.
For every cloud, there’s a silver lining.
Don’t give up hope.
Tough times make tough people.
Blah, blah, blah.

The truth is, I’m tired. I’m so tired, I don’t have the energy anymore to describe how bone and soul crushing it really is, this tiredness.
Do I mean I don’t experience joy, love, or inspiration? Of course not. I live for those moments, and I have never managed to numb myself to the finer things in life. The beauty, the stunning beauty all around us. The exquisite color, sound, magic surrounding us, that truthfully, is sometimes almost more than I can bear. I feel so much, see so much, it’s overload. How can I hold it all?
No, I’m not numb, far from dead. Miles and miles from not caring, not feeling. I just can’t feel much about you anymore. I’m just so tired. Tired of it. I would like to rest. And it never comes.

I try to separate myself from the craziness. I succeed, sometimes. It’s a necessary thing, but an acquired skill. When there is a new chapter in the drama, I find myself watching, yet again. Mostly to give myself the sense that I might be prepared.
I troll the mugshot sites, watching for you, for those connected to you. Eventually we will find you again, if you don’t die first. Death or prison, those are the choices you’ve left yourself, so I watch to see; what way will we grieve?
I am past the point of grieving for you, but not past grieving for the others who love you. And the truth is, I may not care about you much at all anymore, but the course you take will impact me nonetheless. Those others-they can’t seem to help themselves; they still think the loss of you-to death, to prison-is something to lose, something to maybe prevent, something to be fucked up over. I know the feeling, because I have been there. But there’s nothing, nothing they can do to stop you. Nothing but face it square, and move on with their lives. They won’t, not for a while, and they will torment everyone around them with their own coming to terms with it all, but I knew it all along.
Since I’m telling the truth here, I might as well say it. I don’t care if you live or die. I have had to put my care elsewhere. Why is that so hard for me to say? It sounds ugly, unsympathetic, so harsh. Sorry. I didn’t get here overnight.
How many ways can you rob people before you’re seen as a predator? Myself, I saw you this way quite a while back. I knew what others were just catching on to. I knew you were going into peoples’ houses. I knew what comes next, and of course it did. Someone came home while the two of you were still there. And bad things happened. Everything finally caught up to you, didn’t it?
Or that’s what everybody thought. Poor, innocent people. They really thought that with all those dozens of charges, all those felonies, at least you’d be safe in jail, unable to self destruct any further for a while. Unable to hurt yourself or anyone else, anymore. Forced to get help. And of course, it’s what you said you wanted. Help.
Well, now. What a surprise for everyone. Except me. And now, the moment you had a window, you did what I would predict. You fled.
To a few people, you are a loved one. To most of the world, you are the reason they lock up, keep guns in the house, see a suspicious person in the neighborhood and call the cops. The world isn’t wrong about you.
Everything I’ve said has been true. No one will ever tell me that, because they think that means giving up hope. It doesn’t. It’s just truthful. To tell myself a lie would only help you continue to victimize others. While I can’t stop you, I won’t help you lie to yourself and everybody else. And I won’t open the door. It’s shut tightly to you.
And this will make me unpopular, and tired, lonely. It will cause a rift between the people that still love you, that believe that there’s some kind of reset button on you, a default setting you can revert to if only the drugs would go away; a rift between them, and myself. But I know this game, this fantasy, too well. I will not play. I want only to extricate myself.

I still watch the mugshot sites. I hate the way it makes me feel. Like a participant. But it’s information I need, for as long as it’s necessary. I will protect myself; no one else is going to do it. They’re too worried about you. And they say, “I never thought he’d do such a thing.” They always say it. But I did. And you’re far from done.
I asked the cops to try not to kill you when they catch you again. I know how easily those things can happen, especially when I know you will likely do at least one more really stupid thing when they find you. You can’t say I never cared. But I know it’s coming, something’s coming, and when it does, I know whatever peace and rest I do have will be rocked again like it has been before. People around me care in a way I won’t, and they won’t understand. They won’t understand that I just don’t care anymore. If they can’t bring themselves to hate you, to blame you, they will hate and blame me, because they still have to blame someone. And it doesn’t change a thing that I think. That I know. They hate to hear the truth, even when it’s right before their eyes. Even when it’s hurting them more and more to not admit it. And I’ve always told them the truth.

I’m not looking for answers; this is the world of meth and opiate addiction. The world you live in. The world you’ve brought to everyone you know, everyone, people who didn’t enter it by choice. The answers your loved ones are looking for, well, they haven’t figured out yet that they can’t save you from yourself. There’s no answers for saving you. I’m powerless over your addictions. So are they. But like a stone thrown in a pond, the ripples go out and out, and what you’ve taken from me, from your babies, from everyone you touch, it goes far beyond whatever you could pawn. It goes on, will go on for your children. And you can’t even fathom it, because what you care about is your own need. What you cried for was your own trouble, your own self behind bars. Not the hurt and harm you’ve cost, but for the way you yourself were suffering, all because you will choose, every single time, to feed your own endless bottomless pit of need, even if it means the ruin of someone else.

Some people say you’re a victim. Victim of the drug, of the economy, of the people you got tied up with.
I call bullshit.
Choice. Make a choice. No one said it was easy. And no one can choose but you.
Yes. You are someone’s child. But you’re not a child anymore. This may be your last chance. The train might be leaving the station for good. You don’t have a ticket. What are you gonna do?
Choose, it’s your choice.

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Replacements

Till death do us part.

But what if one parts before then?

Do you die, so you can make it right? So you don’t have to break a vow?

Life goes on—that’s the brutal fact you just can never get around, not alive anyway. It did for me, no matter how long I grieved. It went on around me, while I felt dead. I wanted to be dead. Still, it went on.

I lived, and found out one can’t live and not be alive. Least I can’t. So, I began to live, tired of dying.

I didn’t replace you. I found a new life, a new love. Something more than what I was missing, and finally I didn’t miss it anymore. I didn’t miss you. I didn’t want what I’d had.

What I had missed was what I’d thought we’d had, cruelly ripped away from me with a scar put in it’s place. A scar everyone could see. A scar of ugly self hate, slow to heal at all, festering with the delusion that I was deserving of the abuse you gave. But what we really had was just a chapter in a story—your story, made up along the way to fit your needs. Your needs, disguised as ours. You lied about that more than anything else, and you lied about almost everything.

You left me with a sawed off stump, my amputated ego hanging by shreds of aching skin.

In the words of an old song we’ve both heard, “I Wouldn’t Treat a Dog” the way you treated me.

The magnitude of raw hurt I felt for years may have made it difficult for me to trust again, to really love and give myself to anyone. But it didn’t mean I wouldn’t, eventually. I did.

Till death do us part.

But you see, that died; I died, who you were to me died. I grieved, died, lost another chunk of myself here and there as time went on—the old rotting illusion of our marriage would shrivel and fall away, just drop off in chunks whenever I least expected. New little deaths, over and over. And by the time they finally all fell off I was so sick of the disease of them that I wanted them to go, even while it was still painful to let them go. And it usually was. Pieces of my identity went along. My belief system went along. My hope went along. And my ability to fall in love went along as well. So I imagined.

But know something here; I wasn’t really dead. Only pieces and parts of me, the pieces that you could still touch, the pieces you’d told me were me. Well, they’re not me.

I’ve spent some time backtracking, walking parallels of paths I took after you left me broken and bleeding. I didn’t set out to follow these old times, more they came to me, and called me out. Only after the fact can I see that they did so because I was finally ready to give all of myself to someone. It was necessary to see where I’d been since you changed how I saw love. And it was shocking how many wrong turns I made just trying to distance myself from what happened. Just trying to heal.

I visited those old spaces, places, loves, and found quickly that whatever stray parts of me were still laying about lost fit handily in a basket, nothing more than I could carry, although the basket seemed really large at the time. Later when I picked up the basket, it felt small and looked hardly a thing to hold so much woe, yet it was the same basket. And it was easily set down.

Finally one day all those stray, misshapen, fallen apart pieces, they were all gone. The little basket was just empty. I felt naked, and surprisingly light. Uncertain, too young to be the age that I am, I stepped up to my life. And love was waiting for me. I didn’t know I was waiting for it too. Sometimes we have to die a little, in order to really live. Life goes on. Life begins anew.

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Lies

Do not consider it proof just because it is written in books, for a liar who will deceive with his tongue will not hesitate to do the same with his pen.

Maimonides

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