I'm so behind. So, so, so behind. Sort of. Not really. I'm just complaining.
I just thought I'd have my master's by now. In fact, years ago, I also would've assumed that I'd be living in New York, no more than a 30-minute ride away from my best friend of over a decade. I'm not. If I were even more naive than I am now, I could and would assume that my East Coast life would be more fulfilling than the one I have now in the West, but I have experienced enough life to know that the grass is not always greener. I love California.
It's overcast today in LA. My favorite. That's not sarcasm, either–I fully believe it's unnatural for the human psyche to only ever experience blissful breeze. That seems like the best time to write.
I've tried to blog for months, but it seemed like no thought could fully form. The last time I was in an airport, I tried too, but shelved away whatever I had managed to say, tucking into a journal for my eyes only. So, here I am. Trying again. Anything I write feels wrong and evokes a compulsion out of me, but the hurt I feel is only remedied by typing, so. There's that.
Usually I halve my adderall since it's difficult to fill, but I took an entire pill and I'm listening to Starflyer 59, and thinking about how I keep fucking up. Then I remember, it's not me fucking up. I am not one of those people who can't own up to my mistakes, insecurities, vices, whatever–and I can say with certainty, the last six months have proved to me that I'm always going to be willing to do the work to improve myself. I am just not entitled to demanding that others follow suit.
So, I've already written about being sick, about getting help for my OCD, and the works. I left out a lot. Lately, I'd been thinking about not sharing things here, either for the sake of saving myself from embarrassment, or maybe just out of pure avoidance. Not this time. This time, I'm gonna air it all out. Ungraciously, too, because I can't be bothered to censor myself, and I never want to.
I call myself a writer, but for the last five or six years, I haven't written much. For the last ten years, I've struggled with my mental health enough that it's held me back exponentially, and has also provided me the fuel to persist out of spite. In the last six months, I have grappled with my sexuality, finally got a diagnosis and help for my OCD, ended a friendship with one of my best friends/sisters, relapsed into anorexia, ignored my grief, cut my hair (I am always cutting my hair), visited home, cried, got dumped, dumped someone, started reading again, finally started to play the guitar, went to a concert, bought more concert tickets, and planned a trip to Europe.
That's the thing that's been on my mind the most. Europe. The last time I was there was when I was newly 17, and I went with the very friend I no longer speak to. I think, of everything that's happened to me since January 1st, I've ignored how much of a toll that one took on me. Cue my shit introspection:
The neighborhood I grew up in is rough. There've been cops who've chased people through our backyard, machine guns are going off every 4th of July, there's nonstop firetruck sirens–you name it. Across the street from my mother's house is a lot where a church used to be. It had red brick, and it's where my grandparents got married. Argentine. Where things never change.
My mother and I always said it, too: "You'll always have home to come back to. All of this will still be here." Except, Mom, we forgot that people die and seasons pass, and because life is constantly changing, the home I left in February nearly three years ago is no more. Grandpa and grandma are both gone now, and I don't think I can bring myself to go to their empty house. Their cat, Oreo, is still there and being taken care of by my uncle. Yet, the thought of entering and hearing nothing but her squeaky and weak little meow bouncing off the old and stained wallpaper makes me dizzy. I don't know if I can ever go back there.
Let alone ever stand in the empty living room, staring at the place where the television used to be. Where the couch was, too, where my little brother and I spent our childhood days during summer, playing the Gamecube and watching Modest Mouse on MTV's morning music video run. Where my grandparents watched black and white films.
Now, I visit them elsewhere. Creeping up the dirt driveway, I parked my car on a curb near a patch of clover. I entered the door code wrong, then again, and once more before being buzzed in. I made my way to them and sat on the dingy carpet, right in front of their nameplates. Immediately started crying. About Europe, about struggle, about loss. About loneliness. About pain. And most of all, to ask them for luck. "I have the merit. I'm a hard worker. I know I got it, I just need a little bit of luck." And for what, exactly, I haven't the slightest clue. It was just a way to try and tug at them like I used to as a child.
I told them that I met a girl. I fell in love, and fell out of love, and I joked that they couldn't be mad about the whole thing either, because, well. Yeah. I knew they wouldn't be, anyway. I was adored by them, and when my grandmother called me beautiful or pretty, it was was of the only times I ever truly believed it. I told them about how hard I'd been working on myself, and also how sad but happy I was. How the world was, how it should be, how I am, how I should be.
After, I made my way back home. Back to my cat, whose fur I buried my face into, moistening it with tears and snot and desperation. For the unconditional and seemingly unattainable. She knows when I'm upset, and she's waited outside what used to be my bedroom door many, many nights. On the night before I left for LA, she knowingly curled up at my feet and didn't leave until I did the next morning. She does not care that I have fat on my stomach, that my chin is not defined, that my body is soft, or that there are scars on my wrist from carelessness. None of it matters. All that matters is that when she cries for me, and crawls in my lap, I'm there for her; and when I cry for her and reach out to hold her in my arms and kiss the top of her head that looks like a moth, well, there she is.
She met the newly estranged friend, too. She was there when we ate cheese from a Tupperware our mutual friend brought, along with the cheap wine I bought from Target. We lay on my bed and laughed, cried, and hugged before she went off to Spain. This was nearly three Decembers ago.
Before all this, we were 15 and 16. We met in Biology, introduced by our mutual friend. I did not expect to create years worth of stories with her. Inside jokes, gingerbread houses, gossip about our crushes, getting lost in Montmartre–we were girls together. I called her my sister. We practiced our bad French together, bought illegal pot brownies in a Sunfresh parking lot, and consoled each other when we needed it most. I loved and love her. And I am angry, sad, and heartbroken that she was put in a cage.
See, she had everything. Beautiful, inside and out. Smart too, she was promoted from serving to bartending and quickly saved thousands of dollars to support herself in Spain, where she was planning to teach English. She met her would-be husband the year prior, and I hated him. He admired the idea of her and made her his trophy. Then left her when she needed him the most, without reflection or remorse; it was so obvious that he was such a small man in such a big world that the only way he could ever feel important was to simply make someone else feel even smaller. So that he did.
He left her when she was in pain and grieving, and abandoned her after promising forever. I had just moved to LA at the time, and woke early just to talk to her. When her husband caught wind that my friend and I were planning on visiting her, he booked the first flight there. Without a visa but with all the nerve, he slept in her tiny bed during the day, and ate dinner on her dime at night. The savings she worked so hard for dwindled, and those dreams of visiting Greece and Paris with other girls faded into but an old possibility. She left Europe early and came back to our hometown to finish school and work as a teacher.
She cried about the assignments, about the stress. The enduring battle of just barely turning in homework on time, just barely having enough sleep to get up and teach a class of third graders. She moved to Argentine. Then, on some random Wednesday, she announced she had news. And I'll never forget her face when she took a step back from her laptop camera, revealing an eight-month pregnancy. My jaw dropped, and I thought about where to even place my tongue in my mouth. About how he won. About how it was a girl. About how that was it.
That night, I walked to Albertson's and grabbed two cans of beer. They'd go right to my stomach or thighs or anywhere they shouldn't be, but I didn't care, because I'd just lost my sister. Another. We'd fought before, but this time, there was absolutely no going back. Emboldened by my liquid courage, I acted like any drunk and angry sister would. I don't regret what I said. I knew I'd beat myself up over drinking in the morning, though, just like I'd always done, but first, I'd sit, numb in the dark, just like I'd always done. On the bed, hazy, my eyes fading in and out.
I thought about the coldest winter in Chicago when she and I had gotten into it and weren't talking. She was angry that I was killing myself by not eating, and I was angry she was killing herself by drinking. I was disappointed, and the thing about disappointment is: that initial, ringing feeling of "oh" just never quite fades. That winter, there was a polar vortex. I'd wear a long-sleeve and two hoodies under my giant denim jacket and hop on the el, up to Evanston. I'd reach the last stop on the purple line–Linden–hop off, and hop right back on the southbound train. Listening to The Velvet Underground. I wasn't going anywhere, I just needed to not be alone, or still.
Inertia: An object in motion stays in motion. Or resists changes in its state of motion. So I keep moving.
And without her, without a chunk of my sisterhood and childhood, I keep moving.
Although I am more than familiar with loss, it never actually gets any easier to lose. No matter how much I detach, a diagnosis or two, if not just who I am as a person, proves me to be incapable of apathy. I hate it; I couldn't possibly "nothing" it.
I always think back to the 16-year-old me who snuck out of the house every night, who made her way down the street to the park with the slide, where she'd found a little sanctuary. She sat there, staring at the tennis court's cracked surface, thinking about whether or not she would ever leave this fucking town. She stared at the dim lights on the outside of the nearby elementary school. Wanting to be in the future, already. Well, here I am.
I knew it was going to be hard. I knew that. I just didn't think it would be hard like this. I didn't think there would be so much goddamn heartbreak. Over and over again. And you play the game called life where you don't let it harden you, or draw out too much indifference. It's so. fucking. deep.
My therapist has heard my sailor mouth nearly every session, but it seems to make her laugh a lot. Even when I'm crying my eyes out, I crack a joke as if it were just a sniffle. She knows about all my heartbreak when it's related to the OCD or the now. But nothing of the past. None of the trauma that even I have yet to explore. There's times like these where I am reminded I did not dig the fucking hole in which I buried all this shit deep enough. It...kind of reminds me of my mom.
She's in that empty house, silently digging through her parents' belongings, and through her hurt and resentment. Every stupid news clipping the woman had hoarded was just another piece of trash to her, a silly little reminder of how aloof her mother had always been, but especially in the last ten to twelve years. For so many of those years, she simmered in guilt. Guilt over loving her parents, but kind of, well, hating her life. She wouldn't admit it, but there were, in fact, times when she'd feel a gray fog come over her and she'd jump out of bed and get out of it before any storm could even begin. She'd only relay this to me when I confided in her about my own storms.
I don't blame her for any of it. My siblings don't either. She took care of our grandparents well. Better than any parent could ever hope. At her own expense. She'd wake all of us up for school, drop all of us off, and come home to a mess, cook dinner, clean the dishes, laundry, bathroom, dog shit. No time to think about anything else. The phone rings, rings, rings, and it's her mom, and she wants a Coke. So she arrives with one, along with two chicken sandwiches in a brown paper bag. She sits, talks to her parents. Notices their decline, and what the future holds. It's going to be tough. She didn't think it'd be this tough.
Suddenly it's 9 PM, and the kids are calling, so she tells them to make sure to lock the door and drives around for ten minutes longer than she has to, just to have a moment for herself. Still in Argentine. Never, ever changing Argentine. She goes back home, asks me to drop down her towel (it's a dingy two-story), and takes a time-efficient, but unenjoyable shower. Always efficient.
She'd drink a glass of chocolate milk, and we'd sit on the couch and watch movies. We like psychological dramas and historical dramas. We'd talk politics some of the time, and argue each and every one of those times. Before I went no contact with my sister, she'd be there too. Sometimes my mom would dump her purse out on the coffee table and organize and reorganize it. I'd steal a piece of her gum and watch her scribble cursive into her planner. Oh god. Even writing this, I am so like my mother.
It breaks my heart knowing that was her life, every day, for years. And only for brief moments, in the form of quick California getaways, could she turn her mind off a little bit. Now with my grandparents gone, and her kids being adults and all, well, all she had was time. Time to think about how she regretted getting married, but not having us. She could never regret having us. And I know this is true because that woman has personally paid for help for my mentally ill ass tooooooo many times to count to be faking it.
I told her that she can't keep saying she's "60 so [she] doesn't need therapy." Girl.
I am so my mother's daughter. Persistent and uncaring if it's annoying. Likes crude humor. Makes a bull look like a baby when it comes to being stubborn. Cares so much it's sometimes too much, but when I need it, God, I need it. Most of all, and I think we'd both agree with this: we're open-minded. I like that.
Aaaaand yet, both of us sift, sift, sift through the skeletons in our closet, unwilling to make amends. Unwilling to even think to ourselves, No, actually, I'm not okay. Haven't been for a while. If ever.
So here I am, crying over turning 26. Crying over crying on my birthday, again. Crying over not being perfect. Crying over the fact that I just never give up. Crying over the last six months. Crying over the last two and a half years. Crying harder over the last three and a half. Crying hardest at the last fucking ten.
The small, white stuffed bunny my friend gifted me for my birthday just stares. I think it's a sadist.
I know there's no point in wishing that I hadn't struggled for all those years–that I'd set my ego aside sooner and ask for help–it's unfair, and pointless by principle. Besides, I'm literallllyyy still struggling.
Just trying to close this out goes like this:
I want to type something witty and positive, but my OCD is sinking its claws into me, trying to make me afraid of something. Anything. I decide I will type it anyway, but then I have to remove everything from my lap–because nothing can be touching me–and knock on wood seven times, or flick my fingers seven times. Sometimes I spit. Sometimes do it thrice. Did it wrong. Do it again. Good, now thrice. Great. Now type, still with uncertainty: However, I am trying to acknowledge and be proud of myself for even trying. I remind myself: The best time to start was yesterday, but the second-best time is now. Return key.
sincerely,
elena
elena