6:57 p.m. - 06/22/03
homeless...
Sometimes there isn't any right choice.
That's how I felt Friday morning, when it came down to the minute, and I had to decide whether or not I wanted to trek the four hours to my brother's house in Kansas City or stay on my own for two days. In the latter sort of isolation, depression is almost inevitable, and I haven't been taking such stellar care of myself as to feel super-confident. On the other hand, eight to ten hours in a car with my mom, two + days at my brother's, stripped of my own life, etc didn't so much appeal to me either. I chose it anyway, thinking Dale and I have been getting along well lately, I wanted to give him his birthday present in person, maybe the social stimulation would heed depression off at the pass. I forgot Dr. R's wisdom - that distraction will not be enough against this beast, that I need time to feel also, and so had two pretty awful days. I felt as I often do at the end of a New York trip: hungry for the flight home and dreading the destination. I wanted to go home, and as usual - no, more than usual - knew I had no home to end the trip.
My mom played Carole King songs on the way home - all these torch songs, politically incorrect doting songs - until I wanted to ask her how she could stand it. Maybe it's different for her, having had some choice in how things are; maybe it's different having some understanding of why she and Dad are doing something so impossible as divorcing. But how can she listen to these songs about how just one man will be all I need for the rest of my life and not have to turn them down, and blank out, staring at the highway for awhile? Where the hell is her emotion?
I remember when I went to Rogers, the first entry I wrote in my journal there (and not far from the last; journaling and Rogers didn't go together much for me) was all about home and how it didn't exist anymore. It's stupid to me now because I wrote it in the one place that I would later be able to call home, but I didn't know that then. All I talked about was how I'd left the only house I ever knew, never to walk inside it again, (and everyone is saying, you know, when they sold the house, that's when it really happened), how everywhere else was foreign, how I was in a hospital which could certainly never be home. And maybe I'm again naive, but I feel that way again today. That desperate, like the time in the La Guardia airport when the flight took two hours to be cancelled. When I sat there with my sister wanting to cry because I didn't want to stay and I didn't want to go, and there wasn't any solution to the feelings. I was done with vacation; I wanted to go home, but there is no home to go to. And soon this apartment that I've had the stupidity to look forward to - this apartment in the city with the access to a real world - will come into my world, and I'll have to face the fact that it's just another home ruined before I've even ripped the tape off my boxed-up belongings. Ruined- this time- because now it's "my mom's place" - it's where I live with her. Where I am allied with her by default, or spending every second of my life proving how far away from her I am, so that I never have something to feel close to. And my dad's apartment? In the town where he grew up? In the complex where, as Joe put it, "people sit around waiting to die?" Is that supposed to be home? What about this house, which I've hated since the first weekend I spent here, hated with everything in me for not being Rogers, now made even more horrible by the disappearing presence of my father, and the blossoming of my mother before me? That's right; she's going to go and have a real life now. She's going to be what she always wanted to be; well, what the hell... I'm all about evolution, growth, change. I guess I figured it was ok to be about those things. That was Before. That was when I was rebelling against something steady, and Godd, it makes me furious to type that because when in the fucking hell were they ever steady? Never. But now is the time when I think, marriage has never made sense to me, and putting personal identity first has always made sense to me, so why should sacrificing the first for the second seem so wrong? I just want to be able to keep on the way I was; imagine the fact that the pain I was in three weeks ago wasn't enough. I had to be in more. I just want to hate my parents and not have it complicated by the politics of their separation and the guilt of their divorce. I just want to have my different beliefs, to grow stronger in that autonomy, instead of giving up - now of all times, when I'm so freaking close - in some awkward attempt to save this frail little family of ours. You don't repel against a wall that's breaking down. And everything about breaking up is different when it's your parents who have been married twenty-seven years, who have five children; everything's different - even the songs.
I wish so much that I had the resources to just leave. To have an apartment of my own, a job of my own, a life of my own - basic as it has to be; I don't care. I wish I could go and live my life now, instead of sitting around while my mom asks me if she's done something to upset me (in her position, it's easy to forget) and my dad says, "If you want me to come pick you up, just call." I finally said to him Thursday, "If you want to come pick me up, just call" but I don't think he understood it. I don't think he understood the undertone of "Don't you dare put the responsibility of this entire relationship on me, not now especially, when I'm so angry with both of you for making a choice that changes so much of my life, and makes so much of what I'm doing harder, without any explanation at all..."
I have no idea why. None. My dad never even said it out loud. He didn't even come to us and say, "This is what's happening." No one knows why. And they talk about all the "family" things that they're going to maintain and how this isn't going to undermine our right, as their children, to family functions, and all I can think of is, if that's not what this is about, then what? If our lives are going to be exactly the same, then what exactly are you hoping for? What's the change that makes this necessary? What are you so desperate to cut that contract for?
I don't know who to talk to. So many of my friends have experience with this, but I'm afraid to call them, afraid to need anything from them because it might feel like I'm back where I was and I'm so desperate to prove to everyone including myself that I am better than I was two, three, four, five years ago. I may fuck up a meal, but I do eat now. I may seem totally broken, but I'm actually very much in tact. Considering. No. Take that word off the record. I want to prove that I'm ok without any conditions.
I can't believe the pain, all the pain, still isn't enough. There's still more to endure.
It's not enough that in eighteen years and four months, I've spent (less than) three months in a place I could call home, before losing it almost entirely. It's not enough that I have a life-threatening disease that I still have to fight 24/7, with the added bonus of people who think it's simple superficiality or not so dangerous or a lifestyle. It's not enough that my roommate died eighteen months and one day ago, leaving me to fight this on my own, leaving me with all this grief, leaving me to wonder over and over and over again if it would have made a difference if I'd just called her like a good friend, if I'd just been a better roommate while we lived together. It's not enough that the only person I feel like I can talk to is currently back at that home (which is no longer that home, and is therefore bringing her pain) because she's so sick with the disease I'm so much "better" from that I could lose her at any moment, too. It's not enough that my parents have never in my memory gotten along, that I haven't had a friend in "spontaneous get-together" proximity in two years, that I have a panic disorder, a depressive disorder, a complete lack of home, and an identity completely rooted in relationships. It's not enough.
I want to say it's not enough to break me, but that just sounds like egging it on. And it is enough. It's more than enough to break me; I'm just not letting it. But no one was ever supposed to have to be this strong.
I would give so much to just call someone and say, "It's kind of a crappy night. Do you want to come over?" I would give so much to have that tiny comfort, that one option of support, that temporary escape. I just want to collapse for a little while, and I need a steady someone to hold me while I do. But see that's part of the pain that just isn't enough. I have words without voices and love without touch. I don't have shoulders to cry on, no matter how many reasons there are for tears.
I pay for my best dreams with migraines, but sometimes in them I have Chas or Laura or Brea or Stephanie, long hair impossibly in tact. And I wake up and don't care about the pain. It's addictive almost; one of the symptoms is fatigue. So just let me go back to sleep and maybe I'll have them again, for a few moments. Maybe in the nightmares that I dream, there will be shoulders to lean on, present tense and tangibly. The doctor says that in his tiny office, when the tears over Rogers stream down my face, and I fight for words that can never explain it fully, my pain is palpable. And that's all I want from the love. I want to be able to feel its presence in the rooom. I have the best love in the world; I have for years. I just want to be able to touch it now and again. I just want to be able to curl against it and cry and be at home.
I want to store my home in people and then be near enough to them to see its presence in their eyes. I want the vacation, the exile, the house-arrest to end. I want to go home, to stay. To be. That can't be too much. That cannot be too much to ask now. Not now. Not now, especially.
chord
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