you ever just internalize that you're inherently a terrible person and no matter what you do you deserve every bad thing that happens to you because you're *toxic* and you need to *behave*. oh you're happy? your happiness is *almost* acceptable. no matter what you do the closest you'll ever get to being good enough is *almost acceptable*. you're lucky we waste the time to accommodate you. maybe i should clap in your face and yell at you while you're nonverbal and dissociating to really drive in just how lucky you are to be taken care of by us. YOU'RE LUCKY I LOVE YOU YOU CRAZY PSYCHOTIC BITCH. by the way that necklace we gave you is a collar. wait why are *you* calling it that? bad girl. you're toxic. you're lucky i look at you. go to bed. that's an order. get out of my sight. what do you mean you feel unsafe? i've never hit you. capitalist all you do is take and take and i have nothing left to give. my well of love has run out! you don't deserve love! you don't deserve love! you don't deserve love! you don't deserve love! you don't deserve love! you don't deserve love!
Sometimes I think it's all okay. I will get through this, and I know I will, because I've gotten through everything else, good and bad, that life has thrown at me thus far.
But I have moments where I forget, and I pick up my phone, wondering what crisis text has woken me up this time - and it's not her and it never will be her again.
I'll never again pick up the phone at 9 PM, wondering why she's calling, and calm her down because she's been drinking too much and the fight she had with Paul was absolutely ridiculous, even by her standards. She would always say we'd talk more in the morning, but by then she would have forgotten the whole ordeal, and she'd be right as rain, calling to ask what Blayre had done the day previous.
Never again will I sit through an awkward Christmas meal, because she's had too much to drink and she won't look me in the eye, because if she does she'll cry about all the injustices she's put me through, her oldest child that has never been a child.
No more worrying about how much weight she's lost, when she's too small and I could bench press her, but she's ecstatic that she dropped a pant size.
No more amazed speeches about how she wishes she could be like me, how she wishes and hopes to one day see my artwork or stories published, so she can proudly pull the work out of her purse or pull a picture up on her phone. No more tears about how happy she is that I'm nothing like her, because she is just like her mother, and she hates herself for putting me through the same thing she had to go through and the inevitable damage control I do because I love her, as exasperating as she is.
No more frantic questions about whether I'm angry with her because I haven't spoken to her for the past 6 hours and then laughter when I ask what she possibly could have done to make me angry, as I was 8 hours away.
No more crying fits when we come to visit, and when we go to leave, because she cries about everything, happy, sad, angry and the spectrum of emotions in between.
What am I even supposed to say when people ask me about her? How I'm feeling?
Every waking moment, and even in my dreams, I ache so fiercely and bury it so deep that fountains of pressure build and build and then I cry at the most inopportune moments. When an actor in a movie says "I thought you were dead" and my head supplies "She is", or I my phone buzzes and the text is from someone I could care less about only because it isn't her.
I can't quite look at pictures of her, because superimposed over them is the funeral home and the stacks of papers I signed and her body on a metal table, when all I could think is What's wrong with her left eye? and even dead she was golden tan, but they took out her fake teeth and she would have hated that because it made her lips look... wrong.
But I had to look, I had to see, because even after seeing it, even after the proof was laying right in front of my eyes, I was sure that someone would pop out from behind the red curtains and tell me it was all a joke, a prank, a mistake.
I know it isn't. No one that knows me would ever be so cruel as to joke that my mother died, people who care about me would break their own fingers before hurting me so emotionally, I know it, I know I'm loved and people care and that I have friends who would drop everything, who did drop everything to come see me. My best friend, who'd just moved over 13 hours away, caught a plane and spent the single day she was able to with me and we didn't talk about it, because she would cry and I would sit, numb, but she was there.
People I talk to all the time on tumblr and people I talk to in passing on here have messaged me and commented and I know I'm not alone - but it still feels that way.
