Guilt in Black Panties

Cancer in the Family

2008-12-22T09:43:00.000-08:00

When you think of something like cancer the first thought is not me and of course the second is not someone I know. It’s a common thing. The kind of thing you think or say, you hear the words leave someone else’s lips. It’s defiance, it’s a way of shaking your fist at the universe, at God, and saying I dare you. When the inevitable happens you are still thinking this cannot be happening to me.

The human mind is a wonderful thing. It safeguards you, it protects you from the troubles that you cannot face or comprehend. You wrap yourself up in layers of fog and fairy tales, still shaking a fist in defiance, and thinking: this really isn’t happening, tomorrow I’ll wake up and life will be different.

Yes. Yes, it will be different.

It will be worse.

The doctor’s exam room is small, even smaller with four people jammed into the space. My mother sits on the exam table, still in her work scrubs. They are teal, a color that almost matches her grayish-green eyes. My father is bundled against the cold wind outside and leans against the wall, trying to stay out of way while I occupy one of two chairs. The doctor, dressed in military fatigues with newly shortened hair sits in the other chair, the kind that has wheels. If I was just a few years younger I would have been sitting in it and spinning in circles. The doctor leans back in it, my mother’s chart in one hand. He never even opens it.

This memory is just the first. There will be other visits to this small room. There will be other visits to other rooms, places where they’ll shove IV needles under my mother’s skin and pump her so full of chemicals her hair will fall out. But hopefully it will kill the cancer.

I’ll wake up tomorrow and everything will be different.

Blue Blood Death

2008-09-30T09:51:00.000-07:00

Spencer watched August Matthews slide down the wall. A streak of blood so blue it seemed to glow with some unknown florescence leaving a trail across the paint. She reached out one gloved hand and ran it through the smear. Rubbing it thoughtfully between thumb and forefingers she looked at the rapidly cooling body at her feet.

What was he? Something other? She’d known that when she pulled the trigger. But what kind of other? Spencer shrugged her shoulders at the empty room and wiped her hands on her pants without any hint of distaste. It didn’t matter to her. As long as he was dead she’d collect the bounty.

She nudged the body with a foot. Already it was stiff and ridged, like some cardboard cutout of a man who might have been handsome if he’d shaved his ragged face and got a good night sleep. The gun shot wound in his chest was a ragged blue hole. It was deep, the insides torn and seeping that startling blue. The color matched his quickly clouding eyes.

Crouching down she reached out to gently close them. She didn’t want their crystal intensity gazing at her as lugged the body down six flights of stairs. Or when she dumped him in the back of her transport. He was ice cold through her gloves and already so stiff she had to exert more pressure than she’d expected to cover those disconcerting eyes.

Spencer caught herself looking at him, wondering, asking questions that she had no right to ask. Questions she would certainly never get any answers to if she pressed her boss for them. He’d given her the name and a photo. That was all she ever got. But really, it was all she needed. The how and the why of the crime didn’t affect her.

Spencer hunted. End of story.

But this blue blooded man had questions flowing through her head like a fast deep river. You can’t see how quickly the water runs until it's too late and you've been swept away.

She shrugged, the empty room her witness that she was doing her job, and slung the heavy weight of the dead man across her shoulders with a grunt.

Dark Houses

2008-09-25T08:55:00.000-07:00

I tacked a quote on the bulletin board beside my desk today. The quote is in a place that all I have to do is look up and it’s there. Those clear and precise black words on a white page manage to convey everything about me in fourteen words. That’s all it takes.

A few years ago, after my high school graduation, I went to Fairbanks Alaska to spend some time with my aunt. There were several reasons that I went. One very good one was change. My parents hoped that they would put me on the plane and when I returned to them in a few months time I would be different. I would be a changed person. A changed human being and that somehow along the way I would have left some of my darkness behind.

I had been living in a dark house. A house so dark that pitch black night needed a couple candles and a reliable lighter to keep the darkness at bay. And if I had admitted it to myself then I wanted a change too. I wanted to be reborn in my skin.

Alaska changed me. I don’t think you can go there and not come back a changed person. But my mom’s family, my aunt, uncle, and cousin, changed me too. When I stepped off the plane and came to face my family weeks later it was as a changed person. I wasn’t completely reborn but I had been given the first glimpse of a life that was so different from the one that I had been living. I had been set on a new path.

I read a book while I was there, a mystery thriller that I’ve forgotten but in the front of the book was a quote. It’s stuck with me since I first read it. I’ve wrote it into journals and I’ve tacked it beside my desk. It follows me and reminds me. It haunts and comforts me.

“It’s not having been in the dark house
that matters, but having come out.”
– Teddy Roosevelt.

The Killing Kind

2008-09-08T18:37:00.000-07:00

It’s so hard to quench that desire.

People talk about their vision going red. “Seeing red” they call it, as if they are looking at the world through a blood red haze instead of those rosy pink glasses. Where can I find a pair of those by the way? I might be willing to sell what's left of my soul for a better outlook on the world. I don’t see red, I don’t become unfocused. Just the reverse happens for me, to me. Everything becomes crystal clear and magnified. And it burns.

I can feel it aching to be released.

His mouth opens like a flower blossoming, the words spilling forth like poison from a poison pen. They are arrows tipped with Amazon poison and each one is aimed at a body part, mostly at what’s left of my heart.

He is so like me. We could stand side by side and you would see that we're related. I have pictures of when we were children in my house. He was a brother who’s nightmares I used to scare away, a brother who was in every way the best friend I could ever hope to find. But the anger inside of him is atomic, explosive and is always boiling beneath the surface like a dormant volcano. He’s schizophrenic and it has gone untreated for over a year.

I can’t remember the last time he spoke to me without anger in his voice.

I wish it was easy. I wish it was harder. He makes it so easy to hate him and I hate myself for that. He makes it so easy to justify my desire that he would just disappear. A knife in his hand scares me more than I will ever say and one day I expect to visit my parents house only to discover their dead bodies.

Sometimes I wish he would free us from his pain. And sometimes I wish I would just give into that crystal clear desire to be the instrument of that freedom.

2008-08-25T17:08:00.001-07:00

The Plus Side of Negative

2008-07-01T13:35:00.000-07:00

The pregnancy test was negative. She looked into the bedroom where a shadow of a man lay wrapped in her blankets. Could she roll him out from under them? Pull at the edge until he came free of her bed, her room, her life?

Negative. She clutched it in her hand like a cross against the undead, waiting for the body in the bed to rise and attack. His hands would search her curves, the insides of her thighs and he would push his tongue past her stiff lips. He wouldn’t notice that she didn’t kiss him back and he would never see her letting go.

Turning her back she went into the bathroom, her eyes slipping over the mirror and the blurry ghost of a reflection. Without her glasses the world was in soft focus, the sharp plains and red eyes softer and less apparent. She held the slim white piece of plastic above the bathroom trash, contemplating letting it slip through her fingers like so many missed opportunities. It would lay there in the mess of used tissue and gray toilet paper rolls, a sign of freedom that she had thrown carelessly away.

Her fingers tightened, gripping white her proof of choice, of freedom. She carefully set it aside on the closed seat of the toilet.

Reaching for the tap above the bathtub she ran water so hot it would turn her delicate skin a bright shade of lobster red. Her mind skipped ahead to the moment she would sink beneath it, watching the steam curl and cool around her. The sound of the pipes groaning, the water shifting in its copper skin beneath the shell of tile filled the small space.

This small moment of anticipation stretched out before her. The simple enjoyment of sinking into hot water and feeling her mind draw a blank, it only lasted a moment but that moment was bliss.

Old Name

2008-06-25T12:14:00.000-07:00

I kept the name like a badge. Armor. A shield against the unknown world of the recently divorced. I don’t know what I thought I needed protection against or why I felt that I had to carry your name with me into the dark.

It’s been months. In the cold of January a judge dressed in black congratulated me by my maiden name. He sat like a dark crow behind the peeling lacquered stand; dark hair and dark eyes. He said a name that, though it had been buried, was more a part of me than your’s had been. This one, the first one I had had all my life. Your name I borrowed for two years, almost three and now I’ve given it back.

The new driver’s license and eventually the social security card, a new bank card; all these eventually will be washed of that name. Married name. Maiden name. It shouldn’t matter but it does. I understand now why some women don’t take their husband’s name. Yes. It does make you property. It makes you more a part of them then you will ever be yourself again.

Plus if you never take the name when you get divorced you don’t have to worry about changing all your information.

Waiting Room Silence

2008-06-11T10:26:00.000-07:00

The silence is thick. The kind of silence you read about in books and wonder what it might sound like. But silence is the absence of sound and this is not that kind of soundless quiet. This is the silence of a doctor’s waiting room.

The muted sounds of a telephone, the somehow delicate tap of computer keys, and hushed voices. These are the sounds that crawl across my skin like spiders, placing each light foot between the hairs on my arm. I would brush the silence away, shiver at the sleek black bodies if I dared. But I don’t. I sit silently, patiently, waiting in a room that is meant for waiting.

When my name is called unseen heads will turn to match the syllables with the lines of a face. Behind their eyes a brain will turn with questions about why I am here, waiting like they are waiting. Are they wondering what words might pass tense lips behind closed doors?

I am the Mouse

2008-05-21T10:20:00.000-07:00

A white bellied mouse flew through the air. While a glossy black grackle stood panting in the heat, beak open and expectant, tail feathers cocked at an angle as it watched the mouse land. The bird seemed greedy to me as it stood there, waiting for the mouse it had tossed to fall back to earth. The mouse landed and tried to bound away but the grackle followed, sharp beak at the ready.

I watched the bird repeatedly toss the mouse into the air. It would lay still for a moment, its small body rising and falling with panicked breathing before gathering the momentum to try one more break for freedom.

I told myself I was going to get out of the car. I told myself that I would at any moment push open my door and rescue the mouse. It was only a small life, a life that most would not have even noticed. But I waited too long. I held my breath and watched the small creature move once more before it lay still in the heat.

I looked at the gas station parking lot, the cars stopped at the intersection, all the people that hadn’t seen. I should have made the effort.

Letter to a Divorced Man

2008-05-15T10:28:00.000-07:00

I dreamt of you again last night. As if I could ever really escape you. You hunted me through my dreams like a stalker, a killer wishing to peal my skin away from bone to see what kind of woman I was underneath.

I already know what kind you think I am, some selfish creature that was born and will die only wanting to watch you suffer. I was a monster in a human dress and I swung my hair out to send my scent floating on the air. You always said I smelt of vanilla and mint, a taste of heaven as your lips crushed mine. Such bruising force and passion in your touch, such desperation to tattoo your name onto my pale skin. I was already so marked up when you claimed me. One more scar wouldn’t matter.

I believed that you were the only man who could ever love me. I wanted to hide from the world in your love, be protected by it and encased in it like a doll behind glass. A butterfly pinned to a board and mounted on a wall, a trophy of sorts. Did I make myself out to be a trophy wife, was that the secret that I kept looking for but could never uncover? I don’t know anymore.

I’m looking back and wondering what happened? I’m lost in the anger of dissatisfaction and resentment. It takes two and you lay all the blame at my door. You say I fear commitment, that I don’t have it in me to commit to someone for the rest of my life. I want to be mean and say that maybe I just didn’t have it in me to commit to you.

It was you.

I want to scream those words, have them rip my throat as they escape like a thousand biting bee stings. They would hit you like shrapnel, the words tearing into your skin just as they tore my throat because it would hurt me to say them. You don’t believe me; you don’t think that a monster like me can feel. Yes, I am that heartless being you describe me to be. I am anything that you say I am.

You say you saw me more clearly than anyone else. That you loved all my faults, the things that drove you crazy, the things that have driven people away from me screaming at the top of their lungs. Yes, I know I have those. Mostly they are things that are just me, things that I can’t change even if I wanted to though I’m trying to improve myself. I’m trying to be a person that isn’t so hard.

I feel as if I’m just starting to grieve for you. I don’t think that I did before. I was so blinded by anger and frustration that I forced myself to do anything but feel. I pushed myself to limits that took me beyond the things hovering in the wings waiting to take me. They were so patient and when I was done making a fool of myself they took me under their wings and showed me what I had been missing. The pain I had tried so hard to avoid was only more intense for having been postponed.

So I’ve been blinded. Blinded by myself playing pretend like a small girl, wearing a mask made of the face I thought I wanted to have. The one beneath waiting to be unmasked, waiting to bloom tears and pain for you. The man I loved. The man I still love.

I feel so much guilt for you. I feel responsible for you. For you and about you, I feel as if I should fix everything that I have done. But you have to own your own mistakes, your own problems. As much as I love you I cannot be blamed for all of our problems or yours for that matter. You cannot lay everything at my door and call me a heartless selfish woman.

You have made me so unhappy. I could accuse you of the very thing that you accused me of, wanting to watch me suffer. But I don’t want to watch you suffer. I don’t want you to be in pain. I don’t want you to be unhappy. I say these things and yet you don’t believe me and there is nothing I can do to change your view of either me or the situation.

That last e-mail has haunted me; crept into my thoughts and dreams, my days and nights as I have struggled to just be. We are divorced. I have been repeatedly told that I shouldn’t be talking to you or seeing you or having anything to do with you. They tell me to say ‘no’ in the firmest tone that I can muster. A final slamming door, the closing of a book at the end because we have reached our end. Now I don’t have to since you have done that for me.

This is the end and I don’t want it to be this way. I don’t want you to feel as if I did this only to hurt you, to harm you, to watch you suffer. I can’t be with you again. I don’t want to be with you again. You don’t want to be with me either. I feel as if I need to defend myself from you, you attacked me in that last e-mail and didn’t want to give me the chance to defend myself. You felt I had no right.

You accused me of wasting your life. You have no right to accuse me of that. Of being wasteful of the love you and I shared, the problems that we could and could not work through. We were not a waste and I would never accuse you of wasting my life.

I have run out of things to say and yet I feel the words bubbling up through my skin, breaking on the surface that you claimed was so cold and hard. I am sorry even if you don’t hear it.

Who? Me?

2008-04-10T12:46:00.000-07:00

Today I am not going to be me. Nope. Today I am Victory the Stripper or possibly Linda the Librarian. Why am I not me, you ask? Well, with good reason. Someone else is pretending to be me at the moment. I must say if they are willing to take on all that means they are more than welcome to it.

You want my allergy to latex? I would love to get rid of that one. Not to mention the spider and crowd phobia. The sock and underwear fetish I might miss a bit but being someone else I could always develop more interesting fetishes, let me think about that one and get back to you.

As for the person pretending to be me, well I have to say the joke is on them. It’s not great. I don’t make that much at my day job and my bank account was empty before all these charges from a fake me starting rolling in.

So, what’s it to be? Victory or Linda?

Bathed in the Blood of Chickens

2008-04-03T09:00:00.000-07:00

Recently the local Kentucky Fried Chicken, or Kentucky Fried Rat as my dad likes to say, received a new paint job. The building went from being a plain and unassuming tan to red, blood red.

It makes me wonder why the person, whoever it was that made that paint color decision, decided that chicken blood red was a good way to go with their restaurant. Not only do they serve chicken they are bathed in the blood of chickens and ask if you would like a side with that. Cole slaw or some voodoo, you decide.

Gravy Sized Hole

2008-03-14T12:44:00.000-07:00

There is just something about a chicken fried steak with cream gravy that makes my heart skip. Though it could be all those calories and the cholesterol, I like to think that my heart realizes happiness when it sees it.

Yes, I have a hole in my heart that only gravy can fill. A gravy sized hole, if you will. And the wonderful thing about gravy is that it can fill a small, medium, or large hole and depending on the day you can always order extra gravy.

There is a fantastic little restaurant called The Chuck House which has been serving the best chicken fried steaks for years. Periodically I go there with my parents, a manic gleam in my eye as I sing the gravy song. Yes, a song which consists of one word: gravy. I call it my 'Ode to Gravy'. It’s funny that you can connect food to happiness. I only wish that it lasted… which I guess it does in the form of a new pair of jeans in a larger size. But that’s not happiness.

I enjoy going out to eat with my parents. When it’s just us and they are pinned across the table from me with food in their mouths. I talk, my own mouth and mind going a mile a minute, trying to make up for whatever time I’ve lost while they’ve been busy doing other things.

“I had a hole in my heart that only gravy could fill.” I said at one point, mouth half full, knife and fork poised to attack my plate once more.

They laughed, not just the kind of laugh that a parent laughs to pacify a child, but a real laugh; the kind of laugh that comes up deep from the inside and brings tears to your eyes. I think they laughed because it’s true. I think that my heart isn't the only one in need of gravy.

One of Those Days

2008-03-13T07:37:00.000-07:00

Everyday is a new day. I’m more thankful for that than I am most things. I am thankful for the chance to change things, to stop and turn around when I head down the wrong path.

A few years ago my brother was diagnosed with schizophrenia along with a host of other mental illnesses. Years before that the doctors called me manic depressive which is now being called bi-polar. That scares me while at the same time it explains so much. I’m on a low right now, the lowest point of my ride and just days before I was so high I could have done anything. Now the smallest thing seems too hard to handle.

Most of the time I can manage it. I’ve been off and on the meds for years, my mom always asking when I’ll go back on. It’s the same with my brother. Only when he goes off his meds things change drastically. Life is suddenly unbearable because the hallucinations want to kill you. I can’t imagine what living inside his head must be like; it’s hard enough living in mine.

So I have to ask what is it about my family? What is in our blood, our genes that both the children have a mental illness, one being a pretty serious condition? We have a history, grandparents and parents who are a little left of center. Stories passed down and when retold you think ‘Oh’ and the oh just breaks your heart a little more each time it escapes. The thoughts that drift and eventually cover all the pain.

What do you do? What do you do? Take the meds and never go off. The problem is things are different on the meds, I feel not quite myself. I feel something other circulating through my blood. Which it is, I tell myself. Those are things that keep you safe. Safe. As if I would take that knife and draw the blood forth, calling its name. The name of the meds, I would remove each pill I swallowed with each drop of blood. I’d have to drain my whole body dry.

I miss my brother. We had been so close, friends as well as siblings. He was my best friend for so long; I have the best memories of us staying up late into the night talking. Would those memories look differently through his eyes? Is the person I remember still inside? Sometimes he shows through, he isn’t completely gone but he is not the same anymore and I can’t expect him to be.

And now I’m the normal one of the family. I’m the unbroken child that will survive the world and carve something out of it to call her own. It is so hard. So hard to stand and take the weight that most would call nothing. Most people don’t even think of it. The battle to place a call. The battle to go into a store. The battle to order a pizza or go by a fast food place. Those are simple, small, tiny and insignificant things that most people take for granted.

“What did we do to break you?” my mother cries. I don’t know, I don’t know and I want to scream it and yell it. I want to rip my hair out and let the waves of tears break over my shore. Break me and tumble me to dust like the seashells against the sand.

How do I stand when I’m afraid of my own shadow? I write everyday and everyday it is a battle to make myself do what I love. I love the words as they flow across the page, the meaning and beauty of black ink against the white page. It is the one place I feel I am in control and myself. I read to escape myself. I write to understand myself.

How can I be the normal, unbroken one when I carry all this mess around? I’m trying; I’m trying so hard not to call a halt, a time-out in the middle of the game. I’m trying not to change the plan halfway through. I’m just on the downward slide today and it’s kicking my ass.

I’m bloody and broken, a crying sobbing mess, of raw left over emotion from an invisible train wreck.

I’m hanging on. To what I’m not sure yet, but I guess I’ll figure it out.

Catch me. Find me. See me.