#ventwriting

It frustrates you. Your inability to do the normal things that everyone can do. It kills you inside makes you feel as though you can’t be a functioning adult. Just earlier you were sitting outside with the dogs, smoking like usual and your mind wandered to the chores you have yet to do inside. By “yet” you mean have been pushing off for awhile. Yesterday was a good day because you finally folded that laundry that has been sitting in the basket for two weeks and the laundry that has been left in the dryer for about a week. All because you were almost out of work socks and ran out of sleep shorts or loose boxers that you wear to bed. You can’t go back to wearing your boxer briefs to bed anymore they feel stifling. None of that really matters because you pushed through and you did it. Of course the newly clean clothes are now residing in the basket and dryer but this is a cycle that is bound to continue indefinitely. The day before that you had cleaned the bathroom and moved the dirty dishes from the sink and into the dish washer. They had been sitting there for a week but once they were gone it felt like you could breathe again. The bathroom hadn’t been really cleaned for probably almost a year but you never really let it get all that dirty. A couple weekends ago you finally cleaned the dining room of the boxes that had started to pile up. You went on a cleaning frenzy because you felt that you couldn’t breathe.

All of this looks good and sounds good on paper. It doesn’t negate that feeling of inadequacy. Like everything in your life it goes like tides. You can’t clean your house or take care of yourself until you can for one day. Today you almost cried because you couldn’t thinking. The issue was the litter box. It is always the issue and for some reason you can’t figure out the best method to clean it and the mess the cats have made on the floor in front of it. It makes you feel like you can’t breathe, you can’t do anything about it. Logically you know you can. You know you can clean it up like you do every other time but right now you just can’t. It just sits there and taunts you. A reminder that you can’t take care of yourself why would you think you can take care of your pets. It’s a spiral thought process that lead down very dark paths. If you can’t take care of your self, you can’t take care of your pets, if you can’t take care of your pets your pets will go without things that they need, if your pets go without their needs being filled then you are abusing them, if you are abusing them then you don’t deserve to have pets, if you don’t deserve to have them then you should surrender them, and if you surrender them then you’ll never see them again, and if you never see them again and they don’t need you and they aren’t around to comfort you then what do you have to live for? 

It’s an illogical spiral that makes assumptions that you know aren’t true. Your pets don’t go without they always have food and water and attention. Yeah there are some days you forget, there are stints you can’t clean the litter pan or are so wrapped up in whatever is going on you don’t realize how bad it has gotten, and yeah there are somedays that you just can’t have them around because they sounds and the needy form of love is too much for you and you have to hide yourself away in your own house. But you also can’t imagine life without them.

You always hear people discuss the spoon theory. It makes sense to a fault. The main fault is that you can’t wrap your head around certain intangible things. How many spoons do you get? How much is each task worth? You know it’s all relative but that doesn’t make the concept any easier to grasp. You’re an adult, with a full time job, a mortgage, a car payment, insert many more bills here not to mention more obligations. You’re an adult who has to feed themselves, bathe themselves, has pets to take care of, and lives alone. You can’t be rationing out imaginary spoons to decide what is worth doing because it isn’t a choice anymore it is necessity. So you do you do everything, all day, everyday you have no down time you have no relaxation and things start to fall by the wayside but what can you do? Sure you can deal out the spoons to the most important matters: work, bills, pets, food but even that can become too taxing. Dwindle it down then: work, bills, feed and water pets, frozen meals and skipped meals. On the worst of days you’re lucky to get even a bit of it done but the only thing insured to be on the list is work and boy would that take so many spoons. 

You struggle with memories. Sometimes it’s hard to pick out the good ones, and sometimes it’s all you can dwell on. There are times that you fantasize about the past. Those thoughts have the hazy golden glow of a sunset in summer. You remember yourself much more vibrantly, much more happy. The old you who used to be so witty and funny. The old you who didn’t feel the need to be quiet. You miss him. The old you was a much better person and a much better friend. It’s times like these that you dwell on the past. When the future feels so bleak and hopeless that's when the happy memories come out to haunt you. 

Those happy memories only come out when you are feeling down to make you feel even worse. The bad memories are always there. At the forefront of your brain. Whether you are upset and feel the need to make yourself feel worse or pull examples of how shitty you’ve been or how shitty life has treated you. The worst times are when you are genuinely feeling happy, when you feel good about yourself and those bad memories come to ruin any shred of self esteem you’ve worked so hard to build. 

There is rain sprinkling outside your window and it reminds you of a time long ago when your car was destroyed by hail and the windshield while still intact was cracked to hell. You still drove it like that for months. You didn’t have a job and had no money other than the little you could get from your dad. Mom never gave you any money. On the rainy days it was miserable at best in that car. The driver side window was gone and the rain freely came in splashing you in the face sometimes at such a high velocity that it would sting on impact. Though this is not a bad memory. Back then you had a friend, or rather a best friend. Something you are seriously lacking in anymore. You were inseparable. Saw each other everyday and told each other everything. They sat in the passenger seat on every adventure and were there the day that the cracks in the wind shield got so deep that the rain started to seep through and drip down onto the dash. They were the first person you drove to when your dad bought you a new car because yours was now considered too dangerous to drive. It’s them that you find yourself missing when those memories of the good times haunt you. But, with every incline comes a decline. Those good memories will often be shadowed with doubt, anger, and sadness. This one is no different. Once you start to think about them you are forced to think about the decline of your friendship and the resulting argument that ended it all. That leads down further rabbit holes of the arguments that ended other significant friendships in your life. Each one branching to the next slowly weaving a pattern to now. Where you sit at home alone, you have no one to message. No one to hang out with on your days off. You have pushed everyone away and for what? A sense of comfort in the fact no one can be close enough to hurt you? 

There is this song, a popular song that used to play on the radio when you were freshly graduated from high school. Every time you hear that song it takes you back to a much freer time. You can almost close your eyes and remember the smell of the outdoors while you sped past small forested areas, cow pastures, and fields of corn and soy. The highway swaying up and down and curving around hills following the land instead of bulldozing through it. Next to you a friend you have had since you were an infant. You had gotten so much closer in your senior year and you spent so much time with her you practically lived at her house. She was singing along to the song on the radio just like you were. You can feel the wind whipping through your hair sending it flying in loops every so often smacking you in the face. It’s why you always wore sunglasses to drive back then. That brings up the scent of Sonic, getting food from there and taking it to the lakes where you planned on spending all day swimming and just hanging out. These memories don’t devolve into worse ones, these ones just sting because they are so unattainable now. The freedom of the summer right after graduating high school is one that you can never get back, one you can never relive. It always lives there in your mind and you can visit it again but not without the sadness of knowing that you’ll never feel that free again. 

Finally there are the bad memories. They can be very simple. Remembering something dumb you did as a kid or a conversational faux pas. It’s the more complicated and traumatic ones that hit the hardest. They are the ones you don’t want to relive but your mind reminds you of them as what can only be a sick joke. They are the ones that no matter your mood, no matter the place, something small, hardly even connected can cause them to come back. 

Every time you are driving down a gravel road your hands clenched tight around the steering wheel, knuckles white from the force of your grip. Your heart beats hammering in your chest as you try to breathe calmly and slowly but every muscle in your body is tense and you’re beginning to sweat. With every turn or S curve you go through it’s like little snippets play in your head. The turns your stomach made as the vehicle started to spin out of control and the dread when every time you tried to fix it you just ended up over correcting and sending the vehicle barreling a different direction. The point where it tipped is where things get foggy. It was like it was moving in slow motion and that's how your brain makes you relive it. Feeling to slow shift as the wheels on the driver side lift off the ground and seeing the world start to turn outside the window until it's a blur of scenery that you can’t make heads or tails of. You don’t know if you are right side up, on your side, or upside down. At some point though it just cuts off. Maybe you closed your eyes, maybe you passed out but the next thing you can remember is being on your left side, head against the glass of the driver side window. Stunned silence until your mom says “Can anyone smell gas? We need to get out of here.” The feeling of being stuck not physically but too scared to move or really react at all. They never let you live that down. It gets brought up once every few family get togethers. That wound never heals because not only are you afraid of gravel roads and losing control of the vehicle you also get to carry the weight of what if it was worse? What if I had killed all the passengers in the car? How could I live with myself? How can I live with myself knowing that I have caused traumatic memories in my own family? That's the worst one, the one that has plagued you the longest. 

There is that feeling of never being able to find a partner because you can’t stand the touch of other people. You don’t like sleeping next to someone because you’re afraid of what they will do when you’re sleeping. There is fear in the actions themselves and there is fear in constantly being alone. You don’t like to think about this one and you don’t want to write it down.

Then there is the most recent one. You’re in your mid twenties, you should be having fun and drinking. Alcohol is fine and drinking is okay but there's this little thing in the back of your mind that screams at you and if you listen too long then you see her. Not the dolled up version that laid in the casket at her funeral, not the face you saw just a month ago at Christmas, no you see her in that hospital bed. Her face and skin an ashy blue and eyes open so wide, her mouth slack as a tube hangs out of it. Her son sits next to her, his eyes red from crying. He was the one that found her and called the ambulance. Not soon enough but who could blame him. Getting so drunk to the point of blacking out and vomiting was rather common for her. Though she had tried to quit drinking so many times she just never could stay away from the bottle. This time though she was laying in the wrong position maybe had taken prescription pills with a highly adverse reaction to alcohol depending on who you ask. She drowned, choking on her own vomit. That's what you see when you think of alcohol, that's what you see when your friends make their little jokes about being ‘alcoholics.’ You just see her face. 

Though those are terrible to remember and worse to relive. You think the worst things are the ones you don’t remember. You forget the good times with people who you no longer speak to. You forget the trips, you forget the gatherings, you forget the things that made life worth living back then. Just to remind yourself that anything good that happens now you’ll have forgotten in a few years from now. It’s hard now to remember the good things of the last few weeks. And when all you can remember are the bad times, the fights, the loss, the heartache. What really is there to look forward to. 

There truly is nothing wrong with your day. It was just a rough end is all and most days end this way but something about today makes your heart pound. Clock out and walk through the warehouse, scroll through Twitter on your phone, don’t make eye contact. You’re good at hiding your emotions everywhere except your eyes. Right now you know that if you made eye contact all they would be looking back at was a glassy eyes mere seconds from crying held in a way that seems forced to neutral. A vacant stare perhaps because at this point you aren’t looking at them. There is a war waging in your head and speaking to coworkers is the last thing you want to do. Not like you could hear them over your thoughts. 

With your usual quick pace you make it to the doors in about four minutes. Throwing away your mask at the trashcan next to the door you push your way to freedom. Like always that air makes it feel like you can finally breathe again. You’re still far from a sort of comfort zone. Making your way through the parking lot you quickly unlock your truck and sit down. You don’t know why this feels like you’ve been being chased but now that you’re here you can finally start to wind down. So you hurry up and sit there. You don’t do anything, you don’t even start the truck, you just sit and stare out the window watching another person walk by. Why does pulling out of a parking space with someone nearby make you anxious? You don’t have the answer to that one. 

Thinking back you realize that you haven’t actually done this in a while. You used to do it all the time when you worked at the retail store. Where you would get off work and go and sit in your car, play on your phone, smoke a cigarette or three and just not move. It was like unwinding, or avoiding the enviable, back then you didn’t want to go home. It was either to go back to your dad's house with his psycho girlfriend, when you lived there you spent most of your time in your extremely small room because that was the only place your cats were allowed to be. Maybe that's where your hatred of shut doors comes from. You can’t sleep with the door shut anymore it gets too stuffy. Or it was when you were living with your now ex fiancé and her brother and sister in law in a two bedroom apartment. That just didn’t have the space for everything so it was always cluttered, no matter what you tried to clean and organize it could never stay that way. Though if you were being honest with yourself it was because you didn’t want to have to go back and deal with your fiancé. Her constant whining and getting mad because you had to work all the time and when you were off she had to work and “how dare you go do things on your day off if I can’t come with you.” You understand that because you feel the same way but you never voice it because you realize how dumb it sounds. Not saying you are perfect. Far from it but you are your own worst critic. 

Looking back on those times now it seems to have a golden haze. Better times? Nostalgia? Back when you felt like you meant something to someone. Now you just get to go home and come back to work and no one knows where you are or what you’re doing and they probably could care less. Sighing you sit up and finally start the truck throwing it in drive quickly to make sure you don’t just sit there with it running. 

Taking off you take the scenic route through the park, driving is always good for clearing your head. You can’t drive too far though you still have to go home and let the dogs out. You still have work the next day and that comes quicker than you’d think. You make the loop through the park up some very shitty roads with potholes that you have never seen filled, back onto the main street in the area and into your driveway. Your house has an ominous feeling to it. You just know that when you get inside the dogs will be happy to see you. They will be bouncy and rambunctious and you just really aren’t in the mood. Too much activity will set you off but there is no real way to escape it. So you just push through. Like you do with every other aspect of your life you keep pushing like you're trudging through knee deep snow. Just as expected when you open the doors they are excited to see you and you wish you were more excited to see them. You shut off the alarm and make your way to the backdoor to let them out. This time when you get outside you don’t actually feel any better. You're tired, you're anxious, you are still on the verge of tears and you are one small annoyance away from losing it. You smoke one cigarette, try to calm down, stop scrolling through social media you’re making it worse, grab for another cigarette, stop looking at Facebook memories you’re making it worse, grabbing another cigarette and your lighter falls out of your hand tumbling down the steps with each roll you can feel your heartbeat picking up. It’s not enough but you decide then it’s time to go inside. The dogs don’t want to listen to you and that ticking inside gets quicker. They finally come and you're seething just right on that edge you slam the backdoor and that's when it happens. Your phone falls out of your hand and onto the floor. It’s like watching it in slow motion. The ticking stops and the explosion comes. “FUCK! Are you FUCKING kidding me?” Swooping down you pick up the phone and take the briefest second to make sure it isn’t broken but that isn’t going to stop the tantrum you’re in. With what you can only describe as a growl you shove your phone in your pocket, you have to get it out of your hand before it becomes a projectile. Erratically you search for anything to throw, to hit, to do anything to just release this aggression but there is nothing. Your chest heaves with the tearless sobs that work up through your diaphragm. Grabbing either side of the archway between the kitchen and dining room you try to put your head against it. You move too quickly, instead of just placing your forehead there you more like head butt it. In some ways the pain makes matters worse, but in some ways it seems to center you. Balling up a fist you aim a punch at an area you know there are boards. You don’t want to hit something to break it, you want to hit it to feel the pain in your knuckles. This first hit is the hardest and maybe there is one or two after that but it’s usually that pain that takes the break down out of anger and into tearless crying. Turning around and sliding down the wall you sit there and try to cry. The tears don’t come. They never do come. You can count on one hand how many times you have cried in the past 5 years. You wish you could, you think that maybe one good cry can make you feel so much better but you just can’t do it anymore. You’ll always remember those words “Don’t cry in front of me, tears to me are like blood in the water with sharks” or just the simple “Your feelings don’t matter”