#writeraw

You leave the table when it dawns on you fiercely and wretchedly that you dread Christmas dinner at your grandmother’s. For all the reasons you always didn’t like it but now so intense like a bubbling hate that crept out of you the moment you saw them exit the church. Why church? Why does your mom become a different mom around her mother and why do they talk about nothing, the same conversations in vicious circles. The food, the food, the food in boxes and in packaging and fucking heaps of it. Treacherous amounts of catered food and it’s all so so so sad you ache with the sadness. And you are so angry you want to snap at your mother even though the reason you are mad is the huge WHY that’s painted across your forehead. Why did a whole life amount to mundane routine? A small lonely house with an old woman and a 45 year old schizophrenic man? A whole life wasted. His whole life wasted. And I’m angry. How could this be? Will this be me?

And watching your mother talk to her mother in this removed honey sweetness. It’s so empty. Empty empty empty I pray I never speak to her with that sugarcane vacancy. How could she let it get like this? Will I allow my mother’s life to get like this?

Please don’t let me lose my consciousness. My awareness my spirit my sexuality my compassion my anger my drive to live. My vitality. My life force. Let me always talk to my mother about things that matter. Let me fill my house with REAL food and just the right amount not heaps of waste. Heaps of waste to fill the emptiness. Please don’t let my life be empty.

And now I’m on the floor of the bathroom and they know you’ve been gone for so long and you’re angry like you were when you were a teenager. And your grandmother died last week and you always talked to her about everything real everything everything and now. God. I can’t hold it together for even a night. I can’t.

I’m sick to my stomach because everything changed so fast and I’m so happy and then I remember all that’s been lost. And I read the blog of the girl you cheated on me with and I didn’t know it was hers but I felt little icicles up and down my spine and I thought “fuck, this is good” and I tried to stow away jealousy and replace it with flattery and affirmation and then when I found out it was hers my stomach sank. She lost the boy she loved on the same day I lost you and that’s the post that made me shiver. I checked the date. November 1st. It’s almost been two months.

Why do I always fall in love with the girls you chose before me and during? Something about connection, this link between my body and hers that wouldn’t have existed if not for you. I want her to like me, I want to weave an intricate web of female adoration that is so thick and strong and has legs that kick you in the balls.

It’s Christmas and you are not here. For two years we said goodbye right before Christmas and the days before were heavy with doubt and love and angry passion and coated with sex. Now we break the pattern of all that. All that to lead up to this unforgiving Christmas Eve dinner that I can usually grit my teeth through but tonight I can’t. I almost took a fucking klonopin but I’m not anxious I’m angry. My anger paralyzes my back and I want to writhe inside my skin. So I dump it all out on this keyboard and cry fat salty tears into my wet hair. I took a shower. It was nice and the wallpaper is pink in the bathroom and I guess this is the safest place in this house. It doesn’t feel empty in here.

This will never be anything but sad to me. My grandmother said she was sorry that my other grandmother passed and then told me how life is strange and death is inevitable and how she’s so lonely without my grandfather. I tried to let the truth make me feel better but now I’m just angry. I think it’s selfish to dump that on your only grandchild but what the hell do I know about being 85 and alone in a house with your lazy fat schizophrenic son? I don’t know a fucking thing about that in my spoiled-rotten-privelege life. My therapist wouldn’t like me saying that about myself. I thought about calling her and screaming into her voicemail like she told me I could. But I didn’t.

I’m selfish for not keeping it together. But this weight of being the only grandchild to a woman who I see as sad and lonely makes me want to throw up. I have a lot of nice things to say about her but I don’t have to protect her right now and I’m reminding myself of that out loud. Or out typed.

I was in a relationship for three years. I was on my way to making my own Christmas with a boy I loved more than my favorite blanket on my bare chest and we were going to fill our house with so much life and food and sneak away from the dinner table to have sex in the bathroom and that is gone now. And I want to run seven miles and then puke it all out. But instead I ate too much before dinner and now I can’t distract myself with the food on the table and so my feet are on the cold linoleum tub and my bare ass is on the rug and my nose is dripping.

I’ve got to back to the table.