the may roundup: take four
or, a litany of things i once believed in that it is crucial i stop believing
that he loved me, and still does, and the reason i cannot stop thinking about him is because he also cannot stop thinking about me, and the reason that i still love him is because he also still loves me, and that one day i will come home from a long and weary and horrible no good rotten day and he will be waiting in his car next to my house and when he sees me pull up and park and start gathering my things to go inside he will step outside the car and say my name and i will look up and it will mark the moment in my life where i will no longer have to be alone.
that he loved me ever.
that the reason i had to have such a bad childhood was because on some cosmic level or whatever i had decided to just stuff all of the suffering a human normally experiences over the course of a lifetime into the first twenty or twenty one years or so and that after that and once i became an adult i would magically become happy and all the suffering would be over and it would be worth it because now i was getting the life i deserved and that the universe had promised me, where i would be happy and loved and taken care of and things would be good and things would get easier and i would not have to suffer anymore. but there is no one keeping score. there is no one looking out over me. there is no magic number of years i will reach where i will finally be okay and things will be easy, no doorway that i pass through from the before period into the after period. it’s not going to happen, because it was never going to happen, because that is not the truth. that is a story that a traumatized child tells themselves so that they have the reason and the courage to keep going and not just give up or kill themselves completely, and they tell themselves that lie every day and night until they believe it so fully that they cannot separate this story from the truth because the story is the only thing they have to keep them from disappearing completely. i am turning twenty-seven now, and i am only just now realizing i have been lying to myself the entire time.
that if i only explained myself people would understand.
that if i only explained myself people would love me.
that if i only prayed and asked the universe and shifted my mindset that it would make the people i want to love me love me finally.
that angel numbers matter, that my tarot pulls matter, that my intuition matters, that any of the ten million things i saw and believed were actually pointing to the future i thought i was getting and not just the future i used as a nursery rhyme so i would have a reason to keep going.
that anyone was going to do anything to rescue me or to make my inner five-year-old feel safe.
that anyone would look up from their fucking phones and their fucking zoom calls and their fucking botox and think critically for even one fucking second about the earth and what we were doing to it and make even a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of an ounce of sacrifice for the planet to be saved.
that anyone would take personal responsibility.
that any of it mattered, or that anyone cared as much as i did.
that despite the fact that i am strange and sick and unstable and messy and loud and scared and have the reeking stench of a child who was never loved that people would see past that and discover i was just the proverbial orphan with a heart of gold and the fact that i was strange and sick and unstable and messy and loud and scared and have the reeking stench of a child who was never loved would not, in fact, prove too big of a deterrent for me to ever be in the kind of relationship that only happens for people who are not strange and sick and unstable and messy and reek of a childhood where they were never loved.
that empathy is a practice that other people are also engaging in.
that people who identify as leftists would stop ordering fast fashion on the internet to be delivered to their door.
that anyone would take personal accountability.
that if i just blocked my mom’s phone number and blocked my dad’s phone number and blocked my older brother’s phone number and blocked everyone’s phone numbers i would feel better, instead of it being like when it’s your birthday and you’re somehow convinced when you get home there will be people there celebrating you and so you linger late at the coffee shop and browse languorously at the florist and when you come home you park a little bit aways because you want to have the element of surprise and when you come to your house you don’t see any familiar cars but this just confirms for you that everyone is there and hidden and taking the surprise part of surprise party very seriously, and you slowly walk up and you take a moment to really savor how happy you’re about to be with your key in the lock, and then you turn it and the door opens and you step inside and turn on the light and no one is there.
that i was somehow guaranteed a happy ending, or a happy adulthood, or any of the things that a child who is not well loved wishes fervently for at every second of every day for the rest of their life.
that the kind of girl who writes poetry about wanting to kill herself and her ex lovers leaving her and all the different ways men have raped her would be the kind of girl that also has a happy and reciprocal and healthy and fruitful romantic life.
that i could one day be healed enough to have sex with another human being without spiraling into self loathing.
that there was such a thing as another human being that i could have sex with.
that it was counted, all of it, the score kept and carefully tallied, and one day someone would come to me and say, here. i know exactly how much you hurt, and i am here to love you the exact amount you were not properly loved before, and i will fill the hole this unloving left in you and i will not stop until you are overflowing.
that i could get away with it.
that i was special.
that the universe would not come also for me.
that anyone would love me enough to intervene.
that i would ever allow anyone close enough to do so.
that i would ever be the kind of person that people love enough to throw a surprise party for.
fuck it.
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