Eight

Treasured mementos of a life well lived.

I saw this tidbit somewhere today and it made me laugh out loud. Partly from my negative cynic side rearing its ugly head, but mostly as a self-defense mechanism so it wouldn't smart so badly when I realized that I didn't have any of those.

What I have are bad reminders of a life well wasted. Thirty years of them, in fact. Looking back, I don't remember having dreams as a kid - nothing I ever aspired to do. I guess that's because nobody thought enough of me to sow a dreaming seed inside of me. But like any other task you learn in life that you must do for yourself, you eventually sow your own dreaming seed. I did that for myself many years later. I started small. The first dream I had in my aged life was to move out of my parents' house. I remember hearing people say how I should be a kid as long as I could, that being an adult was much harder. Bullshit. There couldn't possibly be anything harder on Earth than enduring day after day in a personal hell taunted by people who wouldn't spit on you if you were on fire. At least as an adult you'd have the option of removing yourself from them. When you're in school, you're sort of stuck at their mercy. I knew the grass must be greener on the other side because there was no way it could be any more dead than it was in my own backyard.

Not that getting out of my parents' house could be considered a dream because it's just a rite of passage that everybody makes into adulthood. But getting away from the misery I was in at the time seemed like too much to hope for so, yes. It did take on the appearance of a dream and I looked forward to realizing that dream. I finally did realize that dream, but it took me almost twenty years to do it. From that point on, I really didn't allow myself dreams. I entertained thoughts of where else in the world I would rather be doing things other than the ones that occupied me at the time. A lot of bitterness and resentment followed those kinds of thoughts so I don't let my mind wander too often. No matter how far away your daydreams take you, it's never far enough and you always have to come back. Coming back proves more traumatic than never having left because, even if for a brief moment, you saw yourself happy. (Refer back to the invisible dog fence mention.) Every time you have to come back, you're reminded just how useless having those thoughts are considering how mired down you are in the present. The future is too much to think of. You're never going to get there - short of a miracle. And if miracles were real and karma was true, the evil son-of-a-bitch that ruined your life would have been the proverbial ashes and dust ages ago instead of your sole source of grief.

When a person has lost so much of who they were to a series of damning events in their lives, many people will counsel that they need to hold on to their faith. Faith in what, I don't know, but I don't have any left. In people. In myself. Or even faith in God, sometimes. That's a horribly blasphemous thing to say and my upbringing tells me never to badmouth God, but if my upbringing is true to its word like that, then God will forgive me for saying so. It pisses me off to an infinite end to hear religious people saying, "Pray about it. Ask God for deliverance. If be brought you to it, He will bring you through it." Or any other equally annoying diatribe they feel appropriate at the time.

If God knows so much about me and wants nothing, but the best for His children, will somebody take up a collection to provide me with the answer to this question? If God put me here - and he must have since the religious folks tell me He already charted my course in life before I was born - why would He veer off that course and get me out of it? Or show me a way to do it myself? He put me here, right? This is where he wants me. He proved this to me before. Three years back God slapped me in the face twice in a row. I was putting the finishing touches on my grand exit plan, actively looking for a job, genuinely making an effort to stand on my own. I asked for God's help. He sent a pregnancy instead. He sent a pregnancy through a condom that never broke or faltered. If that is not a loud and clear reprimand, friends, I don't know what is. I wanted an abortion. He sent other things to deal with so I ended up not having the money to pay for the procedure. Eventually I did have the money, but it was too late in the pregnancy to have an abortion performed. It was right about then that I made up my mind to be of the opinion that I was the butt of some cosmic joke. Even God was against me. I think that's where the last bits of me that were still hanging onto hope finally gave up. It was then that I accepted that I was already dead on the inside and started using auto pilot exclusively.