what I really want is a bubble bath, a drink, and a tranquilizer to just numb the fucking edge
There are none. There are no bathtubs here, no bubble baths in purgatory. There is nowhere to soak your feet, something I would never have thought to do a year ago, but now something that I long for. There is no bubblebath, no bar soap even. There is only a shower stall in my little trailer from hell (the one I am actually grateful to have after the nightmare of sharing showers with 50 other women), one I share with the saccharine sweet but obsessive woman who works in housekeeping. I have tried to tell her not to clean up after me, feeling slightly guilty, feeling like my slothness of leaving hair on the bathroom floor for two days at a time marks me as a l-o-s-e-r. My fucking hair is falling out so fast that there is no way to keep the hair off the floor. I don't even try to explain, I am sure she would smile at me, bent over, sweeping up my hair, saying that she really likes cleaning, it clears her mind.
Smack dab in the middle of my last depressive event, I tried to soak my feet. It had taken weeks to obtain a bucket, but I finally got a pretty red one from the guy in property who made alot of banana in the pocket jokes and thought he could get me naked by tempting me with pizza and NA beer. NA beer, for Christ's sake. I relished in the luxury of soaking one foot at a time, toes curled up against the side of the bucket since my foot was too long, until my toes puckered. But total relaxation does not come one foot at a time, so though I still have the bucket, and my tattered self respect, I no longer entertain any idea of soaking my feet. It has become pointless to try to incorporate any semblance of regular life here.
Have been sick. My trailermate is back in TX, rescuing her real life trailer, the one where the tree crashed into it during one of the hurricanes that I pay no attention to because I am a world away and could give a shit about anything that happens back in the US. My world is of car bombs, brown dust, food all in the color beige, men with jeans that show the cracks of their asses, brown dust, and trying not to get caught accidentally looking at porn when someone's blog accidentally links to porn and I accidentally read the story about how great their fucking sex life is and can't help making the inevitable comparisons to how tragic mine is.
Am hungry today, after two days of vomiting, but not interested in food. Have put away three sugar-coated nutri-bars, surely not nutritious, only because it doesn't seem like food. Now what I really want is an hour in a bubble bath. And a drink. And a tranquilizer to just numb the fucking edge. OK, maybe that is not true. Maybe I want the biggest fucking bottle of wine on the face of the Earth, a veritable womb of wine, the deepest tub, and an entire 90 day supply of the strongest tranquilizers available on the market. You know, the ones they feed to animals or something. The one that they give to the stark raving mad, clawing-at-their-faces, screeching, manic-altered women in the Snake Pit. And I don't want you to tell me not to take so many of them. Fuck you.
Am so tired that I can barely move. Sick? Anemic? I went to bed one night, and woke up the next day with arms and legs I could no longer lift. It was no coincidence that David had again sliced my heart like a surgeon, filling my veins with ice. I thought I had begun to heal. I was wrong. The depression settled over me like the proverbial blanket, drowning out any thought. There is simply nothing left inside me. No reserve. No emotion. No way to deal with anyone else's problems. Nothing but exhaustion. I stared at the ceiling for hours, unable to think, unable to move, occasionally rising only to vomit, as if that could clean him out of me. As if I wanted to clean him out of me.
It has been a year of 84 hour weeks, no days off. Time is relentless here. I had never stopped to think of it, never stopped to think that for every week that you put in at the office, I put in two. I get up, come to work, go home, go to bed. Each day is a struggle to focus, not even caring any more what to focus on. Each day is a challenge to lose myself in something so I can forget I am here, so I can forget how slowly time moves. I have to forget that I am here, forget that I could be killed at any moment, forget that I don't really care if I am killed at any moment.
I don't know where I belong. Going home holds no allure. It fills me with dread, a feeling of here we go again: the long days looking for work, the endless nights crying; the terror of waiting for him to hurt me, the loathing I feel for myself when he does. Waiting. Always waiting for someone else to make a decision that will straighten out my life, finally free me. Waiting. When will I be released, warden? Always trying to hold onto some optimism about where I go from here. Waiting. Always looking down the barrel into the crapfest of my existence, trying to find that fucking silver lining. Waiting. Always feeling like the solution is just around the corner, if only I can hang on. So I hang on. By my fingernails. Until I scream, cry, and seek unconsciousness. But, the fucking trooper I am, I always wake up.
I am somewhat surprised to not hate this place any more, not to really care. I always thought I would. I always thought I did. But I have surrendered my capacity to think to this surreal world, and find that the fog I now live in hurts less than reality. Thinking is simply not convenient, and certainly not advised here. I fear that I may never pull out of the indifference. But I don't really care. Nothing matters here any more.
There is not one single point that seems significant. My days can be characterized either as the happy ones with David, and the sad ones without David. Even he has forgotten how bad it is here, how lonely, how desolate, how confining...the time and distance clouding his memory. And me, the fucking trooper, still hanging in, the unlikeliest of survivors in this strange social stew, the one voted most likely to piss someone off and get fired in the first 30 days. You didn't know you were teaching me, did you? You didn't know I was watching you, studying, trying to be more like you, trying to emulate your pathetic existence. And now I have. I have mastered the art of disengaging. I live inside myself now. And it isn't always a pretty place to be.
Smack dab in the middle of my last depressive event, I tried to soak my feet. It had taken weeks to obtain a bucket, but I finally got a pretty red one from the guy in property who made alot of banana in the pocket jokes and thought he could get me naked by tempting me with pizza and NA beer. NA beer, for Christ's sake. I relished in the luxury of soaking one foot at a time, toes curled up against the side of the bucket since my foot was too long, until my toes puckered. But total relaxation does not come one foot at a time, so though I still have the bucket, and my tattered self respect, I no longer entertain any idea of soaking my feet. It has become pointless to try to incorporate any semblance of regular life here.
Have been sick. My trailermate is back in TX, rescuing her real life trailer, the one where the tree crashed into it during one of the hurricanes that I pay no attention to because I am a world away and could give a shit about anything that happens back in the US. My world is of car bombs, brown dust, food all in the color beige, men with jeans that show the cracks of their asses, brown dust, and trying not to get caught accidentally looking at porn when someone's blog accidentally links to porn and I accidentally read the story about how great their fucking sex life is and can't help making the inevitable comparisons to how tragic mine is.
Am hungry today, after two days of vomiting, but not interested in food. Have put away three sugar-coated nutri-bars, surely not nutritious, only because it doesn't seem like food. Now what I really want is an hour in a bubble bath. And a drink. And a tranquilizer to just numb the fucking edge. OK, maybe that is not true. Maybe I want the biggest fucking bottle of wine on the face of the Earth, a veritable womb of wine, the deepest tub, and an entire 90 day supply of the strongest tranquilizers available on the market. You know, the ones they feed to animals or something. The one that they give to the stark raving mad, clawing-at-their-faces, screeching, manic-altered women in the Snake Pit. And I don't want you to tell me not to take so many of them. Fuck you.
Am so tired that I can barely move. Sick? Anemic? I went to bed one night, and woke up the next day with arms and legs I could no longer lift. It was no coincidence that David had again sliced my heart like a surgeon, filling my veins with ice. I thought I had begun to heal. I was wrong. The depression settled over me like the proverbial blanket, drowning out any thought. There is simply nothing left inside me. No reserve. No emotion. No way to deal with anyone else's problems. Nothing but exhaustion. I stared at the ceiling for hours, unable to think, unable to move, occasionally rising only to vomit, as if that could clean him out of me. As if I wanted to clean him out of me.
It has been a year of 84 hour weeks, no days off. Time is relentless here. I had never stopped to think of it, never stopped to think that for every week that you put in at the office, I put in two. I get up, come to work, go home, go to bed. Each day is a struggle to focus, not even caring any more what to focus on. Each day is a challenge to lose myself in something so I can forget I am here, so I can forget how slowly time moves. I have to forget that I am here, forget that I could be killed at any moment, forget that I don't really care if I am killed at any moment.
I don't know where I belong. Going home holds no allure. It fills me with dread, a feeling of here we go again: the long days looking for work, the endless nights crying; the terror of waiting for him to hurt me, the loathing I feel for myself when he does. Waiting. Always waiting for someone else to make a decision that will straighten out my life, finally free me. Waiting. When will I be released, warden? Always trying to hold onto some optimism about where I go from here. Waiting. Always looking down the barrel into the crapfest of my existence, trying to find that fucking silver lining. Waiting. Always feeling like the solution is just around the corner, if only I can hang on. So I hang on. By my fingernails. Until I scream, cry, and seek unconsciousness. But, the fucking trooper I am, I always wake up.
I am somewhat surprised to not hate this place any more, not to really care. I always thought I would. I always thought I did. But I have surrendered my capacity to think to this surreal world, and find that the fog I now live in hurts less than reality. Thinking is simply not convenient, and certainly not advised here. I fear that I may never pull out of the indifference. But I don't really care. Nothing matters here any more.
There is not one single point that seems significant. My days can be characterized either as the happy ones with David, and the sad ones without David. Even he has forgotten how bad it is here, how lonely, how desolate, how confining...the time and distance clouding his memory. And me, the fucking trooper, still hanging in, the unlikeliest of survivors in this strange social stew, the one voted most likely to piss someone off and get fired in the first 30 days. You didn't know you were teaching me, did you? You didn't know I was watching you, studying, trying to be more like you, trying to emulate your pathetic existence. And now I have. I have mastered the art of disengaging. I live inside myself now. And it isn't always a pretty place to be.
posted by akantha at 3:27 PM
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