Sixteen Bombs

Welcome to a Secret Subject Swap. This week 6 brave bloggers picked a secret subject for someone else and were assigned a secret subject to interpret in their own style. Today we are all simultaneously divulging our topics and submitting our posts.

My subject is: You are a senior in high school again and graduation is upon you. What are you looking forward to? Vacation? College? Career? Moving out of mom/dad's house? Plans?

It was submitted by: https://spatulasonparade.blogspot.com

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I have had a few prompts now about going back to high school and reminiscing in that part of my past, and honestly, it's straight up not a good time, bro. I didn't enjoy my high school experience. Overall I have very few fond memories from that time and even fewer people I remain in contact with from back then. And I'm perfectly okay with that. You won't see me singing "thanks for the memories" any time soon.

It kinda feels like a downer on what is supposed to be a fairly lighthearted prompt, but who am I if not a chronic oversharer whose third favorite topic of conversation (after murderers and abolishing prisons) is her own personal trauma??!?

I surely wouldn't be me so here we go.

I didn't attend school on campus my senior year. I was enrolled in a program that let me take college courses that counted as credit for both college and high school, and even though my counselor advised against it as most students took 1 or 2, I went to college full time that year. Why, she asked...

Maybe it was the fact that I saw the person who raped me several times a week in the hallways? The person who got away with it, who stole me of innocence, killed the me that I had been? The one who had no bad memories and no PTSD and who didn't care about justice?

Or maybe the bullying? The death threats in my locker about being openly queer and protecting other queers? The fat jokes? The crazy jokes? The physical threats that used the word "dyke" like it was a dagger? Weirdo. Bitch. Lesbo. Carpet Muncher. Fat cunt. Stupid whore. Ugly. Gross. I heard it all.

Or maybe just my shit mental health from having one abusive and two mentally ill parents who finally divorced and went off the fucking rails crazy at each other and us and with new partners, having no support from either one especially ESPECIALLY for the rape and my weight and no access to mental health care on top of the rest?

No couldn't be that. I just wanted to be too grown. I needed to be a child while I could.

Guess someone should have let my parents know that 🙃

so the best part of my senior year experience is that I actually didn't have to go to high school at all. No bullshit lunches being mocked endlessly and having to stand up for my friends. No classes with the same people all day long every day of the week. No getting up early. well, except for that one physics class i took and even then i didn't go half the time. my absences there didn't count for anything unless the professor included it in their grading. It made my life a little easier, but it didn't do anything to ease the pain of everything I'd gone through until then. It just meant I didn't have to spend 8+ hours 5 days a week watching my back at school just to go home and do it some more.

I don't know what it was like for other folks, but when I was accepted to a fairly large University, my first choice and still in Georgia, that would have almost entirely been paid for by the Hope scholarship, my mom screamed and cried and threatened me about leaving her and how I must not love her if I wanted to leave. I couldn't even look forward to moving away from here. I was never going to be allowed. At least not to go to college and even now, when Im a mostly grown ass adult, the fallout from moving even within a 4 hour radius would be huge. Suicidal threats and tears...and here's the thing, it's not even about me or love for me or wanting what's best for me. It's about rejection, imagined or otherwise. It's about control, about knowing where I am. it's not the least bit healthy, and it's the boundary I have yet to be able to put up--to just pack things up and move. I'm fucking 38. It shouldn't be this way.

Here's the thing...

I cannot tell you how many times in my years at high school, in college or not (where I still got called a dyke btw), I wanted to die. That didn't stop in my senior year, and it certainly didn't give me anything to dream about or plan or look forward to. I was barely hanging on by the moment. I lived one hour at a time. Sometimes minutes.

Do you understand how hard it is to be absolutely torn down by almost everyone around you, to be damaged and beaten and assaulted and bullied, just to have your only out ripped away from you? To know beyond a shadow of a doubt that going away to college wouldnt be the last dream ripped away from you because of someone else's inability to be supportive and loving and encouraging?

What would I look forward to if I had to do it all over again?

Still breathing? I guess? I'm still here. I suppose that says something.

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Here are links to all the sites now featuring Secret Subject Swap posts. Sit back, grab a cup, and check them all out. See you there:

Baking In A Tornado https://www.BakingInATornado.com

Spatulas on Parade https://spatulasonparade.blogspot.com

Wandering Web Designer https://wanderingwebdesigner.com/blog

A ‘lil HooHaa https://hoohaa.com/

Part-time Working Hockey Mom https://thethreegerbers.blogspot.ch/

Empathy Costs Nothing

Today’s post is a writing challenge. This is how it works: participating bloggers picked 4 – 6 words or short phrases for someone else to craft into a post. All words must be used at least once and all the posts will be unique as each writer has received their own set of words. That’s the challenge, here’s a fun twist; no one who’s participating knows who got their words and in what direction the writer will take them. Until now.

My words are: trash, construction, Elvis, without, retrieve

They were submitted by: http://Bakinginatornado.com

You might be entitled to your opinion, but maybe consider if that opinion makes you sound like an asshole before you spew it.
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I read a few articles recently about the documentary on Elvis that Priscilla Presley was recently involved in and stories a few months ago about suicide notes he left behind. It's a new revelation in his story that puts to rest all the conspiracy theories and mystery. After years in the spotlight, Elvis, like many others before him, felt the need or desire to take his own life.

Now, if you're one of those people who thinks it's weak or selfish or who questions how someone who seemingly has it all could still get to the point of suicide, my suggestion to you now is to close this out and move on. Your opinion won't be welcome here and is, factually, trash. My best advice is for you to retrieve your head from your ass and find some semblance of empathy within yourself and stop with the blame/selfish commentary because every time you do it, someone you know who has had suicidal thoughts realizes they can never come to you about their feelings without being judged. You're helping no one, and it is you who is weak and selfish.

But, what I really want to say is that suicidal thoughts aren't necessarily abnormal. Shit happens, and sometimes it gets the best of you. You have a bad month or a bad year and the depression sneaks up on you like a monster coming out of the shadows. It's not out of the ordinary when everything is piling on for that thought to lurk in the back of your head. It's there and gone like a morbid peek-a-boo session with your darkest self.

Sometimes you can't pull yourself back out of the muck on your own. And that's ok. I've been there. You get stuck on a loop of awfulness, and no matter how much you try to wiggle free you are just caught in it like a fly in the spider's web calling it to dinner. There's nothing wrong or weak or broken about asking for help even if you just need a quiet body to lean on who won't judge how long you've gone without a shower or how long it has been since you washed the dishes. Spider battles are not solo ventures. They're meant to be fought holding someone's hand with every available resource you can grab onto to help. Yes, even medicine. And no, not always more sunshine or grabbing onto your bootstraps and sucking it up--anyone who says that has never fought a spider like this before.

There's no perfect construction for how a person must be. Sometimes regardless of our station in life, our fame, glory, how much money we have or don't have, no matter how much we have or haven't gone through, as evidenced by Elvis and Robin Williams and all the others, those thoughts creep in. Sometimes they stick. Sometimes they can't be patched. Sometimes the patch fails and the roof caves in, and you can't find your way out of it. And maybe you don't want to.

Even then...especially then... judgment has no place in stopping it from happening again to someone else. Nor does it help those people you may know who lost a loved one that way and can't bear to hear those opinions and fucked up jokes and condemnations.

Love. Kindness. Empathy. Know them and use them. Or simply shut up.

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Links to the other “Use Your Words” posts:

Baking In A Tornado https://www.bakinginatornado.com/2018/04/shades-of-parkland-use-your-words.html

On the Border https://dlt-lifeontheranch.blogspot.com/2018/04/half-baked.html

Cognitive Script https://cognitivescript.blogspot.com/2018/04/broken-hearted-mama-uyw.html

The Bergham Chronicles https://berghamchronicles.blogspot.com

Southern Belle Charm http://www.southernbellecharm.com

The Blogging 911 http://theblogging911.com/blog

Climaxed https://climaxedtheblog.blogspot.com

12personalities12 https://mytarotdotblog.wordpress.com/

My Brand of Crazy https://sarahsbrandcrazy.blogspot.com/

I Loved

Before I post this, I just want to say this is fiction. I have never dealt with this personally and hope that I havent done any injustice to the topic by writing about it. I like to explore characters and potential reactions to life's problems like grief and loss and love... And I honestly hope I never have to know what it feels like to be in this narrator's shoes because I'm not sure I would handle it so well personally.

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“At least we aren’t that bad off yet, right? Fighting each other in the mud for a scrap of water. What kind of life is that?” I had asked her during the first parts of Mad Max: Fury Road. We were home that night, neither of us being too keen on going to the cinema anymore with people on cell phones the whole time, loud ass, disruptive kids, and the recent rash of theater shootings.

“Are we really all that different though? Aren’t we all fighting for scraps while the rich keep the power and the money?”

This was another reason we didn’t like going to the theater, these conversations.

“Well… we have water and no one makes us shave our heads.”

“Shaved heads notwithstanding, does everyone have water?”

“Not everyone, no.”

“But isn’t there enough money in the world to make sure they do?”

“I’d have to do the math on that, but most likely.”

“And isn’t there some random rich white person that decides on occasion to do some charity and bring medicine or food or water instead of everyone pulling together and actually resolving the issues that cause it? Sort of like raining down water from a gushing pipe every now and then?

“I mean…I don’t think those people are necessarily as evil as this guy, Sadie.”

“Some famous guy somewhere said something about the biggest evil being inaction.”

And with that her point had been proven for the most part, I guess. We enjoyed the rest of the movie, but the conversation was done. That’s the kind of thing I remember about her most, the thing I might miss the most except smelling her in bed beside me, feeling her heat, being able to put my cold toes against her calves and start a wrestling match in bed. I miss those moments beside her in bed the absolute most, but I also miss that quick intelligence, the snapshot conversations that didn’t take a debate or hours worth of back and forth. She dropped in and made her point, and that was that. It was like that idea was waiting inside her perfect little brain just for the right moment to show itself.

I’ve dated since Sadie.

Let me rephrase that. I’ve been out with other women since Sadie, but ultimately I end up comparing them to her or her to them, and it never works out. And even if I like someone, she inevitably asks me how I deal with it—having been with someone who committed suicide.

Is there an answer to that question, though? Truthfully, I haven’t dealt with it. Truthfully, every time I sit down to dinner with some other woman, I feel like a lying cheat. I hate myself for it. My heart still belongs to a woman that never wanted to be in this world in the first place, and all I can do is lay awake at night and think of all the things I should have said or done or not done even while knowing there was nothing that would have changed it. Rationally, I *know* it wasn’t the first time she tried to end things and that it was a constant battle for her. I *know* that it was going to happen sooner or later because even when she got the help she needed, it was only a temporary fix. But, the part of me that doesn’t give a shit for rationalization, the part of me with all the feels…that part of me is always and forever going to search for something I maybe could have done differently that might have made all the difference.

I love her. Even now after 2 years in this world without her, I think I love just as much as the first time I ever told her. Or maybe just as much as the 12th time I told her. I did kind of rush into things, but the first time I met her I just kind of knew that I would fall head over heels in love with her. I don’t scorn her memory for leaving me with all this baggage, and I don’t think she took the coward’s way out of things the way her family seems to… What I do think is that I was lucky enough to spend 6 long years with her through the hard times and the best times, through the tears and the depression and through the days when we laughed so hard together that my face ached the next day. It hurts to be without her. It hurts more than I ever thought anything could hurt me, but she was honest with me from the start, so how can I fault her? She told me on our 3rd date that one day she would probably commit suicide one day, and if I was going to date her, she needed me to understand it would never be forever. It was a serious conversation, but I already had a serious crush, and I thought naively that maybe it wasn’t as bad as she made it out to be. That’s when I told her that life isn’t worth living without taking risks, and that I needed to know what falling in love with her felt like despite those risks.

She kissed me for the first time that night and cried softly into my neck afterwards.

So how do I deal with it?

I don’t.

I don’t think there’s a way to deal with losing the love of your life. Sure, life goes on and all that. I don’t cry every day anymore, so there’s improvement to be had, but there will never be a time when her memory fades, that I don’t fall asleep at night wishing she was here, and I’m okay with that. I took the risk with her and saw it through, and for at least awhile I knew how it felt to love someone more than I loved myself.

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I hope the strength of my narrator shines through instead of this being seen as bleak and depressing... thanks for reading and be sure to check out the rest of the link ups and the More than Cheese and Beer blog!!

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