Easter sunday. Spending it in memoriam of the blissfully ignorant childhood I once possessed.
I can see the sadness in my mom's eyes. Suddenly I can't talk about my dad around her. Nothing is familiar anymore. I have managed to survive this year by blocking it all out, by throwing the crushing reality under the covers. I feel little to zero relationship with my dad anymore, now that all of this is unraveling. I hope I don't grow to resent him, but I can't help but see that happening. I never want to have a marriage based simply on comfort, fear, and patriarchy, and even more so, I don't want to force somebody to give up the best years of their life to a cause that is held together by withering wire.
My sister is under my dad's thumb. She is being poisoned, mummified by materialism. This next year will further drive her further into the ground by not escaping. It really is crushing to have your entire reality shift 180 degrees. I grew up in a house of mirrors, and all of them have cracked. Times were so much simpler then. I would go to the grocery store with my mom, go to sports games with my dad. They never, ever went on dates with each other - it was always just to card club. No romance, just results.
I feel sick to my stomach, lower than detritus. I can't even bear to think how I'm going to deal with going home each weekend next month. If I lived at home this summer, I'd go insane. My childhood was almost too perfect - I was only fed that which I was prescribed. This life of gift-showering and electronic parenting was what I perceived to be normal. I forsee myself going to a counselor in the next couple years, this pain is too scarring. For the record and for posterity, my greatest fear is having a false marriage and a life masked by things, to raise children that do not know what love is, and to coast through life as an outsider to everyone, including myself.
My grandma tells the same anecdotes every time I see her. She can barely hear, and has lived alone for 10 years. I wish I had relatives that lived in the area, I feel like my family is an ever-shrinking dot. For what its worth, I don't really have grandparents. I never saw my parents interact in positive ways, and that made me uncomfortable to the point where I've always been afraid to ask my relatives about their lives.
I see my aunt and uncle, the people who i've visited with my family at thanksgiving and the holidays all the time growing up. Their marriage is a real one. They go out and do things, they both genuinely love each other. I've been blessed with so much, but I'd gladly trade just about anything that would ensure I would still exist and whoever my parents would be would have a marriage based on something real.
Burned into the back of my eyes is the living room scene on october 5, 2008. like a chain reaction, the tears uncorked. i instantly went into freeze mode, and being with everybody again has resurfaced those feelings. when i see that visual, my hand immediately balls into a fist, representing 22 years and exactly 6 months of life wasted. the tears recycle into burning anger, and upon the realization that i can't alter the past, they return to tears.
with every failed relation/opportunity with a girl i have a thing for, i feel constantly prodded by a hand of fate. i try not to believe in fate, i try to believe that we all pave our own destiny, but maybe i'm thinking about it in the wrong way. maybe there is one end goal, no matter what, but we can go and do what we choose in the mean time. i need to escape this ethereal prison. i need to have proof that love exists. solid proof. not based on history, not based on fear, not based on convenience, but a true passion and desire to live for the other, and have those feelings be reciprocated entirely. i have yet to experience this, in my years of dating. steph and i were never on an even keel. in the past year, largely it has been me overcompensating for trying to recover lost time, to find that spark again. i've had new sparks many times this year, but they all fizzle.
i am bitter. i am frustrated. i am lonely. i have nowhere to go. i am slowly becoming pessimistic. for all the waste that my parents went through, that makes me want to be with somebody and really treat them right that much more.
