Photo by Luigi Boccardo on Unsplash
November 25, 2020
I really do hate this time of year. Mom has pictures of our family on the refrigerator. I looked at them yesterday, for a long time. Dead, dead, dead, dead. That’s how many people on the refrigerator are dead.
Is it death that troubles me? No, I don’t think so. It’s all the holidays I assumed would always be the same, without even knowing I assumed. All the Christmases with my family around the table, the same conversations, the same shared history. It’s all the times I rested in something, thinking it would always be that way, without realizing how much I took for granted.
And then, it’s all the pain caused by my illness and not being able to see it, to name it, and no one else being able to either. It’s all the regrets I don’t have, about skipping family gatherings, because it was just too painful to be around the people I thought would always love, support and understand me, when I finally realized that was never the case at all.
It’s the pleasant, warm sensation I get when I look at those people on the refrigerator.
Dead, dead, dead, dead.
It’s not death that troubles me, it’s that I wished it on my family.
Resentments If I never feel happy again. If I get a case of the “**** its” and follow that red glow all the way to my grave(because it feels warm once in a while). If I walk into a venue in my hometown and smell the familiar scent of stale beer and regret. If my mom passes away suddenly or succumbing to the passage of time. That I’ll never heal from how I was treated and continue to treat myself the same over and over. That I have to rely on jokes about my grandmother to keep her memory alive when she is not. If I let myself down again. -Brooke P