This win is for me

Visiting my parents for Memorial Day; having hot dogs and all the sides and fixings because Mom likes to make holidays special even if it’s not a celebration. We’re talking and joking around, ‘The Last Vemeer’ is on the tv and we’re eating on trays in the living room. Enjoying the moment then cleaning up after eating. I made my parents some homemade air fryer cinnamon sugar donuts and an apple n cheese danish. Mom says I want to talk to you. I follow her to her room. We chat for a minute then she says your Dad wants to talk to you in his office. 

Dad opens with the tell it to me straight about what’s going on with your job and the company and your boss. Tell me all of it. He gets straight to the point; I dig that about my Dad. I tell him how the whole shakedown went. I’m still hopeful that I can step up to a full sales commission position with a draw on future commissions for the next few weeks to a month. I’m stupefied but was also fully aware something was coming for a few days prior. I spiral in a million different directions about the role, the pay, the expectation, the circumstances surrounding the reasons why the conversation had to be had and how the dynamic of my role at work was shifting seriously sideways and fast. My boss is adopting and a baby is on the way, we have no claims no business coming through, he can outsource the admin part of what I do, but wants to give me an opportunity and is also fully supportive of if I have to look elsewhere for something else in a month if I can’t just make it rain at work. Because literally a good storm would fix this lull. But he’s pulled the trigger on expanding his business and he can’t reconcile the pay when it’s not as busy and he has to think about the future. And I’m just blazing through it all and it hits me. I can hear myself and my feelings are increasingly less optimistic about the situation and the reality of how that means he doesn’t see me in the future of his company unless I go out and make a bunch of sales. I stop. I look at my Dad and he says, “you think people are like you, you think they have good intentions. And you hurt yourself when you realize you expected more from them, because it’s what you would do. I love you, but you’re naive and far too trusting of people and situations and you’re too generous with giving the best of you to others. It’s time to start thinking about yourself. Your whole life you’ve made others a priority over yourself. I need you to stop doing that now. I need you to look at me because I’m being serious; this isn’t a compliment. I need you to put it all down for a minute, I need you to put the needs of your kids, your granddaughter, your job, your boss, your friends, your Mom and I, I just need you to press pause. I know you don’t think you should, considering the the weight you’re carrying for everyone else. Quit putting yourself aside. I don’t know how much longer I have left in this world but I would like to see you win. I need you to think about what is best for you, not for your son, or for your boss, or your kids, or anybody else, just You. I just need you to put You first. I just need to know that you’re going to be okay when I’m not here anymore. You need to think about the next phase of Your life and what You want that to be, what You need it to be. But I need to know you’re going to be okay.”

Two hours later I’m still waiting for my lungs to refill with air. I don’t think anything has ever knocked the wind out of me so hard. I can’t control my tears right now, but I held them in in that moment. It was all too fragile; everything was, and I would’ve fallen apart if I let it sink in too deep.

It wasn’t the words, it wasn’t how he said it. It was his eyes and the way he knows he won’t be around forever. It was the look of ‘I’m all out of fight’ kind of look. 

It’s the same one Nani gave me the night before she died. When she grabbed my hand and held it asking everyone to leave the room, asking me to stay behind. 

~ ~ ~ <She was tender and we talked for a few minutes; she asked me to take her back home, she said she was tired but that she didn’t want to die in the hospital. I told her she was going to be fine, it was temporary and after the doctor fixed her hip I would bring her home. She paused and smiled, used both her tiny frail hands to lift mine to her lips and kissed my hand and prayed for a moment quietly to herself. She looked different in that moment and when she opened her eyes, she said, “I love you. You have been a most brilliant and beautiful light in my life. She asked me to bring her a filet o fish.” I hugged her and kissed her forehead and I told her I love her and that I would be back tomorrow with a filet o fish from McDonald’s.

The nurse was stammering for me to leave the room so she could finish taking Nani’s vitals and move her to another room. 

She was 86 and I believe she knew it goodbye. 

She passed the next day, about 10 minutes before I got there. I was in such a hurry to see her I pushed past everyone in the hall, no cutesy hugs and kisses or hellos. I just pushed past everyone into her room to be by her side. I didn’t know she had already passed. And yet somehow I still think she was there in that room. I leaned into and just hugged her and I told her I love her, just over and over how much I love her. Just loving her with everything I could. 

A few minutes later my brother walked in and through tears managed to mutter that she died 10 minutes before I got there, but no one could tell me because I came in and made a beeline to her. I think peace washed over me, my my tears were hard and eyes were on fire, my muffled crying was inaudibly soft. I felt her in that room and I felt so much of her love.> ~ ~ ~

I didn’t know that it was an I’m giving up the fight’ look then, but I saw one quite similar today. That’s saying a lot, my Dad is a proud man, the good kind of stubborn, amazing in ways that it is so fucking unbelievable that I get to be his daughter; but my Dad is a fighter. He’s always been a fighter! And knowing he’s ready to give up the fight means he’s ready to go, he’s just trying to swing a few more things first. 

I am selfish. Yes I definitely heard what my Dad said but what stands out to me right now was how morbidly aware of my father’s mortality I must’ve been. All I know is I couldn’t have been more thankful for my Mom’s interruption into the room to say my son wasn’t feeling good, we probably need to get going.

I nearly fell apart and I really need my emotions to not always be ready to jump off the ledge, so I can just be strong for my Dad now. 

My Dad’s words resonate with me, I hear him. I told him I hear him and sometimes I listen. He always says, “but you don’t always listen to me! And I am one of the few that has the very best intentions for you my dear.” 

Gulp. So I just listened to him with my heart. I heard him, every word, every why, every when, I shut up and listened. 

I don’t know what is going to happen in the next few days, weeks, months, or even years, fuck I don’t even know what the fuck is happening right now. But there are a few things I wish I didn’t know right now. Yeah I hear you Dad. I listened to all of it this time. I’m going to listen to you. I promise. 

It feels eerie being fully awake and aware that your life is about to change. I can do this Dad, I just selfishly don’t want to do any of this without you. Also I’m not grieving you today. You want me to win and I want to win. So I’m going to go get a fucking win.

Writing through these emotions helps. It helps me catch my breath.

This win is for me. (but yeah also for you too, Dad)

A lot of people talk about fight or flight. And I guess flight was never an option, for me. I got way too much fight in me. There probably were a few times that I should’ve chosen flight, but I stayed in the fight. That’s not regret, I know what I am made of. 

I’ve stopped trying to make sense of the what’s happening or anyone else’s bullshit. And I don’t know if that means I’m healing, or it’s another unhealthy coping mechanism.

I hope to fuck I’m healing.

Belladonna is a pretty and delicate flower, but it can still kill you.

All in

Manic, like a feral animal trapped at the top of a stairwell, eyes panicked and steady waiting for the moment to take her leave.

There will be no dank submission to this grief. Even if she has to climb her own walls, her mind racing to navigate the map to her escape. 

The back up to the back up plan had failed, but she wasn’t going to be buried by the weight of obscurity. Death and reckoning had to wait, she was gasping for air, but she still had a lot of fight left. 

She was held together by the longing of her magnum opus, her piéce de rèsistance, her flower in bloom. If she couldn’t get under perdition or over ruin, she would go straight through hell; and god help whomever stood in her way. 

This was just another maze to solve; she was going to have to crawl until she couldn’t feel the bleed on her knees. She knew pain, suffering was an old friend, but this wretchedness was tearing at her flesh biting into mealy bone. 

It was provoking atrophy and her hesitation wreaked of decay. She could tend to and lick open wounds later. She knew it was too soon to let her guard down, still she gulped down the penitence of regret. 

Trapped animals chew through their own limbs in order to escape. She was no stranger to baring her teeth. Head down, this is going to hurt; she knew she would have to be all in.

Even the daintiest of souls are guilty of sleeping under the plush bones of weeping ghosts. 

You don’t have to be the one holding the knife, to know you can still end up digging your own grave with someone else’s blood on your hands.

You have to stop doing that with your teeth, you keep leaving bite marks on everything you love.

Genuine

I’ve been tearing myself apart, half ready to move forward, and half head in the dirt. 

I remember beautiful things are never perfect and so what if I fail or fall again and again, I get up, and I learn. 

I am always within but I am never without. And sometimes the smile I see in the mirror is genuine. 

I am hopefully always going to keep evolving, I don’t want to stand still. Growth can be painful, but it can be beautiful too. And that was it, the beauty and the pain, they always made it worthwhile. 

The high ground

The year Charles Bukowski died is coincidentally the same year I discovered him. 1994. It was also the same year my oldest son was born, I was 22. And he kept me company during that atrociously hot summer that swelled my feet so much while pregnant. So I put them up and read Hollywood, which I had found in the back of a thrift store. It was cheeky and real and one of the most down to earth things I had ever read. I didn’t know he died earlier that year, in fact, I wouldn’t read Bukowski again until I was in my very early 40’s. Something like life, happened; I was working, having an active social life, being a mom, doing the fulfilling yet mundane and typical kind of thing he abhorred. What can I say, I got busy and when I wasn’t, I was reading someone else. I had forgotten about him. I am ashamed in hindsight. 

I say this because I feel like I missed out all those years. Then, an ex boyfriend swore by a book he wrote, the author’s name was familiar, but I couldn’t place it. He raved about Post Office, how funny it was, how much I would enjoy it. 

Then I found the book and dove right in, instantly falling. His ability to articulate his disdain, how deeply brutal his raw words left my soul pierced with the tragedy and comedy of the human condition. He didn’t write like anyone I had ever read. I had spent my youth stockpiling a collection of Dean Koontz, with horror, thrillers, like Rice and Barker, King and countless novels on serial killers; the macabre was my favorite. Sure I was an avid reader of Hemingway and the allure of Poe’s darkness was timeless. I still was heady over all the classics, but stumbling again upon this grotesque, magnificent and utterly compelling masterpiece that was Bukowski saved me.

I raped the internet for his poetry and quotes, I saved memes and poems, I read book after book. Stopping in between to switch things up, reread favorites, dabble in other authors, swoon over Fyodor and drown in Keats, and Yeats. I swim through the unknowns and the decadence written under the pseudonym of A. N. Roquelaure. But I thirst for more of this lunatic man that put his finger on my pulse and spoke the truth of the downtrodden with such beautiful contempt and depravity.

He validated my off color opinions and perpetuated my emotions, such a dirty old man that was insanely lucid despite his constant drunken state, he spoke truth in ways most people are too chicken shit to draw from their own well and pen, and after seven books, it’s just not enough. 

I want more. So I shall continue my quest of reading anything he ever wrote. Honestly I would read his scribbled cocktail napkins if there were any, I would creep the decrepit walls of a dirty bathroom stall, if I thought he wrote on it. I’m chasing Bukowski. 

I have two loves; Bukowski and Hemingway. Their words burn me, they sear my heart and tickle my soul. I know it seems a bit unfair to any other man in my unwholesome opinion, but I have fallen in love with two men. They have a stronghold on my affections and the high ground of my thoughts. They’re both dead, but still so very much alive in my mind. Anyway, I’m rambling and gushing again.