Category: sad

I Wonder

I wonder: if someone could time-travel and approach Psycho when she was still young, and describe to her how she would be in her mid-50s, what steps would she take to avoid the atomic fumbles that led to such a monstrous downward spiral?

Let’s take an inventory. As of today, Psycho:

  • Was sacked from her last menial job.
  • Has been sued by multiple credit card companies for not paying her bills.
  • Has a suspended driver’s license.
  • Now “works” where she is outranked by her son’s teenaged girlfriend and is esteemed just slightly above the rubbish can.
  • Was out-adulted by all four children the instant they first paid their own bill or handled any basic task on their own.
  • Owns nothing of any worth in her own name.
  • Still squats in a run-down shack paid for by her stepmother, who just wanted her lazy, freeloading ass out of her house.
  • Has an ex-stepson who describes her as a “raggedy ho”, among other affectionate epithets.
  • Has no hobbies or interests beyond writing bad checks, stealing license plates, robbing her own children, posing for mug shots, and opening credit cards under other people’s names.
  • Has been twice married and twice divorced. Disastrously.
  • Has not landed a viable relationship in years, no matter how many saggy tit pics she sends to equally desperate men online.
  • Accuses every man who comes within 100 feet of her of beating her and raping her.
  • Is hopelessly infatuated with her first ex-husband and his current wife, who have a relationship she can only dreamily admire from a stalking distance.
  • Resembles a geriatric shar pai with far more skin corrugations than common sense, usefulness, or stable relationship options.
  • Looks at least 10 years older than she is, and getting worse each day, like a rotting pumpkin in Florida heat.
  • Is, in a nutshell, horrifically yet satisfyingly pathetic. Couldn’t happen to a more deserving or more homely bitch.

I suspect that, even faced with such an unpalatable future, Psycho would simply continue marching on the exact same path, making the exact same cataclysmic choices. Her insufferable ego would not allow her to accept truth back then any more than she does now. Improving herself is not even on the table. Why bother, when she can simply lie outlandishly about everything, throw raging tantrums if someone refuses to swallow her fairy tales, and pout if Daddy doesn’t bail her out when she inevitably fucks up again?

The saddest part to me is her obstinate refusal to make any attempt, of any kind, to elevate herself. Lack of growth, evolution, or progress is far worse than stagnation– it is demise. It’s unnatural. Life, at heart, consists of change and learning and adapting. Rooting herself in the same bitter, sour spot, year after year, dry-rotting in place, has entombed her in her own toxic futility and musty worthlessness.

If Psycho can be anything positive, then let it be an example and a warning to us: to move on, to learn, to be self-aware, to commit to self-improvement and truth. Because one thing she has demonstrated, beyond any doubt, is that jealously fixating on the lives of others will siphon the meaning, joy, and growth out of your own, until you are left with no life at all.

But don’t worry, Psycho. Just keep on lying. Keep shamelessly riding the coattails of the kids’ accomplishments because you don’t have any of your own. Keep editing your pictures into comedic, ridiculous oblivion. Keep hijacking the kids’ accounts to pore over my Facebook page and fantasize your way into a life you can never have. Keep slobbering over me online, every single day, because we both know why you are infatuated with me. Keep on failing like it’s your job. Keep pretending your entire hick town isn’t laughing at you. Just keep doing what you’ve been doing for decades.

Delusion is all you have left, so cling like hell to it. I mean, at this point, your life surely can’t get much more pitiful…can it?

What Does It Feel Like?

I wonder…what does it feel like to watch my husband and me, so happy and in love with each other, while she remains terminally alone, every relationship she feebly attempts disastrously imploding because she is incapable of caring about anyone but herself?

What does it feel like, each day, to pull into the rutted dirt driveway of a barren, collapsing trailer, at risk of being mistaken for abandoned, while we own our cozy house and are proud to come home to it –and to each other — every day?

What does it feel like to sit for hours, alone, hungrily scrolling through my blog, using the kids’ accounts to pore over our Facebook pages, rooting like a starved, snorting pig for any shred of information about us?

While she focused on bitterness, we focused on moving on. While she focused on herself, we focused on the kids and on each other. While she focused on endlessly and jealously attacking us, we focused on protecting and caring for each other.

I don’t have to wonder: how it feels to be completely, unwaveringly loved. How it feels to set eyes on him and feel like I’m at home, no matter where we are. How it feels to be intensely proud of what we have overcome and achieved together. How it feels to act silly just to hear him laugh, because that is one of the happiest and most magnificent sounds I can imagine. How it feels to be both beautifully at peace and endlessly excited by the same irreplaceable person.

She will never feel any of that. She has chosen to live in such a way that severed any possibility of feeling anything beyond shallow, meaningless playacting and desperate attention-seeking from any hapless victim willing to indulge her out of pity or boredom.

In the end, then…it seems that all of us have received exactly what we deserved all along, doesn’t it?

Filtered and Fake

I cringe when I see heavily filtered, obviously edited selfies. They always look horrible, fake, and desperate. I’m not sure which is worse: that the person who posted the picture thinks everyone who sees it is stupid enough not to instantly know it is a concocted fantasy image, or that the person clearly dislikes their own appearance so much that they smooth, airbrush, blur, and alter themselves into clownish oblivion.

Not surprisingly, the people most likely to abuse filters are the people who are most invested in promoting a phony life, far more concerned with the image they strategically project than with reality. I have never understood why what other people think of your life would ever be more important than how you actually live your life, but social media has warped small minds into worshipping likes and comments, while devaluing authenticity and truth.

It’s bewildering to me that someone can devote so much time and energy into filtering and editing every wrinkle, every wart, every sag, but pay no attention whatsoever to the far more offensive and decidedly more blatant blemishes of their personality. Who cares if a doctored selfie features an artificially erased complexion, when the person who shamelessly posted it is an unpleasant, deceitful, and downright toxic individual?

What is even the point to this facade? The instant someone lays eyes on you, they will see that your fraudulent image is one hell of a far cry from reality, and what then? What lies and delusions does a grown person feed themselves to prop up a ridiculous make-believe photo and pretend that is really what they look like?

The filtering trend doesn’t seem to be going anywhere and will likely just get worse, as our society descends even further into celebrating unbridled narcissism and shallowness and frivolity. Something to seriously think about, though: when your prized goal is to swipe and scribble and obscure your own face until it is unrecognizable as you…what does that ultimately say about how even you feel about you?

The Man in the Restaurant

I have often told my husband that he should write a book. He is self-employed and works with so many different people each day, spending time in their homes, and he ends up seeing and hearing snippets of people’s lives that are sometimes hilarious, sometimes sweet, sometimes disgusting! People feel comfortable with him, and as he works in their homes, he becomes their sounding board, their counselor, a witness to their lives.

The other evening, when I got home from work, he told me he wanted to tell me what happened to him earlier that day. I laughed, anticipating some crazy story about a colorful customer, but it was not at all what I expected.

He stopped at a restaurant after work, and he looked up and saw a man sitting nearby, crying at a table, alone. My husband asked him if he was okay, and the man wiped his face and told him it was his first time eating out without his wife. She had died the week before. His son was supposed to be meeting him there, but he was late and hadn’t shown up yet.

My husband told him that he was sure his son would be there soon, but while he was waiting, he invited the man to sit with him so he wasn’t by himself. The man sat down with my husband and told him his story, that he and his wife had spent a lovely weekend together, played hooky on Monday to have more time together, then on Tuesday, as he was driving to work, he got a phone call that his wife had sat down at her desk at work and had simply died. No explanation, no warning. She was there one minute and gone the next.

The man told my husband about his wife, how she liked to plan things, how she had a notebook full of information about places they wanted to visit, trips they wanted to take. He told him how they were running late for work on Tuesday morning, how she was standing in the kitchen when he left, how she said “I love you”, and how he said “I love you too” just as he closed the door to the garage.

He started crying harder as he told my husband this, and he said, “I don’t know if she heard me.”

My husband asked him if he told her he loved her every morning. The man said yes. My husband said, “Then she heard you. Then she knew.”

I felt my eyes fill with tears for a man I had never even met, because I know that regret, that doubt, that tearing apart every detail after someone has died. It’s agonizing. I hope he learns soon to stop adding to his pain.

My husband talked to him a bit longer, then looked up and saw a younger, spitting image of the man walking through the restaurant, looking around. He knew the young man was the man’s son, even without having met him before, because they looked so much alike. He said, “Look who’s here.”

When the father and son saw each other, they hugged, crying, and they sat down together at another table. When my husband went to pay for his meal, the waiter told him it had already been taken care of. The man’s son caught his eye and nodded.

It was hard not to cry when my husband told me this story. It will soon be two years since my mother died, but losing someone that close to you is a deep wound that never really heals. I hope my husband brought some comfort to that man and to his son that day. I hope they find out what happened to her, even if it won’t bring her back, but just to understand a little bit of why she was taken away. I hope that man stops torturing himself with what he thinks he should have done or said differently that morning and learns to focus on the love they shared and the time they had together.

I held my husband tighter that evening. I don’t take any of our days together for granted, and now, I appreciate them even more than I did before. I want to be sure he never doubts how I feel or that my life would not possibly be the same without him in it.

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