Secrets and Lies

I just spent the last hour half crying on the phone to T.

I'm the best girlfriend ever. 'Hi, honey, you're at work for 12 hours, and that sucks. Your job has been horrible the last few days, very stressful, lots of cleaning up other people's messes only to have to do it again 12 hours later? Shit. Here, let me get semi-hysterical and babble for an hour about things you can't change nor really understand because I can't go into any real detail because of the squeaky sob thing going on, that should help, right?'

Sigh.

Yeah, so, as the two of you that read this can surmise, I spoke with my mother just before speaking with T. Amazing how you pick that stuff up--its almost like it happens every time I talk to the freaking woman.

But it wasn't really mom this time. Well, yeah, it was, but it wasn't anything she out-right said to me. (No calling me a whore or anything! Amazing. She did elude to how fat I am, but it wouldn't be Wednesday without that.) She has decided that I am coming out to visit her next month, work be damned. Remember what happened the last time she decided this? I quit my job to be able to get out there and the day before I was supposed to leave she tells me that she doesn't want me to come. (Granted, that was a terrible job, but I didn't get a new job for over a month after that. And how freaking manipulative???!!?!?!) She just can't see past herself. Oh well. That's not really the problem.

The problem is this:

When T and I went back there last summer, as we drove up towards the godforsaken town she lives in, I FREAKED THE FUCK OUT. Crying, begging him to just turn around and go back, hyperventilating, the whole routine. I didn't see it coming, actually. But now, just hearing her tell me all about the things we will do when I come visit--It makes me want to throw up. Just thinking about going back there is flooding me with memories of all the horrible shit that went down when I lived there. Not just there, but college, High School. Just how many people hate me. More people hate me than call themselves my friend, many times over. And I may or may not deserve that hate--regardless, its there. All of them live in that state. No one had ever hated me before I lived there. And those people don't even really matter, in the grand scheme of things.

The most horrible, fucked up time of my life was bar none the eight years I lived in that state. A lot of it was due to very poor choices on my part--and a lot of it had to do with circumstances beyond my control. I had a realization earlier. My parents should have done a better job of raising me to believe that I deserved better, and could do better, than I did/was doing. A good heft of the blame lies with me, for being dumb enough to fall into the shit that I did, but we do have to at least cast a glance at my childhood. Everyone who knows anything is now having an "ah-ha!" moment, I'm sure.

I need to be able to get past this crap. Get past the cheating, the lying, the drug use, the sex, the betrayal, the shooting, the alcoholism, the slaps in the face, the 16 hour days, the fucking white trash assholes, the absolute bottomless pit that was my despair and loneliness during this time. Wrap it up, kiddies. Throw it out like yesterday's trash--we're done.

It doesn't work that way.

Its been almost 2 years since I have lived there, and still, still I am haunted by visions of my mother falling down and splitting her head open on the hope chest. (Irony, anyone?) Her bleeding internally and smoking a cigarette with a beer in her hand yet unable to walk when I came to take her to the hospital, finding out she was hours away from death but still had to finish that drink before we left. My stepfathers blood frozen into the ice in the driveway for months with nothing we could do about it. Being alone in that house and having to pull a gun on someone, and the knowledge that I could and would pull the trigger if I had to. The fear....constant fear. Uncertainty. Thinking that this was as much as I deserved. It was like a whirlpool--I could see up over the edge, to the calmer water, but it was just too much pressure, too much weight, I couldn't climb, claw, swim, leap out. How many times I contemplated taking my own life, how many times I tried. The reactions of those around me, telling me that if I couldn't get it right the first time I needed to accept that I was a failure at being a failure and get my fat ass off the floor.

I don't want to go back there. It is just a place, a state, a piece of land. But its so much more than that. No part of me wants to go there, ever, ever again. I'm afraid to. I'm afraid that if I do all those things will happen again, that I will feel like that again, be responsible for my mother again. I know it won't. But I was sure it wouldn't the first time.