ugly

The air is spun sugar and silt here in my room in the dead of night, the blue bias fire of the television flickering on the ceiling, the fan rotating back and forth in a slow, perpetual no. Sleep won’t come, and I can’t meet it halfway. I sneeze as dust is buffeted by the relentlessly beating blades, a soft and constant whir, the shush of white noise beneath the dialogue of the half watched movie. The entertainments are used to it, and carry on without a hint of contempt or disgust. Would that I could say the same.

I am sick, feeling suicidal, and desperate knowing I won’t act upon the urge. Breathing is still a low level struggle, and my thoughts are running riot on an ugly bent. It’s been too many years in a bad way, and there is no relief In sight. I still go through the motions, minding my mother’s schedule and tending to her modest needs. Some days she’s not unlike herself, but largely it’s been a long, losing war of attrition, with a little something lost with each hard fought battle. As long as she wants to be in this world, I’ll try to hang in, though other than the endurance parts of the job, I know she’d be better cared for without me in the mix. I’ve given up pleading to the powers that be to end me, mostly because they’re even more useless than me. If you want something done, as the saying says. 

My dad died back in October  2006, dying in the hospital without any family there. I was late getting to town, my mother waiting impatient on the front porch, yet another in a series of disappointments as I let my father down one last time. Fourteen years later, I am still here, unstable and all used up, so insignificant that no one even texts me any longer, just the old and the older bumping around in the deepening darkness with barely a word shared. There’s no one I can talk to because there’s no one I can trust, my mom fading hard into dementia, and all my allies long gone. I stopped being a person many years ago, as my context left me and my interest in the world waned. Love, work, family and meaning all words that mean something different to me than they seem to mean to most people. It’s two in the morning, and all I can do is talk to myself in sad fragments. Even the moon carries her curse for me.