Wednesday, February 26, 2014

Today: February 26

Today:

It is two weeks until I am out of my terrible job.


Today:

I should have had a job interview, but as is the habit of the universe it was rescheduled just as I was completely prepared for it.

That interview is now in two and a half weeks, on the day I am scheduled to start the new job I don't want.

This new job is a job of desperation, which is what most of my job offers are for,
and I wonder if accepting it was the right thing to do, or if I should have held out for the customer service position that was also a compromise, but a compromise with a chair and a better paycheck.

It seems I am always in this position,
and I always take what is offered "now" rather than waiting
and am left wondering "what if" I had waited.
Taking the offerings of "Now" is what put me here, in a fast food restaurant instead of the temp pool at the university. Money and position now instead of the gamble for better later.

Granted, the last time I had fewer options, with a checking and a savings bled dry,
and two kids to support with sketchy financial assistance.
The financial assistance was a cruel joke, then, and little more than a memory now,
but now I am in a better place. I have a paycheck or two coming, money in the bank, and a few more interviews lined up.
I still have those two kids though, and they need stuff. Pretty soon my daughter will be borrowing my jeans, but until then I have to do something about the plumbers crack exposed by hers.
So I took the sure thing.
Again.

I will go to the second job interview anyway. It is at least at a different time.
It can't hurt, right?


Today:


I medicated a rat. Again. Not a euphemism.

Today:


Arin and I turned "Bob" the tiger moth loose today.
Bob, who has twice convinced me beyond a shadow of a doubt he was dead.
Bob, who has laid eggs in the glass bowl without the aid of a mate.
Bob, the mystery.


Today:

I went underwear shopping without leaving my apartment.
Assuming Victoria hasn't played musical sizes with my favorites again I will have new cheek-hugging cotton comfort within the week. The standards and then a couple with stripes, just because.

Today:


I brought home the gift from the foreign student at work.
She is one of my favorites, and I wish she had a better grasp on English, or I had a better grasp on Thai.
It is a tote bag she brought back from Thailand because I admired hers a couple of years ago.

Hers was baby blue with cowboys and bucking broncos on it, and she said she couldn't get the same pattern, and I said she didn't have to get me anything at all but she insisted, and when she went home over the winter break she remembered.
She was right. It isn't the same. It is pink and slick and shiny and has frothy coffee drinks advertised on the outside and looks like it is made of candy.
It is nothing at all like I'd ever have purchased for myself,
and I love it.
It is one of the hundred ways the foreign students have extracted me from my comfortable place.
It is a reminder that if I just go of certain expectations I might invite brighter, shinier things.
Even if they are pink.


Today:

I am sipping Earl Grey and dodging phone calls and wondering how to become independently wealthy when I'm not cleaning hospital water fountains. I would like to think I have the skill, but when I look at so many of my truly talented artist friends who work hard at their craft and still struggle, I don't merely entertain my doubts, I stand on my head and juggle for them.
I mean, I think maybe I could do it if I could find a niche, but the world is pretty well explored and I fear I don't have much that is new to give.

I will have to be brilliant.
More than brilliant, I will have to be lucky and blessed
and hope it is my time.

Sunday, February 2, 2014

Part IV - The Worst Part is the Silence

"I guess we just don't have anything left.

Huh. No, I guess we don't.
Click."


Then comes the silence,
but this time the silence is your ally.
It's the silence that allows you to accept what has just happened.
It is silence in the face of the panicked ringing of the phone that's still in your hand.
It is a silence that seems like hours instead of seconds, and you are afraid to break it because you can't be sure this is real and you know beyond a shadow of a doubt that if it is, this is the easy part.

At first you don't trust the silence because it has not always been kind.
This all started with silence, remember?
First came the subtle discrediting of your inner voice, that took the things you knew as wrong and made them right, or maybe it was the other way around. You're not sure, anymore. Your inner voice could try to talk sense to you, but nothing you had to say worked on him. Those aren't arguments, they're discussions; no one is yelling, right? You aren't wrong, you are a liar. You didn't make a mistake, you're incompetent. You can't defend your point because your point is indefensible and not just because you don't like to...
"discuss" things.
You can't even be sorry because that's not acceptable either.

If you were really sorry, you wouldn't have done...
whatEVER the hell it was you did
in the first place.

Your silence became your best back-handed defense,
when you would have preferred a baseball bat.

The silence of his voice,
that was the calm before the storm.
Sometimes it meant that he was content, full of cheeseburgers and curly fries and ranch dressing, watching while John Wayne just "Pilgrim'd" the shit out of everyone, spanked his woman and started another bar fight at top volume on that huge. fucking. TV.
Other times it meant that he was watching you, and he was thinking, and the more he would think the more COMPLETE INSANITY he would think OF and the angrier he would become before you even knew what was happening.

There is the silence of people who are going through it just like you.
They are women who went to school with you, women who went to church with you, women who worked with you. You bump into each other at the grocery store and on the internet, but you are alone and they are alone, all of you and your muffled inner voices.
You can't help them or they you because no one believes this could be happening to anyone else. You won't know about them until much later. The strong ones who manage to get themselves out, and you will wonder how many more haven't made it, yet.


You do not know now that for months you will bounce from couch to couch and spare room to spare room, that you will borrow money from your parents for a deposit on a miniscule apartment, or that you will have to give up your job and most of your "friends."
You do not know the lengths to which he will go to get you back.
You do not know he will play your family (or he will try) against you,
and then he will use you against them.
You don't know how low he will sink.

And it is low.


You don't know, and it is better that way, because what you haven't gotten yet that is that living with HIM...
has made you tougher than you know.