October 4th, 2008
Twelve o' clock in the afternoon.
It is a fan-fucking-tabulous beautiful Saturday afternoon. The sun is shining, yet there is a whimsical hint of fall whispering it's cold breeze through the rustle of the tree's orange, yellow, red, and brown leaves. All my sunflowers are out in full force. David and Carmen just went for a walk together to their friend's house down the block, Mike Jr. is in the house playing contently with his Thomas trains, and I can hear Snookms' cheerful voice sharing amusements with his brother Kevin on the phone.
Life is ironically beautiful in this moment, as well as beautifully ironic.
Mike and I made love this morning. I was wearing my Halloween costume.(I'm going to be a maid for Halloween.) Little does he, or anyone else for that matter, know that I'm going to be a blood-spattered maid, that is going to be wielding a chainsaw for a feather duster.....
I already bought the fake blood to spatter all over my dress, as well as the rest of my body. And I found a fake chainsaw for sale at the Spirit Halloween Store in Avon. It's actually supposed to be Leatherface's chainsaw but I think it'll suit me just fine. It even makes the sound of a chainsaw when you push a button. Too bad there are no blood curdling screams incorporated into it as well.....
That would be icing on the cake.
Well I just spent the better half of my yesterday converting my book into a PDF format. I don't know if it really worked or not, but I was able to look at it in a "book" format, and there is indeed a "URL" for it, as well as an "embed" code.
The only problem is that whenever a new chapter starts, it doesn't start on a new page like a real book does. It just continues onto the same page that the previous chapter ended on.
And....
I, essentially, don't know what the fuck I'm doing on Adobe, so I feel ridiculously foolish and ignorant into going into all of this.
And what's even more is that I'm using fucking WORDPAD to write all my shit, which, is probably SOOOO not the way to go. I guess I need to get Microsoft Word up and running on my comp already.
Can it, all you ancient war-mongers that already know this craft and are knee deep in TNR, proper margining and double-spacing.
*******
Today is ironic.
As was yesterday.
I don't know how I am where I am today, except to credit it to the grace of God in all his merciful kindness.
I was a mess Thursday afternoon.
An emotional, mental, physical fucking mess. I'm pretty sure I had a breakdown of some sort. I can still feel the effects of the emotional mess I was in today.
I lost myself around 4:00 p.m. or so on Thursday and then it only went downhill from there.
I couldn't talk, barely walk, feel, function....Not for anything.
I called Mike while he was working to let him know I was going to need to get out for a while when he got home, but the the time he got home it was too late.
I was immobile.
I just locked myself away in the bedrooom and let myself crash and burn. I spent the remainder of the evening curled up in a fetal position on my bed, listening to the sounds of the Weather Channel blare out any feelings of hope I might've had left.
By the time I "came to" it was dark in my room, save for the sarcastic glare of the Weather Channel beaming it's ridiculously gentle tune from the T.V.
My oldest one.
The autistic one.
He has a new obsession with the Weather Channel. He's 12 now, so I find it rather amusing most days that instead of finding him in his room jacking off, I find him sneakily watching the Weather Channel, like it's some sort of guilty pleasure for him. Nobody else can tolerate watching the Weather Channel like it's a movie in this household, so he usually has to resort to indulging his guilty pleasure in my room, which would explain why the T.V.'s always on the Weather Channel whenever you enter me and Snookms' room.
I had neither the energy nor the desire to change the channel the day I chose to lock myself away...
And I don't think I really "choose" to lock myself away, but rather "it" chose to lock ME away.
That's how it felt anyway.
I felt like such a prisoner of myself.
Several times I counted how many pills I had left in my Flexiril prescription bottle, considering and weighing my options countless number of times.
But I kept remembering the kids, thinking "What would they do when I'm gone?"
I think that when you feel like everyone would be better off without you, that THAT'S when we've finally gone off the deep end.
I've been "There and Back Again" several times, but there was always something commanding me to came back to the light.
There was no one calling me that night I was alone, and I didn't care anymore.
I was numb and I didn't want to be.
I spent my night in darkness, curled up on the side of my bed, turning my butterfly night light off and on that my sister in law had bought me for Christmas. I was turning it off and on repeatedly, crying because it just hurt so much to see the beauty in that light.
It was far more illuminating in the darkness, and the beautiful irony of that just pained me so.
I wept deeply, like a lost child as I admired the beauty of the stained glass, the colors of that beautiful butterfly shining brightly for me to see.
I felt a trigger pull through me full force.
In that moment I was taken back in time.
A time when I had admired that same beauty of stained glass, but instead through a child's eyes.
I was in children's church.
1st grade.
Seattle, Washington.
There wasn't many joyful moments in those times of my youth, so I held on to the smallest crumbs of joy that hope could offer me then.
We had a Christmas project going from last week, fashioned together with simple paper and crayons. My Sunday School teacher (it was a guy, but a very kind and gentle one) told me to color this picture of Mary holding baby Jesus as darkly as I possibly could, and then to outline it in black, again, as darkly as I could. He explained to me that he was going to keep it in a tray of oil until next week, and that when we took it out and let it dry, it would give the appearance of stained glass.
I didn't know what stained glass was at the time, so he chauffeured me to the closest window in the building that had stained glass on it.
"That" he said, pointing upward, "is stained glass."
I looked up an saw Jesus being crucified on the cross, stained glass style, and I thought to myself dubiously, "Yeah right".
There was no way what I was being asked to make would turn out as beautiful as what just lay before me.
So I filed that information in the back of my mind, went on about the rest of my ridiculously stressful week, coming into yet another night of Sunday School. (My mom only took my 3 brothers and I to the 6:00 services for some reason) forgetting all about my stained glass project.
My self esteem was at an all time low right then. I had just been freshly yanked from the evil clutches that was my 1st grade teacher that year. School life was in shambles for me, and my teacher just couldn't tolerate me coming apart at the seams anymore. I was having to be dragged to my classroom every morning kicking, screaming and crying, and I think both my mother and the teacher grew tired of this. So my mother did what she thought was best (and believe me, it WAS for the best) and decided to pull me out of 1st grade for the rest of the year.
I was still recovering from those particular events when I enter my classroom to find that the teacher had laid out each and every one of the student's beautifully colored art projects out on the art table.
I felt my breath being stolen away from me in an instant as I gazed at my newly tranformed art. I felt tears welling up inside me that my 1st grade mentality could not comprehend, so I held them deep inside of me and instead, did what I do best....
I asked my teacher a million and one questions about how it all worked.
And you know what?
He took the time to answer every last one of my questions.
Not many adults EVER had that much patience for me.
With me.
Me, and my "questions".
Only my mom. And Jesus.
And now this guy.
This Sunday School Teacher.
So that's what I remembered in the darkness.
In that night.
In that room.
And that's why I cried.
And that's what pulled me out of the darkness, and got me into the shower, forcing me to function and be a part of society and it's ideals once again.
The beautiful irony of BOTH of those situations;
a light amongst so much darkness,
both in the literal and the analytical sense....
is what's got me living another day.
Another beautifully ironic,
and ironically beautiful day.
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