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I’ve had a really bad month. Not in any real, practical way. I just go hit by a wall of something… something thick and black and difficult to drag myself through. I can’t tell if it was worse than usual, or if it was the same as it has been for the past however many years, and part of me has just already adjusted to not having to do that on a daily basis. Either way, it was rough. I have my days every now and then, but this was more than two weeks of unrelenting down and dark. I kept waking up every day expecting it to be over, and it just wasn’t.
There’s stuff you pack away when you’re in the midst of crisis. You focus on the basics of survival, and anything that isn’t an immediate threat gets shoved way to the back to be dealt with later. I suspect this is that stuff coming back around to the front. Over all, it’s a good thing, I think. But it’s not pleasant.
There are things that have happened over the past year that I still haven’t spoken about, mostly because at some point it started to feel like a joke. I’m not trying to be the Bad News Bears of cabincore Instagram. Suffice it to say, some shit went down when my brother visited me at the end of last year. Stuff that, for me at least, was related to his reaction to me leaving my abusive marriage. He likes podcasts by men about men. He is a man who was raised by my father. Y’all can take a few guesses and probably be right about most of it. Although I doubt you’d be able to guess the degree. The stripes I took on account of being the woman in the situation were shocking, to be honest. And there’s a raw pain there that I still can’t look fully in the face.
Then my grandmother passed away just a few months before I could make it home to see her again. And when she did, my last remaining elder, my aunt, made some unbelievably dark choices.
I worked hard to get back here for a lot of reasons, but the reason why I chose here rather than anywhere else in the world was because here is where my family is. But now I’m back here, and that family has evaporated like morning mist on a warm afternoon. Here I am, once again. Alone for the holidays. Alone for the whole year. After everything.
And the thing I can’t bring myself to even hardly say out loud is, after what I went through? Shouldn’t there have been a family here fighting…
