Ode to albatrosses

Intrinsically, I’m flawed. I don’t mean flawed in the every day nobody-is-perfect way. It’s like there is just something that I’m missing. Something that when I was made, someone left out somewhere. It’s like a drug addiction; they get to the point where they need the drug just to feel normal. They can’t be normal without it, they drug makes them whole.

I have this recurring nightmare. It isn’t something I get every night, or even every week or month. But it’s happened every four or five months for the last eight or nine years of my life. Not often, by still recurring.

I’m sitting on a cold marble floor. I’ve got tears and mascara running in rivulets down my face, and my face is ugly with rage and emotion. One hand is curled into a fist, the other clawed, and I’m sitting there with my legs pulled up to my chest, just rocking. Rocking myself, and crying.

There’s a sharp pain at the back of my head where my hair has been used to tug me upwards. I’ve got a bruise on my arm where it’s been gripped, and one side of my face stings. My thigh is painful where I’ve been kicked.

And I’ve been left there, in pain, alone, and livid. Angry that it had happened to me, and angrier at the futility when I’d tried to fight back. The complete inability to either fight back, or protect myself at all. I can’t stand being completely powerless, and in that room, I couldn’t even stand up without being knocked back down. So I sat, miserable, and rocked myself, quietly whispering the same phrase over and over again, “it’s all my fault.”

If I’d done things differently, if I hadn’t provoked them into anger, if I’d been good, it wouldn’t have happened. There are always consequences; the consequences of my actions left me bruised. If I wasn’t so flawed, it would all have been alright.

These things happen once, maybe twice, and though the actual bruises heal, somehow they still manage to leave a mark. It isn’t about the pain, the pain is sharp but it doesn’t last. It’s about the memory of the futility. It’s about knowing that if it were to happen again, there would still be nothing you could do to stop it.

It’s my fault. If I was whole, if could love someone properly and unconditionally, then I’d provoke the same unconditional love back from that person. If I was better, if somehow I improved, then people would treat me better, they’d care.

If I’d been a better daughter then my mom would have stayed. If I’d had fewer tantrums as a kid then my gran would have lived longer and I wouldn’t have had to move back in with my dad. If I’d been good then they wouldn’t have sent me away.

And then, of course, the final irony. If I wasn’t constantly thinking I was unlovable, so trying to make people love me, find me attractive, then they wouldn’t get bored of me and think me pathetic. But the constant rejection just causes me to try harder.

Sometimes I can be normal. If the relationship doesn’t mean anything, then I act like a normal human being. But if I let someone get close, or I grow attached to someone, then it’s already over. I push them away by needing too much. I try to hard, and everyone knows that the only time that things happen is when it isn’t important, when you’ll be alright either way.

Things aren’t going to start changing now. I’m still too internally bruised to change, heal. No one can love me, and its all my fault.

Labels: Demons, Introspection, Past tense