tired

Some times, most of the time, I dread going home for visits.

Part of is that everyone treats me like I'm a slightly slow ten year old and I know I'm not. And part of it is that I have so few good memories from my mother's house. The few good ones I have are tainted.

My mother drives me crazy. I use to think I hated her. Now, she just makes me tired and depressed when I'm around her. I know (after years of therapy) that she doesn't mean to make me so hurt, crazed, angry, frustrated, tired, destructive. But just because she doesn't mean it, doesn't mean I don't suffer from her actions.

I feel like an animal in a trap when I'm around her. I just want to get away, anything I need to do to get away.

For days before and after wards, I'm emotionally uncertain, frazzled, easy to weep. My friends avoid my 'mom mood'.

And the town has too many places that make me sad.

The Super Quik gas station is where my nephew drove me on Christmas day because he wanted Freezee Pops and everything was closed. He'd been sick for over a year, on chemo. But damn, he made me laugh. I'd visit him either at home or the hospital and we'd talk and talk and talk. And laugh and laugh. Like me, he kept parts of himself private but I never felt separate from him.

As different as we were, we understood that about each other. He collapsed that Christmas night, never to wake up again. Dead at 27. He was five years younger than me. I miss him.

The house across the street is where my brother, Rickie, second wife lives. I see her there with her new husband, smoking and bbqing on her deck. Every front window of my mother's house faces that house.

The parking lot of the Elementary school is where he tried to teach me to drive a stick shift (without much success).

The drive-through was where he'd have me yell his orders into the box for him. They never could understand his speech impediment. Every beat up, rusty pick-up makes me think of him. He died at the age I am now. And he didn't die easy. He suffered.

The front room couch is where my brother, Eddie, use to tease me with ice-cream cups, it's where my mother told me he was dead. I remember. I had a chocolate chip cookie in my pocket, it was sunny but cool. My aunt picked me and my brother up at school. The sky was so blue. The house was so dark.

He died quick. He was there and then gone. His funeral is one of my earliest memories.

The picture window is where my father lay in his hospital bed, eating cherry Popsicles when ever my mother left the room. His clothes are still in the bedroom closets. His fedora still hangs on the pegs. The couch is where he took his naps and watched CNN for hours on end.

My bedroom is the room my grandmother bled to death in, hemorrhaging to death in her sleep. She wore black rimmed 50's glasses and blue flowered dresses with gum boots. Her favorite meal was fried chicken and red creme soda. She chewed tobacco when she thought no one was watching.

Ever room in that house makes me sad.

The town makes me sad.

My mother makes me crazy.

My siblings make tired most of the time because they still treat me like I'm nine. And no, I can't just let it go. I've tried.

I just hate going down there. I hate the person I am there. I hate I'm so sad there. I hate how those people make me feel. Like I'm small, stupid, ugly, alone. Alone. I never feel so alone as I do when I'm there.

I'm glad to come back to my house.

My dirty, cluttered little house where the static in my head stops and I'm finally at peace if only for a little while.

Why I am telling you this? I'm not really. I'm just being eaten up with words, with memories, with tears and I want it out of my head so I'm pouring in the page. I need it out of me.

Tirz