Beautiful Cupholder

Has tomorrow ever tried to talk to you? Did you listen?

I wish I could say I’m in tune with the universe to a degree which allows me to interpret tomorrow’s cues in the events of today and yesterday, but I don’t dare make such a claim. I don’t dare many things. I feel that the gifts of wisdom I have been granted are nothing I can claim, only something I can appreciate and share. Of course not everyone wants to hear what tomorrow is telling me, sometimes, not even myself.

At this moment though, tomorrow is reminding me that I need sleep. And I choose to accept this reminder, though many nights I have not.

Sweet dreams to those of you who are reading this when you should be sleeping.

Life is rarely what it appears to be. How foolish of me to look at my friends… my ONCE friends… whoever they were, and to think they don’t have a gun to their head. I suppose I am like the girl who sat across from me at that meeting which I pretend I didn’t attend.

She thinks that every time a woman receives a beautiful bouquet of flowers it’s because… he beat her up, or something equivalent to that. Are you aware that there’s something equivalent to that? We all like to think that we can look at people, and as long as there are no visible bruises or scars, they are fine. We are wrong, and you know, it can happen to men too. It can happen to ME too. I just wrote it, a typo, but it’s true. None of you want to believe it’s men too, but sometimes it is.

Perhaps that’s what this blog is really about, or maybe not. I’m not ready to define it beyond what it is. I want you to read and decide for yourself.

Today I imagined someone with a gun to her head, or a knife to her throat, and nothing but what occured after her escape really mattered, yet nothing but what occured then REALLY matters.

There’s a moment in all of our lives when we know that had we moved merely half a foot to the left, everything would have been different. Perhaps it wouldn’t have been better, but surely it would have been different.

For me it was a kiss. No, it was two kisses; two chances at another life, and I missed them both. I often believe I learn from my mistakes. Sometimes I laugh at those who do not learn from their mistakes. Yet, I made this horrible mistake twice.

I can’t really complain. It’s all come full circle, and I’m not making the same mistake again, but it would have been so much easier to get it right the first time… or at least the second.

So today I exist in a world so very different from the one I know I shouldn’t regret missing out on. Still, tonight I find myself trapped in an infinite replay of the hug I accepted in place of a kiss that might have changed my life.

I want to pick up the entire room and hurl it through the window, not just the books or the bed or the alarm clock. The entire room.

I feel like success is dancing beneath my fingertips, but whenever I attempt to make a fist and grasp as one that is visibly successful, my fingers break, each one, each bone individually. The pain is excruciating, and I do whatever I can to make it stop; I drink whatever I can… to make it stop.

Do you hear me? Do you understand? Would a photograph make it more clear? Sorry, I forgot my camera.

I remember watching “As Good as it Gets” I’d never seen anything quite like it before. I was a teenager, barely able to comprehend the reality it betrayed, but I knew it was a reality. Perhaps I was more wise then; perhaps I was more aware.

I am an adult now, but somehow I’ve forgotten that when an awesome moment envelopes you, that truly is as good as it gets. There are no happily-ever-afters, because life is infinite. Life does not end (just so no one is left unclear of my meaning when I use the word infinite.)

I’ve met the most wonderful man, and whether he wants to marry me, or simply live with me for the rest of his life, I am quite sure that this is “as good as it gets”.

How often do I overreact. I hate overreacting. I hate doing it, but it still happens, perhaps daily. My show of the month is Mad Men. I avoided watching it for the longest time. I hate any show that leaves a question mark between what is right and what is wrong, but for some reason, I hit play on Netflix, and I just couldn’t stop.

I understand the concept that life is not black and white, that the truth is a blob, very different depending on the angle one views it from, but when I watch television, I want high definition.

The title of this article is a quote from Mad Men. As much as the concept of the program bothers me it’s one of the highest quality pieces of programming I’ve had the opportunity to enjoy. I love that they took a moment to recognize, amidst all the conflict, that our problems are really not so great as we make them out to be.

You spilled it. It’s done. It’s just a milkshake.

Today, my mother is upset with me.

I am a grown woman with children who are old enough to hate me, and a husband who doesn’t deserve to be called my husband, and a boyfriend who deserves to be my husband.

What I don’t understand is the process of distrust. I still, after all I’ve lived through, want to believe that people can trust one another. Am I a fool? Today I saw an old friend whose opinion at one time in my life, I cared about, more than my mother’s.

I’m not one of those women who doesn’t care about her mother. I care desperately about my mother. I understand how difficult it is to be a mother, and I still keep trying. I have a daughter who praises me… and proclaims I can do nothing right, yet I love her.

I want to know how others feel, how others know that they can continue wanting to be not only a mother, but also the woman who is distrusted and hated.

Have you ever felt sorry for someone who didn’t exist? I found myself feeling that way this evening. I was watching a TV program and the one character was horrible and pitiful at the same time, and I couldn’t help feeling sorry for him.

That is not what struck me though. It was the reality that I feel sorry for a real person that no longer exists, my husband. Well, my estranged husband that is. I saw him the other day (we’re not allowed within 500m of one another) and I stared at him for a moment before I skittered off half terrified in the opposite direction, towards a dead end as all foolish heroines do. Every night since then I’ve sat and imagined his face: eyes wide, skin pale, and I’ve felt sad.

Only I don’t know him anymore. I know it’s cliché, but it’s so true when women say, “he’s not the man I married.” I must try to think of a better way to say it, or at least a new way to say it, for I fear I shall be commenting on it for a long time. Perhaps what would be most appropriate would be to state that he has become a man I thought I would never fall in love with, and I have not, but I did love the man I married.

I once told him that I never really loved him, and I am sorry for that. No one should feel as if they have never been loved. I did love him. I simply could not figure out, at the time I said it, a better way to explain to him that I did not love him anymore, for I always believed as the me that existed before who I am today, that people could not fall out of love.

Perhaps I was right. People do not fall out of love. They are pushed, and pulled, and punched until eventually they feel sorry for someone who does not exist.

One of the things that irritate me most in life is incompetence. Not incompetence due to ignorance, however, but incompetence due to laziness or sheer disregard for others. The most frustrating incompetencies are my own.

So what is incompetence? The following “definition” is an amusing example as it is itself an example of incompetence, does NOT define incompetence, and also contains an example of incompetence which discusses incompetence.

In fact, incompetence, according to the Oxford Dictionary is the “inability to do something successfully”.

The question this brings to my mind is a very important one: what is success? Perhaps I shall address that tomorrow night, but then if tomorrow is successful, I don’t foresee myself having time to post here. Could that be an example of my own incompetence?

Breathe.

I keep reminding myself to do this. Sometimes I wonder if I’m putting too much effort into this simple task. Then I find myself digging into hidden pockets of the internet to reset a password using an email address that I never bothered to create in the first place. That’s when I remember that breathing is the easy part.