Yesterday was my birthday. Now I am 43. My brother was two years older than me and he should have turned 45 in September. But he will not turn 45, he will remain 44, I guess. And next year I will be the same age as my brother was when he died. And in ten years I will have been alive longer than he ever got, and in 44 years, if I live to be 87, I will have lived just as long on the planet without my brother as I lived with him. To imagine time stretching forward, moving further and further away from him, is so painful that it does not bear contemplating. In fact I can actually feel my mind dancing away from the fact of his death, skittering when reality gets to close. It’s too easy to pretend this is not real, that if I don’t think about it in any focused way it will remain soft, abstract, conceptual—it will not enter the space where the truth lives.

I suppose that is OK for now, this shrinking brain of mine. I have been ever one to look at the cold hard truth, but not now, not this. Soft and fuzzy suits me fine. Because the hole in my guts if my brain goes there is too huge and gaping and full of confusion and sorrow.

Yesterday was not a particularly great day. I don’t have much fondness for my birthday at the best of times, and these are not that, by whatever measure you’d like to use to gauge just how shitty things can be. My mom was here. I slept, I ate cake and strawberries, I went out to dinner with people I like and enjoy, there was ice cream and there was laughter. But it was surreal, mostly.

Yesterday though, I did dream of Danny, and it was a good dream, a comforting dream. I will hold it close always, I wrote it down, what happened, how I felt, and I will remember that feeling just as long as I possibly can. I hope it’s a long time. I hope that I don’t begin to forget him, in ten years, or twenty years. How can there even be stretches of time so large without my brother in them? You see, I still don’t understand it.

Today I went out and I saw little boys in Cardinals t-shirts, and I started crying at the mall. I thought I was fine, I didn’t know I was going to cry, I didn’t know I would feel this way. I didn’t know anything could feel this way. I went into the hair care store and the clerk introduced himself as Daniel. “That was my brother’s name.” I said. And then I felt the guilty weight of that “was” punch me right in the heart.

How could I say “was” about my brother? My brother is.

But no. He is not. Not anymore.

I am reading a book about siblings and grieving, they say it gets worse. They say just when you need support the most, in a month or two, when your brain stops dancing around the facts, that’s when people will start assuming you’re over it. That perhaps your parents are still grieving, but you, you’re just his sister. How much could it affect you?

Were you close?

Yes, but we didn’t know it then.

I look at pictures, but not as obsessively now. I don’t check his Facebook page in the middle of the night, hoping someone tells me a story that explains to me why this could have happened. I still don’t understand, but it’s a quasi-function kind of not understanding. It’s the kind of state that lets you do the things you need to do, and smile the right smiles and laugh at the right jokes, and pretend to be human when you really aren’t at all.

And yesterday we celebrated the day of my birth, and each day that passes leads me one day further away from the last time I was with my brother in the world.

Let my brain dance all it will, I don’t even want to understand.

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This weekend I spent my time reorganizing my house, setting it back the way that it was before my surgery. My desktop computer is back upstairs, the bed is back in the same position it was before, instead of shoved up against the wall to make room for my knee walker. My mom isn’t here for now, she says she feels better near my brother’s things.

I got out old photos and found pictures I’d taken of my brother in high school, pictures from when we were kids. I looked at photos, I rearranged my house, and I grieved.

I called my friends sobbing, I sat alone sobbing, I thought I was OK and then I was sobbing. It was a kind of grieving I couldn’t do with my mom here, for fear of making her worse. I cried for my poor brother and all his body went through in these last two years. I looked at photos of him before and after the stem cell transplant, and really allowed myself to see what it had done to him. He looked old and gray and ill.

I was trying to explain this to someone, and I am not quite sure I can, but as long as he was going to beat cancer, whatever the fight took was OK. It’s OK to fight, when you win. It was somehow OK that he was going through something terrible, because he was going to come out the other side healthy. We go through tough times, we fight, we recover, and the recovery makes the fight worth it.

But he didn’t win this fight. Instead he went through pain and illness and indignity and infirmity and other things I don’t even know how to describe. His body was abused beyond what I thought a human body could take, with chemicals and radiation and infections. He had tubes permanently connected to him, he was poked and prodded and scanned and he gave up any privacy and dignity he had, to fight this thing, and it killed him anyway. That is the injustice I’m screaming against, in my head and sometimes out loud in my home. What happened to him. How he was a big robust man, with bushy eyebrows that made me crazy and sometimes a weird goatee and a strong arm that encircled my mother in all their photos together. But cancer sucked all the health from his face, all the strength from his body. Cancer made him use a walker or a cane, it took his stupid bushy eyebrows and his weird goatee, and it took those arms that held my mom and left them weak and hairless. Even pictures from a year ago show an ill but chubby smiling guy, with a twinkle in his eye and sometimes pure happiness on his face. But I have a picture of him with his friends watching the World Cup in May, and he looks drawn, and old, and so, so ill.

In May we thought he was doing well, getting stronger. The stem cell transplant was experimental, we knew, but we were told it was the best hope to keep the cancer at bay for the longest time. Round the clock chemo for five straight days, the stupid transplant itself and its side effects, they fucking destroyed his body. He didn’t win. I was sure he’d win. He was always so lucky. He won everything. Everything. I knew he would beat this, but he didn’t and now that I know the outcome, I cry because I don’t know if what he went through was worth it. Maybe there were other treatments, standard chemo. If not for the transplant maybe he could have fought this last infection. I keep telling myself I should have known, I should have done something, I should have known more than the doctors and more than anyone I should have protected him, I should have intervened. Something. Anything. I should have anticipated this would go wrong, I should have done something. I should not have let this happen.

And I know, I know, everything I read tells me I was powerless to stop it, that I am railing against my own powerlessness, that blaming myself is a way of not feeling like the world can do whatever it wants to us. But knowing that doesn’t change how I feel.

I sat on my back deck and ate a popsicle and I watched my dogs in the yard and I felt the breeze and I knew I should cherish life, since it’s precious or whatever. I should relish the sensations and feelings of the world, or something. But my brother can’t, and he never will again, and I wasn’t able to stop it and what took him was so, so ugly. So fucking brutal and hideous and cruel. His poor face when he told me he was fine, when he told the nurses that his last stay at the hospital was “just excellent.” His poor dry skin, when the chemo sucked the life out of it. He told me over and over that he was fine. He was fine. Don’t worry, he was fine.

It’s not fair. It’s not right. He was not fine. I thought he would be, and so I didn’t scream and cry at what he was going through, not then. We fight. We’re strong and we fight because we have to. But now that he’s gone and retrospect tells me he was dying all that time, there are not enough things in the world for me to break in my rage.

I don’t know where that feeling takes me, or leaves me. I don’t know what to do with the anger, I don’t know who to talk to, or what to say, and I know that soon people will tire of hearing me talk about him and what happened. People like to talk about happy things. But I need to talk until I am done talking. I need to feel until I can come to some kind of understanding. I need for people to know what happened, because it was important.

So this weekend, my life went on. Because it has to, because it does. Because we can’t stop it, not for grief or anything else. And every minute it goes on feels like… what. An eternity, a betrayal. Frivolous, nonsensical. People keep doing things, because that’s what they do, and I keep thinking and grieving, because that’s what I do.

The post Life Does That Thing appeared first on Superbadgirl.

I keep having to say to people “my brother passed away.” But that’s nonsense and it can’t be true because my vibrant loudmouth brother who never-ever stopped talking can’t have done something so permanent as “pass away.” Pass away to what? Pass away to where? He’s got to be somewhere telling a story to someone, he can’t just not be anywhere. He can’t just not be. He was so incredibly alive, and the thought that there is no more him in the world—that doesn’t make sense. Is this what denial is? Is this the shock of unreality? I didn’t see my brother every day, so the thought of him being out of my sight, but still out there doing brotherly things, that’s possible. He’s out there doing some boring Dan thing, to do with sports or trivia, and I don’t care about it, but I will hear about it later from my mom, and then I will get an update on what his doctors say lately and how he’s holding up, and then I will hang up and do my sister things, the things he never understood, and he will be doing his brother things, things I never understood.

Passed away. Died. Neither of those phrases makes the first damn bit of sense. My mouthy brother, so full of stories and energy, can’t have done something so strange and permanent. He cannot have gone away to a place where I can’t speak to him, even if I want to.

It’s actually nauseating to think about. When I think about him, about him not sitting at my mom’s kitchen table and telling some insane story while my mom gazes on him adoringly, I want to throw up. I want to throw up all that lonely emptiness, the black hole in my insides, where all my certainty was.

A friend sent me a link to information about grieving a sibling, and this quote was contained. Like a gut punch.

“Siblings may be ambivalent about their relationships in life, but in death the power of their bond strangles the surviving heart. Death reminds us that we are part of the same river, the same flow from the same source, rushing towards the same destiny. Were you close? Yes, but we didn’t know it then.
– Barbara Ascher”

“Strangles” is the right word. My heart, my stomach, strangled. My love for him, strangled. I know from experience of loss that eventually things will be a new normal. For me much sooner, much easier than for my mother, I know. I know. But for now my heart is strangled, and nothing can ever be the same. 

The post This is Nonsense appeared first on Superbadgirl.

Why aren’t there any tomes on grief that don’t approach it from a religious angle? I don’t want to hear about anger at God, or angels in heaven until we meet again, that is not at all my belief system and distracts from what I am going through.

I did not allow my boss to tell anyone at work what happened. Not for a lack of emotion on my part, but for a lack of caring on theirs. I can’t imagine what would be worse than “I am so sorry for your loss, how terrible. My prayers are with you. Also, could you review this spreadsheet?”

The inanity of everyone else’s ongoing lives is completely offensive. However irrational, I want to scream at them “Don’t you know the world has stopped? Don’t you KNOW?”

I have seen several people speaking of new pregnancies, or just-born children, and I wonder at their audacity. Don’t they know what can happen?

“The hubris it must take to yank a soul out of non existence, into this, meat. And to force a life into this, thresher.” – Rusten Cole, True Detective.

I don’t feel as if I understand anything, but other people look to me as if I do. My words have impact and meaning. I don’t want them to. I want someone to explain things to ME, I don’t want to have to guide others.

Time passes so slowly. Was there always this much time? Were there always so many minutes in a day to fill with things that don’t make you scream in pain and horror and grief?

Dan’s doctor had told us that he’d been treating another man with his same type of cancer for over ten years. It came back and he’d beat it into remission, it would come back, he’d beat it again. In my head, the deal I struck with myself was that my brother would have AT LEAST ten years. And then there may be new treatments available. This was my brain’s bargain with the world. I had accepted that my brother might have a shortened life, but never just two and a half years. Never ever that short of time. No. Ten years. I had been promised.

I want to return to Victorian ideas of mourning. I want a black wreath on my door, I want to dress head to toe in clothing that will inform strangers that my life is irreparably damaged. I want visible remembrances of my brother, I want the right to cry in public if it suits me, to let myself be overcome by my grief. I want the respect of people around me for what has happened, what my mom and I are going through. To not be asked what our weekend plans are, or told to have a nice afternoon. I want silence, and reverence and respect. I want the world’s pace to match the slow, plodding pace of my own heart.

I feel guilty that I have not given my mom grandchildren. She wanted them so badly from one or the other of us, but she’s never complained about not getting any. Still, a baby or child would be such a comfort to her, I know. I feel guilty about not being my brother, as well. She loved him better, they were so close I could not even comprehend it. I feel terrible that I can be her child and yet not the child she needs.

I know there’s grief in the world. I know there’s suffering and loss and pain and people lose people they love and that’s tragic. I just don’t want grief to be MY thing. I don’t want it to touch MY life. I don’t want to have any loss or pain or a big missing hole here where a man used to be. This is not a thing that gets to touch me. How does it get to touch me?

I came home and my mom’s been crying all day. I have always known how to fix all of my mom’s problems. Anything she needed, I could solve. But I couldn’t solve cancer, and I can’t solve death.

To sit and watch her cry for her dead son, to witness her pain without having a solution, without having hope to offer, is some nauseating thing I wish I’d never had to experience.

The post My Thoughts, Presented in an Unorganized Manner appeared first on Superbadgirl.

I keep having thoughts in my head, like “Am I now an only child?” But no. I am not an only child. I am a sister whose brother has died.

I am a sister whose only living witness to her childhood is gone. We were the only ones who shared that experience, now I am alone. No one else will remember the jokes, no one else will remember the endless hours of play, the squabbles, the shared eye rolls, the way things were.

We were a party of two, responsible for our mother: he for her happiness and joy, me for alleviating her anxiety. Now it’s just me, and I can’t make her happy in the same way.

I always imagined my mother slipping into old age with my brother constantly by her side, coddling her, loving her, perhaps living with her. Now that is never to be.

What changes now? What is the same? Who plays what role, who takes care of whom? I was one of two, a younger sister, the less loved, the outsider. That I had come to terms with, that I had accepted. Now I am not sure who I am, or what I will be, or what will happen.

What is this that has happened to my idea of myself in the world. Where is my brother, the axis around whom my mother turned? How do I keep her from floating away? And who keeps me?

I miss you Danny.

The post Not Sure What Changes appeared first on Superbadgirl.

“How do you pick up the threads of an old life? How do you go on, when in your heart, you begin to understand, there is no going back? There are some things that time cannot mend. Some hurts that go too deep…that have taken hold.”

― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Return of the King

Realized yesterday that every day on my way to work I am going to have to drive by the exact place where my brother died. Eventually will it be just another place to me? Or will it always give me pause, every day? Emergency and Trauma Center. Yes. It is a trauma center.

I have had the most terrible song in my head since it happened. Fucking Morrissey. The refrain I cannot break free of is “oh mother, I can feel, the soil falling over my head.”

What is that.What is my brain doing to me?

“Love is natural and real, but not for such as you and I, my love.”

Returning to work while grieving is like filling out a spreadsheet while surrounded by and hanging in Jello.  Everything is so hazy and soft. I am in a cloud of free-floating grief, and everything I hear just bounces off me and falls to the ground as I walk the halls.

Time will not pass in a consistent manner. Days lately have flown, long conversations with my mother of what-might-have-been mean midnight sneaks up on me and I have to force myself to go to bed. But today I checked the clock three times in four minutes.

The realization yesterday that I will never be able to ask him another question almost made me vomit in my car. I keep thinking of him as out there somewhere, out there being my brother, doing brother things that I don’t know about, and then I remember no, he’s done. Everything he was ever going to do has happened. There are now only memories. There will never be another story he tells us, or another story about him my mother relates. He will not buy another card, he will not get excited about another show, he will not wear again the jerseys he was so attached to. He will never memorize the Colt’s stats for next season, he will not go to late-season Cardinal games with my mother. All the places he should be are empty, all the things he should in any fairness be doing, will be done without him.

He will never again enjoy wings, or Fitz’s soda, or the excitement of receiving a package in the mail, he will never captivate another nurse with some elaborate story of his past adventures. People won’t experience him as special and charming, they will remember him as special and charming.

My mother will never again be able to hold him, and tell him over and over that she loves him, and that together they can get through anything, and that she’s scared too, but they will fight it together. My mother will never have her son, her precious best loved son.

All the wrongness here cannot be weighed or measured or even made sense of. It’s so wrong, and it’s so out of order, and it’s so final.

We will never understand, and we will never know for sure, and we will always wonder. We never stopped hoping, never stopped expecting, never anticipated such an outcome.

It is unfair, it is wrong, it is obscene.

Cancer took my brother’s body and his life and chewed them up, destroyed them. Not for any reason, not to teach us any lesson, not because (as one brain-dead shitwagon told me) “God needed him more than you did.” No, cancer did that because that’s what cancer does, for no reason, to anyone, even those who loved their simple lives, did good by others, and would never deserve any such fate.

Grief is a horror in each of its new revelations, and it will be with me forever. The path of my future has now been altered and erased, my idea of my family has been decimated.

We go on somehow from here, because we have no choice, but with us we carry the very heaviest of loads.

The post The Horrors of Grief appeared first on Superbadgirl.

Saturday I went for my first post-surgery pedicure. A milestone by anyone’s accounting, as I walked out of the house in two shoes, and went to a public place. I still have handicapped parking, thankfully, so I didn’t have to walk too far, and I parked at the entrance of the mall closest to the pedicure place. I am unreasonably paranoid that someone will challenge my handicapped parking status, because I don’t look too handicapped on the outside, although walking is still really painful. I walk across parking lots with a head full of pre-loaded angry and insulted retorts, in case of challenge, and I vow not to judge people who don’t look handicapped when they use handicap places or assistive devices.

I got into the blessed air-conditioned cool of the mall, and I was so looking forward to a relaxing experience, feet soaking in warm water, a gentle massage, head tilted back, eyes closed, blissful daydreams. But alas, it was not to be.

The pedicure place wasn’t crowded, I only had to wait for five minutes or so. I brought my own color (Number One Nemesis from the 2012 OPI Spiderman Collection. A neutral metallic if there is such a thing. Goes with everything.)

As I waited, I perused the laminated card that explains the services offered by the salon. It doesn’t make sense to do this, I get the same “spa” pedi each time, but it’s something to do rather than stare at other people. A woman comes up to the counter, asks for a pedicure, is directed to the shelves of polish bottles in the back. “Pick a color!”

“I just want plain.” she waves distractedly at her feet.

We wait. Like me, she picks up a laminated card describing the various services. Unlike me, she puts the card in her left hand, then reaches back and uses it to scratch her ass.

“No judgment. No judgment.” I think desperately. “Let other people do as they please.” She places the card back in the plastic holder, and I leave her behind as I am seated.

I slip off my sandals, and the floor underneath my left foot is icy cold. To my right foot, it feels normal. Same when I slip my feet into the churning blue water, the left foot experiences the water as boiling hot, the right finds it comfortable. I ask the woman working with me to turn the heat down a bit. “I just had surgery on that foot.” I say “If I am a little sensitive today it’s not your fault, my foot just feels very tender.”

“Did oi hear ya say that you had serjury?” A voice next to me asks. The butt scratching woman has been seated next to me. She has an accent that is impossible to identify. Aussie? Kiwi? She’s been a long time in America, so the accent is soft around the edges. She later speaks of going to visit her family in Edinburgh, so the origin is explained. She speaks to me of many things, the 7 (SEVEN) surgeries she’s had on her left foot. The combined years she’s spent in crutches. Her work as an EMS driver. She had a lot of stories, and she had an inclination to share them, despite my inclination to be left very much alone.

When you go for a pedicure and you’re wearing a shorter skirt, the workers will offer you a towel to gracefully drape across your knees to preserve your modesty (or more likely prevent themselves having to stare at your panty choice for half an hour. Either way.) I always wear bike shorts under my dresses when I go, having long learned that lesson. EMS lady’s worker offers her the towel to gracefully drape, but she chooses to stuff it determinedly into her crotch area like a wadded diaper, then to rest her Starbucks cup atop the new construction. “You can put your glass here.” the worker indicates a shelf attached to the arm of the chair.

“Nah, s’fine here!” EMS replies. “Saves you having to clean that off later!”

Her conversation returns in my direction, more about her surgeries, her marriage to a podiatrist, the extreme good looks of her surgeon, and how after one surgery for the addition of stabilizing hardware, she made a joke to the nurses that he’d “finally screwed her” and it got back to him. This woman had been through it all, multiple times, from what she had to say. She said she’d never seen anyone with a scar like hers (my doctor says it’s one of the more common procedures he performs) and wasn’t it a coincidence? She was having French tips done on her toes, and wanted me to agree that it looked “so fresh and clean.” I nodded vaguely. I hate French Tips on toes. So hideous.

I closed my eyes and laid back, jumping each time the woman working on my feet touched the left one with a pumice stone. I tried to relax.

“I had an accessory bone break off and insert itself into my tendon,” she said “And then it started to spontaneously regenerate. It was unheard of, all the doctors couldn’t believe it.”

“Mmmmm.” I said, staring at the television.

“You know, I think you get treated in life the way you treat other people.” she continued. “If you’re nice, you get niceness back, and if you’re not nice… Well.” she said “It’s amazing to me how people call us out and then get rude with us. I think to myself ‘well YOU called ME.'”

I wonder if my mom is nice to the EMS people she’s called twice in the last four weeks to come and pick up my brother. Probably so, my mom is nice to everyone. I think of how stressed she was each time she called, and how it would be hard to always remember to be polite under stress like that. I don’t explain this to the EMS lady, because I don’t want her to take it as a sign to continue talking. It doesn’t matter, she talks the entire time anyway. The experience I wanted and paid for has been taken away by this nice-enough (I guess) but much too chatty woman. I curse the social conventions that won’t let me say “I prefer not to speak to you.” Then I would be the rude one, right? Even though she’s intruding on my space without invitation, subsequently denying her entry to that space makes me the one in the wrong.

We finally finish and are of course sat next to each other in the drying area. “When a cop asks a person how many drinks they’ve had that evening, you know they always say…”

“Two,” I interrupt, holding my left hand up in a peace sign.

“What do you do, that you would know that?” she asked, somewhat incredulously.

“I minored in CJ,” I explain, though I don’t actually know where I picked up that bit of trivia. Doesn’t everyone know that?

She continues her story “Only one time did I ever hear someone give a different answer. I was called out to a report of someone laying in a ditch. We arrived at the same time as the police, and found a man drunk, just sleeping it off. The police asked him for ID and he searched his wallet, scattering different cards all around. ‘How much have you had to drink tonight?’ the cop asks him, expecting the same answer, you know, two. ‘As much as I wanted!’ the guy said – and then he found a five-dollar bill in his wallet and turned to me… ‘want to run up to the 7-11 and get us a six pack? I’ll split it with you.'”

“As much as I wanted.” I replied. “I like that. I might have to start using that.”

“It was a good answer, I thought. He wasn’t doing anyone any harm, so we found him a place to sleep, a friend in the next county said he could sleep in the cab of his truck for the night, and the cop drove him there. I thought: what a good friend,  to let him sleep in his driveway. People can be generous.”

I admit, I didn’t think much about generosity then, I wanted her to go away and leave me alone. I wanted to be at home, I wanted to be where there weren’t any people, and no one felt like they could talk to me, or relate to me, or share my thoughts. I did like her last story, though, it was a good one. As much as I wanted.

I don’t have a way to apply that concept to my life yet, but I hope to use it soon.

People talk to me.

The post People Talk to Me: Pedi-curious Edition appeared first on Superbadgirl.

No updates lately because things have been progressing mostly the same. Still in PT, although I had to skip some sessions because my brother has been in ICU and I have been there with him and my mom. My flexibility is now basically the same in both feet/ankles. I can balance much better and for a longer time. I can lift my body weight with my foot and my calf gets tired of it before my ankle does. That’s all good stuff.

The foot is still painful, not as much, but pain definitely still there. My heel hurts like I am walking on broken glass sometimes, the bone hurts like it’s re-fractured, the ankle hurts, the scar hurts. Still taking pain pills, though not every day. The foot doesn’t hurt so much when I am using it, as after I have used it. So I can do things all day, but at night the pain keeps me from sleeping. Or I can walk around fine at work, but driving the car home just kills me, when my leg is resting. I don’t understand it. I see my doctor next Wednesday, and as of today I am (I think) formally retiring the boot. (The knee walker got retired to the basement last weekend! Hooray! Milestones!)

I need to walk in shoes for awhile so I can report to him what it’s like walking in shoes and if I am able to do so. I don’t want to go in there next week, have him say “Oh, all sounds normal, try shoes.” and then have to wait another month to report any problems. If I am still not able to walk in shoes after two and a half months, something is wrong. So tomorrow I have the day off work, I am planning to spend some time at the hospital with my brother so my mom can run home, then I am going to go to the mall and get a pedicure, and hopefully I will be able to do this without the support of the boot, and without too much pain. Sometimes I think the boot is causing as much harm as it’s preventing; yesterday my foot felt like it was being squeezed in a vise, and the boot was no tighter than normal. I think my whole leg is just sick of this shit.

I know I am sick of this shit. I want to go do things. Walk the dogs. Go to the park. Go to the farmers market, go to the grocery store or Target or anywhere. Walk up some stairs. Just BE NORMAL and move like a normal person. I feel like I have missed so much. I feel like life is happening all around me and I can’t play. I am at the end of my rope with this shit, and well beyond. It’s depressing, it’s soul sucking, it’s demotivating, it’s whatever harmful mental thing you can think of. This has been almost a year of fearing to move, basically, and I really need it to be done.

So that’s what I know for now. I will update you if there’s news.

The post Tendon Surgery Recovery Day Six Million and Five (71) appeared first on Superbadgirl.

The kettle can’t bring
me love, not a thing
Can warm my skin or sing like you
No thing can boil
my blood and sting like you do

Someday I’ll stop buying things
That don’t give me the high that’s missing
There’s no room between
They’ll never be what was you

No blanket can hold me
No bath plug can stop up
this hole or control this blue,
no cup can catch this spill
Stay filled with the feeling of you

Someday I’ll stop buying things
That don’t give me the high that’s missing
There’s no room between
They’ll never be what was you

Someday I’ll stop buying things
Like I’ll stop missing you

I’ll throw everything
out of the door
You must use
objects without hearts
just like you

Someday I’ll stop buying things
That don’t give me the high that’s missing

Someday I’ll stop buying things
Like I’ll stop missing you

The nightgown I bought and never unwrapped
the bed from vacation
we never  packed
the dryer out back
clothes that I wept

Even the things you didn’t give me

I am not missing anyone.  But even still, this song is in my head and heart all the time lately. I have been on such a buying-things spree lately. I buy and buy makeup and shoes and dresses and jewelry and more makeup and books and more dresses, and I try to exert some control and fill some void and find the perfect thing that will make me happy or bring me joy, even if only for a moment. And despite what you’ve heard, things CAN do that, for a little while. The self-soothing I get from shopping online and selecting and purchasing and anticipating and unboxing – those things are not to be discounted lightly. Some days the only thing getting me to drag my ass up the stairs to my house is the package I know is waiting there.

I wish there were some other ways for me to self-soothe at the moment, or feel in control, or feel happy or loved or cared for. I miss my mom taking care of me. I am heartsick that my brother’s cancer is back. I am exhausted of being stuck in the house and too tired/in pain to do anything. I am not sure quite how to rejoin the world, and I want someone just to come and give me a hug and take care of me. I want to take all the calm-down drugs and all the painkillers and exist inside a hazy not-reality and only wake up when it’s dark out. I want to not interact with anything I don’t like. This grown-up thing is for the birds.

So for now, I will care for myself by letting me have everything I want. There are worse ways to cope, I am absolutely sure.

The post Someday I’ll Stop Buying Things appeared first on Superbadgirl.

This week in a nutshell. Physical therapy and more physical therapy, the first (tear-stained) barefoot steps on my foot since surgery. PT is really helping, I know it is. It’s also scary as hell. They tell me that I am no more likely to re-tear my tendon now than a normal person is to tear it in the first place. In fact, with the cadaver graft they put in there, it’s probably stronger. But then they said not to “overdo it”  – I should have asked more questions about that. If I am healed, what’s the harm in overdoing it? What would I overdo? I don’t understand.

I am working on strengthening, stretching, regaining my range of motion and ability to balance. I have a left calf muscle that’s made out of jelly, and an ankle that constantly feels like I’ve been ice skating for an hour. But at this week’s follow-up doctor visit, he did say I can now start gently practicing walking sans boot at home on level surfaces. He’s overall “happy with my progress,” but fuck him, he’s not the one in pain. I am supposed to put the boot back on if the foot starts to hurt, but the foot always hurts, so I don’t get it really.

Apparently he would normally have people start wearing shoes at the seven week point, but since my case was extreme and because my ankle was so weakened by all the conservative treatment we tried, he wants me in the boot and in PT for one more month, and then we will see. It hurts to walk, sharp pains across my heel and slow burning behind my ankle. I feel pretty steady on my feet, but my right knee is bothering me, probably because I’ve been walking so jacked up for so long. Trying to take it easy, but mostly I’m just sick of this shit.

This week’s accomplishments: two loads of laundry, cooking a grilled cheese, going into Local Harvest for milk, taking a bath and hoisting my carcass out of the tub after. Those are all good things, I guess, but I am depressed and I don’t care too much.

I am not sleeping well, my stomach hurts from the Vicodin withdrawal, and my brother’s cancer is back. Life seems pretty pointless at the moment, perhaps tomorrow it will seem brighter.

That’s week seven, they tell me good things are coming.

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