This might be TMI. Unsurprisingly, I give no fucks.

Instead of finishing one of two papers due next week, I spent a good portion of my Thursday night sitting on a park bench, attempting to conjure up the spirit of a dead woman, hoping she would appear so I could crawl in her lap and disappear. 

But that only happens in soap operas.

I get that adversity is supposed to make us stronger. it’s supposed to give us an awesome story to tell. It’s supposed to inspire us, make us better. But I am not strong. I am not better. I am being crushed by the weight of it all, every bad decision, every cruel twist of fate. I understand that some of my angst is man-made, that there are things that I should have done differently. But I can’t do anything about that now. There is no TARDIS to hop into, no magic pill to swallow to take me back to before, when things were just tolerable and not fucking awful. Before, when the rest of my family was here and my mother was ok and friends didn’t take sides because there was no war to battle, no hearts being broken, no pieces to put back together.

That I destroyed something real for something that wasn’t, for something that has been so artfully revised by someone I shouldn’t have let in in the first place is poetic justice, perhaps. History is written by the victors, right? Meanwhile, I’m the post-antebellum South. Or Germany. Or the bug being wiped from the windowshield. 

When I was younger, it was all about passion. How could people exist in a relationship without it? I’d wonder. And I’d tell anybody who’d listen how pointless it was to be with someone you didn’t feel passionate about, not realizing that—eventually—it fades. It always fades. It is a temporary affliction that clouds your judgment, that impairs your vision. And when it disappears, all that is left is contempt. Passion inevitably becomes contempt.

And it is that contempt that will have you sitting on a park bench at midnight, attempting to conjure the spirit of your dead grandmother.