21:30 - April 28, 2002
silly things in the way
I think my parents must both be reading some sort of 'How To Handle Your Child When In The Middle Of A Nasty Divorce' handbook and then turning around and doing the exact OPPOSITE of what it says to do. I can't help thinking, a lot of the time, that they must be less mature than I am, which is probably wrong and horrible because they're 35 years older, but... if I have to hear my mother whine about how it's 'sooooo unfair that he gets everything and i get nothing and you're cutting me out of your life and what did i do to deserve this and i'm a horrible mother aren't i? aren't i? this is why you're punishing me. because you hate me. right? RIGHT?' I might eat my arm. Or her arm. And if I have to hear my dad stomp around muttering about 'it's all in HER hands. i gave her a choice. i said, i told her, i offered her a fair offer, and said if she continues to rape me of my life, i don't want anything to do with that bitch, and she kept doing it, and i have cut her out. i will not be in the same place as her. and i am not being immature, how dare you suggest that to me?' I will explode, or move to Colorado faster than either of them ever could have hoped (and NEITHER of them gets to drive me! HAHAHAHA!). They're having this huge spazzout over which of them gets to be in a car with me for fourteen hours mindbendingly nervous about going to college and therefore driving everyone around me crazy. Whoop-dee-fuckin-doo.

I've lately been feeling older than my mother, which both exalts and unnerves me. I'm the one trying to give her life lessons, and she looks at me with the eyes of a little kid, like I'm what she needs to make it all better. I feel like a grown child who's abandoned her parents in a godawful nursing home and gone off to Tahiti to blow all her money or some such, just because of the way she looks at me when I go home. I mean, I'm sorry. I am. But as I explained to her, of course much worse than is written here, as I'm not a great talker, it was exactly the same when I was worried about pleasing everyone. Someone always found something to call me selfish over. Enough of that and you become selfish. I've stopped trying to please both of them. Why try? She says I think only of myself now, and that's true; I do. I do what's convenient for me. I live with my dad because it's easier and we get along better. He has a later curfew. I have a car there. I have my music things there. I'm closer to... I don't know, the beach.. or something. I'm being fucking fucking selfish, it's very true. So they're angry. They were angry when I wasn't being selfish. There's no difference, except for one apparently tiny little unimportant person who's no longer pissed off, because she's stopped caring: me.

Perhaps I should listen to myself, also, since something just occurred to me that I said to my mother tonight: 'You shouldn't go into things having all these expectations. You can have hope. Hope is different. Hope that things work out, and if they don't, it's a disappointment, but if you had expectations and they failed, i's like fate betrayed you. and that hurts much, much more.'

I do expect things from people far too much, and I'm always delighted when they surprise me with something unexpected and quirky, and, usually, better. But if nothing's like I envisioned, I get sulky. Or deny its reality. For example, when the C-word came up a few years ago from out of the blue, I had the surgery and then wiped it clean from my head. I prefer it that way. If it's not something I've made for myself, it can just leave; I write my own script, thank you very fucking much. Unfortunately, in the midst of the whole mindswirly phase, I told Erik, who, fittingly, didn't believe me. 'It's just anxiety,' he told me in Nikki's backyard. Then I showed him the scars....
I told Maria. She burst into tears. Somewhere between those two extremes was more what I was expecting, so I ran away from both of them, and then worked hard convincing myself none of it really ever happened. Not because it was especially painful or heavy, but because I did not put it there and it had no place being there, on sheets denying my right to give blood, on my fingers when I took a shower, the black line of stitches, the family history charts....

Erik and Maria told Camille. I was calm, I glared at them like they expected, I distracted myself by jumping on James, who eventually dropped me on my head, but I still managed never to directly talk about it with her. I had, by that point, convinced myself so thoroughly that it never happened that I had blocked the whole month from my memory, and feared I had made the whole thing up, for some horrible selfish reason, and that everybody was going to find out and oh my god freaking out freaking out, and it was made worse by the fact that my dad never said anything and the stitches had faded enough so that I could barely see them... they could be stretch marks, couldn't they?.... and then, to mock me, it came back. 'See? I exist. I'll prove it.'

No, I hold expectations for my entire future. I expect it to wait for me to weave it before it drops silly things in my way that get caught in the web so tight that I don't remember how I wove it in the first place. People know now; I want them to know so that when I don't, there'll still be a record of it and I won't go crazy. I told Mike with nothing but a deep breath. Other people don't forget things like this. Now all it is is seething: I can't fucking climb, and karma is on my ass for pretending I had fatal diseases in elementary school so all the teachers would feel sorry for me and give me candy.

'Can I see the scar?'
'What? Oh... what?'
I had it right the first time.

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