I got acrylic nails done for the first time probably 23 years ago.
And, with the exception of farm life and a handful of straight jobs that didn’t pay enough, nor warrant getting them done, at least once a month since.
I can’t grow my own nails, I bite them.
For some reason, I don’t touch the fake ones until they have grown out for x amount of time and then I pick at my fingers until they bleed.
As I type this, my fingers hurt.
This happened twice during the two previous lockdowns as well. Fresh set of lovely fingernails that cannot be filled or maintained, and I file them down so I can write, but eventually they chip, split, peel and I rip them off violently and it hurts.
I have always bitten my nails. My Nana hated it, she even went so far as to take me to her nail salon and bribe me with polish. It didn’t work. Maybe 6 times in 46 years I have grown my own nails out nicely.
Never when I am stressed.
I remember my very first reconstructive surgery. I had come down with a slight cold and they delayed my surgery by a day. I wasn’t sure if they were even going to operate. My fingers were chewed to shreds by the time they put me on the gurney and rolled me to the ER. I remember the throbbing and the shame of it.
I remember getting thrown in a holding cell, 52 Division I think, during the really bad snowstorm of 1999. I had a fresh set of acrylics on when they locked me in the room and they were in a pile on the table when I left, in pieces and shards. I can still remember how bad my hands hurt.
Brief backstory that has nothing to do with anything…I was stripping at Zanzibar on Yonge Street in Toronto, I lived maybe 5-6 big city blocks away. The city had been hit with a bad storm and was pretty paralyzed. State of Emergency, the whole of Canada made fun of the mayor for calling in the Army. My girlfriend left work from day shift and I finally caught a cab. The traffic and snow was so bad the meter hit 20 bucks before we hit 3 blocks. We wanted out of the cab, driver was being awful and abusive. My girlfriend handed him a 20, demanded change, and when she reached for it, he grabbed her by her hair and pulled her halfway into the front seat. We had been sitting at a red light, she had opened the door to get out, we proceeded to roll across the intersection with her legs sticking out the door and me screaming at him to let her go and trying to pry his hands off her. The clincher was… my friend was a scrappy fucker. When she finally got some leverage, she hit him 3 times, hard in the temple and knocked him out cold…hence the rolling through the intersection. Her purse had fallen out the door, someone stole her money. We both just wanted to get home. So we gathered our shit and walked down the road towards our houses.
We got picked up by the cops 10 minutes later and thrown in holding. They couldn’t ‘tell us apart’ so we both got charged with assault.
It was a very expensive clusterfuck.
I have had a lot of those in my day. Barreling towards another one right now. All because I decided to share a cab with someone, or move to Newfoundland or move away from Newfoundland, living on the farm was expensive as fuck, leaving it too. The trailer 6 years ago that chewed my jeep’s transmission. The car wrecks.
Everything listed in the last paragraph was a separate $5000 mistake, and there are so many more.
The above isn’t what I meant to write. I was tapping away on the keyboard and my fingers hurt from being chewed and I thought about my first surgery and my impending surgery and the massive lack of direction that is happening in my life right now. All the things I have lost or am losing.
This is the last thing I am going to write for free, and I will tell you why.
When I was 16 years old my mother burned everything I had ever written since kindergarten.
I have eluded to this before but never explained it so here goes.
I had the same dresser from 2 years old til I was 38.
One big drawer across the top. 2 smaller deeper drawers in the middle and 2 cupboards on either side.
The bottom drawer contained layers and layers of papers.
Every note I had ever been passed in class. Every creative writing project I had done for school or fun. Birthday cards, poems, drawings, lists. Basically me in words and pictures.
My mother thought I was doing drugs; because I was. My behavior was angry and erratic, I was disruptive at home and school.
She went into my room to find something that would give her a clue as to what to do with me.
I wasn’t terribly organized, so everything in the drawer was just thrown in there, loosely chronological.
I had been getting high on acid and writing angry, sexual, crappy, angsty teenage poetry. Still hadn’t had sex yet. But I digress.
She read the stuff on top, found it to be pornographic and burned everything.
I am allowed to be upset about this. And I was.
I ran away from home.
I kept writing for a little while until my only writing partner and friend died in my lap and I gave up.
I lost everything.
My job, my apartment, my family and bestie at the time.
And it was all a series of unfortunate events that eventually led to me living in Northern Ontario and getting knocked up.
Not the first time I have lost everything, and I am sure it won’t be the last.
You know most of the rest.
There have been a lot of bad decisions and hard roads and fuck ups and times of great bliss in my life.
I was getting better at walking away instead of having everything ripped away.
Then the Facebook thing and I am standing in my childhood bedroom looking at the empty drawer listening to my mother say, “it’s gone, I burned it”. Not realizing the enormity of what she had done, what was at the bottom of that drawer, or the middle. It was me, it was everything I was.
I died that day metaphorically. Defeated.
After Greg died in real life, I didn’t write another thing until I hit my 30’s.
12 years of my life disappeared from that drawer, 12 more years the day before yesterday when the powers that be on Facebook decided I was too much trouble to bother with and they set my life on fire.
I know I am being melodramatic, but I am really trying to figure out what I am supposed to learn from all this.
What happened to me at 16 put me on the life path I am still walking.
I could have stayed living at home, been a lawyer or a writer, gone to university. But instead I worked in restaurants and had a baby at 20. Started stripping at 24 and here I is.
(Gestures broadly at the nothing I have to show for anything.)
Everything I have tried for the last 3 or 4 years has failed. Actually, if you think about it, it is all a failure. Except my amazing kid who literally lives his life the opposite of mine on purpose; and he is doing pretty well for himself.
I am a glaring and constant reminder of what not to do.
And I try new things and the universe just yanks them away, with a no and a slap on the hand until I reach for the next thing and that is a no too.
Am I an idiot?
Did I believe in a magic that doesn’t exist?
Ya, I totally did. I might actually be kinda insane.
I can’t believe I believe in anything. Seems so stupid.
I have completely lost my faith. What did you think was gonna happen?
I am not a witch, I am just some dummy with massive delusions, a bunch of rocks and mild pyromania. True passionate twin flame love is fucking horseshit.
Everything I believed is a lie.
I think I brainwashed myself into thinking there was more than 9-5 day to day blah blah blah.
There is only blah.
The angel of the lord is hitting me with my own hands. But he doesn’t exist either.
I remember thinking my life felt magical, like I was manifesting good things and I was happy. I remember being happy. I remember believing in fate and good juju and lessons.
But there is nothing remarkable about me except my willingness to fail out loud.
And I am so tired.
Sofa king tied.
Do I just get a straight job and a little humdrum apartment?
Try to work my way up to middle management.
Drink wine with my friends who also have average lives so I can sleep at night and try to forget everything.
Maybe learn how to knit so I stop biting my nails?
Get a mediocre boyfriend, sex on Thursdays and all-inclusive vacations once a year. Book club, spin class. Just exist like everyone else.
This has never sounded so appealing.
After today I am moving this blog over to the Patreon.
Mercury is spilling Gatorade all over everything and not in a ‘we just won the championship’ kinda way. What else do I have to do besides tie up old loose ends. So many loose ends. My life is a bunch of unfinished macramé projects shoved in a garbage bag.
Half a million times someone has read what I have written and I have nothing to show for it.
I am going to edit my past and see what is worth saving out of this drawer of papers before the universe decides to light that on fire too.
So long
Farewell
Auf Wiedersehen and thanks for the fish.
https://www.patreon.com/sarahthegoodwitch