It’s Not Your Fault

This is what I intended to write for today.
Life happened and I posted yesterday.

This is the worst diary ever. Worse than Memento.
Past, present and future all jumbled up in tattoos, Polaroids and post-it notes. No cohesion. Not surprising, my life has no cohesion. I am not chronological girl. Not terribly logical either.
The center doesn’t hold. I believe everything spirals out just to spiral back in again.
S’okay, I love amends and open ends.

Wednesday was unpleasant. Thursday was incredible. Friday sucked the devil’s balls.

Midweek haboob. One of those desert storms, cover your eyes and ears and just try to keep breathing. I hate the desert. Nothing grows there, just void of everything. I dislike beige. Give me pale greens and blues, oceans and seaglass. Give me storm clouds all black and grey. Give me green grass, blue skies and lemon yellow suns.

Haboob is the word I use for when all the magic goes out of the world and I feel like a sad, weird girl, but not in a good way.

Carried over to Thursday. 4pm I was still in writing/sleeping clothes, hadn’t eaten. Hadn’t written really. Watching The Office allowing Jim and Pam to give me false hope (fuckers). Coupled with a sense of foreboding I just felt decidedly blah. Something bad did come, surprise. Being psychic sucks some days.

I had plans in the city. Made them before Christmas. I was invited to see Golden Boy play with his band. He said the words ‘guest list’. I wasn’t sure if we would even have a chance to talk, and there was the whole having to take the bus thing, and dressing myself and everything just seemed so hard.

And like that white girl who can’t even, my motivation was sorely lacking.

Also, I was secretly hoping the Giant would materialize.

He didn’t.

I showered. Got on the bus and wrote.

A girl walks into a bar…

No joke here. I just did. I was outside smoking and I saw Bad Kitty on the sidewalk. Bar was safer.

Ordered a whisky and settled in to wait, I was early. Wrote a bit more while watching the door.
Looked up and saw Golden Boy walking towards me.

He hugs like I remember.

We chatted briefly, he mentioned his parents were waiting, I asked him to say hello for me.

I went back to whiskey and writing.

I heard my name called out in the thickest of Scottish accents. Spun around on my bar stool. Eric and June, parents of Golden Boy, looking just like I remembered. And they were…smiling at me?

I never know how heavy a thing is that I carry until it’s lifted and I float.

Once upon a time I had no friends, save one. Sessily. I didn’t know it at the time (I was 17, I knew very little) but she was clinically insane. Vicious, toxic, manipulative, just awful. But when you have no one and nothing, something seems better. Even a narcissist of epic proportions.

She dated Golden Boy’s brother. She pitted us against each other because I knew all the dirty shit she did. She made him believe I was the crazy liar to keep her crazy lying self safe. It worked. Until it didn’t. He and I now have this weird, unbreakable bond that comes from two people surviving the same disaster. We made peace years ago and he treats me with incredible kindness now. Still shocks me how little I feel I deserve this. I was a rotten kid. Self-esteem still fluxuates down to those painful lows. But I don’t live there anymore.

Hurricane Sessily. Wait, too much poison and human error and lands that can never be lived on again. More like Chernobyl.

I watched her flush her birth control pills. She wanted to get pregnant to keep a man.

That man happens to be Golden Boy’s brother. She did manage to get knocked up eventually and proceeded to drag his whole family through hell and back. I was there at the beginning.
I watched it. She went that extra batshit mile. I couldn’t abide. Then slept with my baby daddy just to drive the wedge all the way through.

Golden Boy and I had our own thing. “You really did look after me when we were kids.” We reminisced a bit.

I was protective of him. Not for lack of friends but because he needed it and he let me.

His family welcomed me into their home. Fed me. I slept there.

When I cut strings with Sessily I lost everything and everyone, or so I thought.
Went on a walkabout trying to find me. Still walking. Always will be.

The amount of shit she said about me and did to me could fertilize the aforementioned desert and she could irrigate it with her overly dramatic crocodile tears.

When Greg died, she made sure I couldn’t go to his funeral.

I haven’t forgiven her for that. Mayhap I should. I was the last person he saw before he died, holding him, smiling and something is telling me that is more than enough.

Back in the bar, Eric and June hugged me. Golden Boy grabbed us a table and more drinks, and I was transported back to a floral print couch, smiling talking, laughing.
I tried so hard to dance around the subject of her and failed.

I braced for the fallout.

Instead June said “Oh Sarah, we always knew that had nothing to do with you. We always knew she lied. We always knew you were a good girl.”

You know that moment in Good Will Hunting where Robin Williams says over and over “it’s not your fault” until Matt Damon ugly cries?

I almost cried like that at the bar, I am crying like that now.

I carry a world of guilt and shame about how I used to be. I don’t try to rationalize it. I was awful and I know it. I knew what she was doing was wrong and I didn’t stop her. Not sure if I could have, I never tried except that once when she tried to lie about rape. Add that to all the dumb shit I did of my own volition and it is a fucking heavy burden to bear.

Every time someone who knew me then opens their home and lets me in I get to leave some of that weight at the door.

Everything ebbs and flows.
Nothing good is ever truly lost.
Everyone comes back at the right time.
I’m reminded why I MUST  forgive everyone, because it feels so incredible to be forgiven.