I have to go buy black dress pants and a black shirt and I don’t want to.
It’s not for the funeral. I am not going to the funeral.
I am cooking for the barbecue tomorrow after the funeral and I am happy about this because Jesus Christ I need a job. When something like this happens I need a job. I need something productive and helpful to do.
Not just when something like this happens, always. I always need to feel useful.
My inner 50’s housewife has been in hyper drive lately and I can’t shut her off. Like a Stepford wife on Adderall and lithium batteries. No rest for the wicked.
I am buying black dress pants and a black shirt because I am taking a bartending gig tonight and the woman in charge hates skirts. Even though it’s 90 degrees I will acquiesce to her request because I want this job. Even though I can cut and stack firewood, cook, clean, change a tire, mow the lawn and do pretty much everything in a skirt, I will abide this woman in charge.
I want this job so bad.
I want this job because I want to be normal.
I don’t want to be the ‘did you hear he’s dating a stripper’ girl anymore.
It’s not who I am, it might have been who I was but it isn’t who I am.
I don’t want to be disposable anymore because of what I do.
It’s not who I am.
I am learning I have value.
I am having a funeral of sorts in my head. For that girl that I was, for finally getting to the end of my fantasyland fairy-tale bullshit delusion I had in my head about happily ever after. Because there was no happily ever after.
I acquiesced to his request and he said lol.
No the end. No horse and carriage no marriage. No good girl or my girl or okay baby.
Just lol.
The shutdown ‘word’ of all fuckboys and men.
The ‘I don’t want to deal with your feelings and I can’t be bothered to type ha-ha so” lol.
Lol = I don’t care enough to respond.
The international word for ‘just kidding’ when we all know there is a whole lotta truth behind every just kidding, like if I gave permission he’d say okay.
But I am not giving permission.
What we allow is what will continue.
We are in charge of our own fate and our own fairy tales. We get to write the ending however we chose and when the prince reveals himself to be a fuckboy in tinfoil instead of a knight in shining armor then we get to say, this isn’t how this ends for me.
Next chapter.
And we will hold tiny funerals in our hearts and our girlfriends say nothing because they tried and tried and tried to tell you that you were a side piece but you couldn’t see the color red until it was all you could see.
I am not coleslaw.
I ain’t even mad.
I did this to myself.
I had a cabin in the woods in my head and I lived there with someone who didn’t make time which is why I had so much time to make these stories up in my head.
And when I told him he just said lol.
It wasn’t a no, so I ran with it.
Straight into a brick wall because I was blind and I couldn’t see.
And he said he would turn my imaginary hammock into a sex swing and I said I love you.
I fucking love you.
After months of tasting blood in my mouth from keeping it off my tongue.
I tell my friends every day that I love them, but with the men in my life it’s been harder to say. I hold it back. The last 10 years I have said it 3 times and only once was it returned.
But it wasn’t with him.
He said I wasn’t allowed.
No lol.
A full on nope.
And it still took me days of denial and a harsh text about something else before it hit me.
He doesn’t love me.
He is never going to love me.
The imaginary cabin in the woods burned to the ground.
Nature will take it back.
That burned black space that was left behind when the fire came and took away any idea of home and comfort.
Then something else can grow there.
Something real.
