Growing Up Is Still Hard To Do Read online

who’s disruptive in class because his parents ignore him at home and solving the problem by doping him with Ritalin. It might calm him down, but the problem still lies with mommy and daddy and the drugs aren’t doing anything to fix them. Chemical imbalance or not, drugs don’t make people better, they just give you a leg up on fixing yourself and I’m not even sure I want to fix myself.

  Getting kicked square in the junk is a horrible feeling. Experiencing someone breaking up with you and showing virtually no emotion in doing so is even worse. At least a swift kick to the groin produces an identifiable pain that’s tangible. When someone leaves you after a year without so much as crying a single tear, when they barely reveal a flash of anger or a sign of frustration, but instead address you with a simple level-headed dismissal, you officially come to realize that you do not matter. I would rather be yelled at and have shit thrown at my head when losing something that helped provide my life with meaning than face a calm, self-assured, and unwavering wall. What could better say, “You’re not fucking worth it and I no longer care enough to care,” more clearly than an ending almost devoid of emotion? In a break-up full of yelling, crying and carrying on you at least get the impression that something of significance is going on. A break-up with all the excitement of a dental cleaning leaves you filled with rage. Rage at being nothing in someone else’s eyes. But even worse, it makes you feel despair. Despair because you know the complete lack of emotion is your own doing; it’s because you’re a babbling manifestation of OCD nonsense, irrational behaviors and toxic thinking. You built your own impenetrable wall of crazy. You’ve done and said so many crazy things that they no longer see past it to the person underneath.

  You can’t convince or reason with a person who has already decided that they are beyond you. It’s like trying to have a conversation with someone sitting on a moving train with their head sticking out the window. As the cars move away your voice grows smaller and smaller. Eventually all the other person hears is the sound of their life heading down a new set of tracks. Meanwhile you are stuck at the station without a ticket or a prayer. No matter what you do, you have no way of catching the train. No matter how hard you run, no matter how hard you try, it’s out of your reach and control. Before long you learn that you’re just going to tire yourself out. Wishing in vain is exhausting. Would have, could have, should have; it all amounts to the same thing: Nothing.

  So messed up I can’t even function. So messed up I forgot how to have fun. So messed up that I’m dragging others down with me. So messed up that I wasn’t even allowed the dignity of handing the key back to her. She grabbed the ring from me and stripped it in front of my face like I was a child. I stood there like a child. Like a child? Worse than a child. I wasn’t standing there at all.

  Goodbye, so long, good luck, don’t come back.

  God, straight alcohol tastes like shit especially when complemented by acrid pills.

  So, I wonder what I’ll look like once I’m dead? I hope that my mouth doesn’t hang open letting drool run down my chin. Although, I always liked that scene in A Christmas Carol when Marley walks into Scrooge’s bed chamber and removes the bandage from his head allowing his jaw to just drop open like a fish out of water gulping for oxygen. The popping sound makes me laugh every time.

  And another thing, I’m sure as hell taking care to keep my eyes shut out of respect for whoever has the pleasure of finding me. I would hate it to walk into a room and see a dead body just staring at me all accusatory-like. Dead people look really stupid with their eyes open anyway. They’re like big stuffed animals.

  I think that it’s about time for another drink.

  Bottle’s three quarters gone now. Shit, it’s getting hard to type. Fuckin’ letters are floating and weaving, weaving and floating. Wee round we go. Goddamn keyboard’s all sticky too from the rum. How about a few parting thoughts? A few more lines of bullshit just to kill the time.

  Everyone acts like humans are so sacred but isn’t it funny that we’re the only creatures who willingly destroy themselves? I mean have you ever heard of a suicidal dog? Lassie saves Timmy from the well, she doesn’t throw herself into it. Humans on the other hand, we’d as soon take the header into the well because it’s the easy way out. Forget saving someone else. We can’t even save ourselves. It’s sad, pitiful even, but it’s the truth. I’m less well-adjusted than a dog. hahahaha

  I’m going to drain this bitch.

  I’ll probably get about six more sentences since it takes five minutes per line unless I forget about the typos. They loook like thiss.

  I’m fucking funny.

  I’m fucking funny.

  I’m fucking sad, but I’m still fucking funny.

  I’m funny, this is funny, it’s all funn……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..

  God, I just threw up all over the fucking place. I need to get out of here.

  I’m sitting in the park and the October breeze is about the only thing keeping me from passing out. I don’t think it’s the sleeping pills because I barfed all of those up - just sheer exhaustion. The sky is blue, and despite the northern wind, the day is fairly nice. I’m sitting on a park bench along the side of a playground jungle gym – a really good one with a fireman’s pole, a yellow twisty slide, and a tire swing. I watch as four tykes push and shove for a seat on the spinning swing laughing the whole time. It brings me back to better days. I can’t believe that “bowl-cut” hairstyle never seems to go out of style among little kids: Both boys and girls. I was with them once, round haircut and all. I’d play on the swings if I didn’t think that I might start hurling again. I’m sure all the parents would love that so I just sit back and let my head fall against the hard wood of the bench. The birds fly in their customary “V” overhead. I wait for one of them to shit on me.

  Most of the parents sit on other benches under large oaks set off from the playground where they can still see their little ones, but escape from the constant chatter of their play. Some of them look almost as tired as me. I can hear the kids well enough and their little snippets of exasperated conversation. Two little boys play in the sand with a miniaturized dump truck and bulldozer. It’s nice to see that not every toy they have needs to be plugged in. To their right, a little girl in jeans and a frilly white shirt with flowers printed on it, dangles upside-down from the monkey bars sticking her tongue out at her friends. From the distance her daddy calls her and tells her to knock it off because her shirt keeps falling down around her shoulders as she swings showing her bare chest. She ignores him for a minute and then flips down when he begins to stand up. She runs off toward the slide with a slightly annoyed look and no conception of what her father meant when he told her it’s not proper for a girl to show her chest. At five, she doesn’t see the problem. At five, you haven’t had much time to invent them.

  About six other kids run around from one end of the jungle gym to the other happily playing tag and chasing one another. It seems nearly every kid in the area could use a sedative. Or maybe that’s just my thinking because I lost track of how people should be. I begin to doze off despite all of the noise as the sounds of childhood melt into an even static. My eyes fall shut, open, and then fall shut again in spite of my efforts to stay awake. I begin to think that maybe I didn’t hack up all the sleeping pills after all. I image the trauma I might create in some of these kids if I die right then and there and someone walks by, realizes it, and screams. “Therapy is expensive,” I think as I slip away.

  When I open my eyes again I realize I’m not dead but that perhaps an hour has passed since I fell asleep. The sun has begun to set beyond the trees to my lef
t and the light streams through holes now vacant of the colorful leaves that liter the ground. Splashes of light create a golden pool on the soon to be dying grass. The beauty and warmth of the day is a last hurrah before the coming winter. Most of the children are now gone except for a few still bouncing away on the tire swing, and a little girl of perhaps six singing happily to herself as she sits in the sand twirling a flower made of tissue paper. The green, red, and blue reflect a kaleidoscope of color off of her jeans and soft white jacket. She swirls it in the tips of her fingers, tries to fix it in her hair behind her right ear, and then laughingly twirls it again when it falls out. Her laughter catches the attention of a little boy wearing a red jacket with patches of baseball teams on the pockets and he looks up at her from the tire swing. With a bounce found only in the steps of a child, he leaps off the tire in mid-arc and jogs over to her to see what’s so funny. I again feel my eyelids grow heavy and the world begins to oscillate between blackness and the children playing before me. My view lasts long enough to see the look of disappointment on the boy’s face