I'm looking around this room trying to pick something out. It's no easy task, and the more I consider it, the more the job seems to overwhelm me. It occurs to me, often, that if they'd told me caring for people was gonna be this hard, I might've checked out long ago. I suppose that option is still drastically available to me.
If I could choose anyone, I would pick me. I think I would handle things better. Not that she is handling it worse, but that she doesn't deserve. But then, none of the people we love ever do. As they say, when it rains, it fucking pours.
I am, of course, wrong. I would handle it much worse. It's a possibility I refuse to even imagine. And so.
What can I send that says I'm sorry the past few years have been shit?
I ended up with sexy lipstick and a very honest card. The lipstick is supposed to say things can still turn around. The card - and to a lesser extent, the make-up - says I won't accept that someone so beautiful I fell in love with so much will end up this way. But it's been dark a very long time, and the American medical system is a particularly murky one. The sort I wouldn't wish on my worst enemy. I haven't known a single person who benefited from it. I'm sure they exist. But from all I've known, it seems to be an unending pit of doom. Not that it's isolated, of course. People have been left to die quite merrily pretty much across the world.
I miss her a lot, you know. I miss how she was before they got her hooked on the wrong kind of meds. I miss when we were both young enough to pretend that a little bit of lagging behind could still just count as a slow start.
One of the most frightening things about getting older is witnessing the people I love coming to less than I'd hoped for them, and suffering tremendously as a result. See, the artsy side of me always intuited there'd be suffering in my own life (and perhaps, to an extent, invited it). But I don't know what to do with my loved ones hurting.
I expect life to play rough, but never foul, which leads to needless taking it on the chin, I suppose.
When I was small, I understood life to be like this:
https://youtu.be/GFW-WfuX2Dk?list=RDGFW-WfuX2Dk
It mostly is. It's how I translate my life inside my own head to a great extent. Most of the shitty situations you'll go through will serve as lessons in one way or another, so that you hopefully 'level up' as you go and don't keep making the same stupid mistakes over and over.
But sometimes, it also translates to,
"How can this be happening?"
I genuinely would like to understand better the mechanics of "shit happens", so that perhaps one day I'd be better equipped for it. For now, I'm just making little packages for people with lipstick picked by AI that says this will make things right (just to be clear, the AI just suggested a shade, not the moral or emotional undertakings of lifting someone out of Hell).
Not that I am so conceited as to imagine I have any power to do so. But I can do everything that's available to me. And I'm learning increasingly that that's what maturity is.
Maybe. Then again, what do I know. I'm only a kid with tired eyes and nice smelling hair. Is red lipstick salvation? Always, always an answer. Now, if only the universe could start asking the right questions, you know?
How do you show up for the people who matter most to you? is a question I ask of myself a lot lately, and one that no one ever prepared me for. I admit I'm a bit sore on that point. See, they fill your head with Prince Charmings and bold career moves, but they don't warn you that's gonna be one of the hardest questions you'll ever have to answer, nor that it will challenge you constantly as you live.
Might I ask, how do you tackle it? And have you found some answer for it, at your given point in time?
