ugly little angela

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tonight, the last thing i want is to be your goddamn pillar of strength.

take a deep breath and well up the courage to ask the question you already know the answer to.  i don't give a fuck about your preferences or respect.  my heart is too damn broken for that.

i know who my friends are by the way they walk; those who don't pretend to know what it's like for me and don't pretend our shoes fit the same.  my friends are those few sweet souls who don't say they understand.  they love me enough not to degrade my history with thin sentiments of faux camaraderie. do not deny me my obvious singularity.  do not deny me my status.  i am separate and i know it.  my best friends don't pretend to know the nuances of my pain-  the atrocity of a dead mother, demolished by cancer, looking like motherfucking Mussel-manner, like a decrepit 90 year old man, disintegrating at 55, right the fuck in front of my eyes, right in front of my baby sister.  i cannot for the life of me describe for you the total pain of witnessing the horror that seized my sister when she saw our mother ravaged by pancreatic cancer and deformed by tumors, looking to me for an explanation and mouthing the words oh my god and not being able to do a fucking thing to stop it or change it or ease it. 

i walk home through dark streets, wet with recent rain, hands in pockets and wondering if the people i pass can see it- the pain in me; the horrible crack in me that makes me incapable of believing in FOREVER but in such dire need to at least try.  the stupidity that results from abuse and abandonment.  and so i decide, instead, to be a disappointment.  i make myself another cocktail and attempt to nourish myself with my own disgust.  i climb in to the scorch of my shower and let my mascara run.  i drink my delicious poison and i think of my mother and i think of all the pages of her own poetry she lit on fire.  she left no record.  everything is burned, including her body and the thought alone makes me want to throw up all over myself.   it makes we want to vomit into my own hands and hold it up like a proof that is begging to be seen, a proof that must be reconciled, a fucking reckoning.  hold up my insides, my putridity, my horror, my total innocence and naivety and expectation for this nightmare to fucking end so that i can look at my sister and not see the vast horror that found her too soon.  too goddamn soon.

let me slip tonight, my love, back to being ugly little angela.  ugly little angela.  ugly little angela.  15 years old and failing tests on purpose because she was so fucking sick of being such a goodie goodie, all those fucking AP classes and bringing an apple for teacher.  for once, let me fail.  let me fail and love me anyway.  motherfucker, love me anyway!  show me you love me by saying you don't understand.

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