I want you to stay...

It’s my last day in Arizona and I have to say the feeling is all so bittersweet. I spent the entire summer here last year and I couldn’t wait to leave. This had nothing to do with the place itself but rather the occurrences in my life at the time. This time was good. Despite several setbacks, I met some amazing new people that I can’t help but want in my everyday life.

I met Jeremy first and while I only spent a few bits of time with him, he has this light about him that pulls you in. His wit and intelligence are on par and his attitude resembles that of Captain Jack Harkness (For you Doctor Who fans.) I enjoyed the adventures, the conversations and the inside jokes we created… He also showed me how to work my camera a bit better, so that’s always a win.

There was Elvin and I can only describe him as the nicest ass hole you’ll ever meet. After months of daily conversations (sometimes 4-5 hours a day) we got to actually hang out in person. And he was every bit as funny as I expected. His wit, his intelligence, humor and lets be honest, his good looks were all of what I had expected. I feel like I could spend hours with this guy and never once get bored. Even if he rambled about rap or Wrestling…. He’s got a good heart and he is part of the reason I am having a hard time going back. (Where were you last summer?)

But mostly, there’s my family and all the friends who have been there. I miss them. I miss sitting at one another’s houses or running to a pool to avoid the overly hot sun. I miss being there to see their children grow and not just on facebook.

My youngest nephew almost brought me to tears tonight…

Josh: Did you use to live here?

Me: I did, 5 years ago I lived here.

Josh: Why did you leave?

Me: I needed to get out, I don’t like it here

Josh: I wish you would move back.

Me: Why’s that?

Josh: Cause I like those friends of yours (Refering to my friend Ashley and her sister Taylor) (good moment gone!)

Me: Oh, only for them? You like them better than me?

Josh: No, I like you more than them… but Taylor was fun. Will you ever move back?

Me: I don't know.

I got to see Jeremiah in his earlier years, and now I feel like I’m missing out on Joshes life. At least this time he remembers who I am. I miss my sense of family, and I’ve spent so many years running away from everything that it truly makes you realize how alone I feel now that I’ve gone away. But, everyone has to do things on their own terms right?

Last summer I broke bonds and severed ties…. This summer I mended some of those bonds and I feel so much better now. I’m happy with my life, I just wish the people I adored so much didn’t live so far away. I miss them. And now I have more people to miss.

Life is funny sometimes.

Black velvet with that slow southern style

I have always loved coming back to the place where my mother grew up. It gave me a sense of peace and connection.

Specifically I enjoy driving random roads and imagining that my mother once drove down these roads. I think about what life must have been like for her when she was a teenager and where she must have gone. I drive by specific places that have been land marked in stories and pointed out and I can see her face. I can hear her laugh, but then I also see her pain. I feel it.

I try to think how drastically things have changed in the ways that every time I visit Tucson, something has been built up, added or destroyed. Or perhaps the only change is that the shops now house things with a Spanish and Mexican flair.

I just know that when I’m here, I don’t feel so rejected or alone. I feel… home.

I need your grace to remind me to find my own

My dad is paranoid schizophrenic.

I’ve known all my life that there was something wrong with him, but I always thought it was the drugs. And since no one in my family could give me answers on what it meant to be schizophrenic I did my own research by way of many psychology books. For a long time I feared the genetic pass down of the disease and even still do. I was always afraid that I would be crazy, crazy like my father. And that scared me so much. It made me cry myself to sleep many nights. Everyone looked at me differently, my father didn’t have money, but he remembered what was important.

When I was 16, I found a card amongst my mom’s personal papers that my father had given me. In it said “To my baby girl, Here are two pairs of tights, so you can wear some outside and for fun and some for dressing up to go to church with your siblings.” He knew I loved tights and he also knew I was a pig pen and loved playing in the mud and outside. It was something so simple and yet, it caught my heart. The language isn’t big, and I probably couldn’t even read at the time, but I could hear his voice telling me this, like he always does, like he would when I would come over in my late teens with a new tattoo. He’d semi scold me and then show me the sparrow and sun on his arm and tell me when he got it. He always tells me the same stories, just like he always used to point out my tight obsession. But hey, a girl got to have some clothing they like? Because as I hear it most of my life from birth to 4-years-old was spent naked.

I remember watching I am Sam in the basement of my friend’s house and there was a part in the movie where I just burst into tears. The movie hit me hard as a child who struggles with a parent with a mental disability. In the movie Lucy (the daughter) is reading a book to her father, but she refuses to read the word. And Sam, her father knows she can read it, the dialogue goes as so:

Lucy: I won't read the word!
Sam: I'm your father and I'm telling you to read the word. Cause I can tell you to because I'm your father.
Lucy: I'm stupid.
Sam: You are not stupid!
Lucy: Yes, I am.
Sam: No, you are not stupid 'cause you can read that word.
Lucy: I don't wanna read it if you can't.
Sam: No, because it makes me happy! It makes me happy hearing you read. Yeah, it makes me happy when you're reading.
Lucy: [Lucy reads again]

In that moment I couldn’t stop the tears from streaming down my face because I spent a good chunk of my life feeling that way. Feeling that because I was smart it was somehow a bad thing, not because anyone told me that, but rather, because I didn’t want to seem like more even though both of my parents promoted my reading and writing abilities. It still stung the emotion in the moment of this movie. Being a child scared of losing her father because she was smart. I fear that even now and I know I don’t make the effort I should to be closer to him.

I remember on my 9th birthday, my dad was wearing Kleenex boxes on his feet and completely out of his mind off his medication but he was walking down our street carrying a birthday cake for me. My mother did as much as she could to protect us from him, but sometimes she wasn’t able to foresee things like this. And in these moments I feared becoming crazy. I feared being like my father. I saw how other people treated him and how my mother talked about him with disgust. The way my family talked about him and the way people say “well you didn’t have a father in your life.” And because of this, it afflicted me. Even though my dad has the IQ of an 8th grader and he has somehow managed to be a better parent than my mother ever was. I had a father in my life who taught me compassion.

Most of my memories of my father are pleasant. They are good things that warm my heart and make me realize that crazy doesn’t mean you don’t have the ability to love. Crazy doesn’t mean you can’t be there for your child. Crazy doesn’t mean that you are any less of a person. Crazy just means you’ve got something that isn’t firing right inside your head. In his instance, it didn’t affect his ability to give me good memories. It doesn’t affect his ability to call me and see how I am doing. To tell me how proud he is. To tell me that he has the photographs I sent him taped on the wall and how he tells all his neighbors about his little girl, living in the big city (when I lived in NJ that is.) Crazy hasn’t affected his ability to make me feel lucky.

Chasing Pavements

I’m feeling the urge to run again. And maybe I’m being a bit melodramatic when I say that life seems to hit me hard when it hits me.

Arizona this summer was a bust. There were good parts to it, but mostly it was a bust. And everyone knew it would be the collapse of my relationship except m. Because being away from Daniel made me realize the things I missed about him. It renewed my sense of need for him in my life and the things we did together.

My grandma’s house being sold was a major blow for me. Watching pieces of her stuff be carted off to different people’s homes or even walking through the hallowed existence of a place I called home for so many years broke me. It hurts me now. It feels like closing her estate meant the closing of my family, everyone can say that I haven’t lost them, but it doesn’t change the fact that I feel like they’re gone from me too. My family is broken, and while it always has been I feel like even more so now. I feel detached from my siblings and worlds away because I chose to leave Arizona.

So, this whole “Jenn having a nervous breakdown.” is not because Daniel left me, but it is part of my fear of abandonment.

I fucking hate my mom. It’s easy for me to say that, but it hurts just the same. I know that she gave me life and I should appreciate it, but she only gave birth to me, she did not provide me with a life any one should have to endure. So, yeah, I have a chip on my shoulder. And my fear of abandonment is her fault. My need to run every few months because she wouldn't let us go to people who could actually care for us and provide us with stability. But no, instead kept us so she could maintain a government check... but provided the most unstable living, constantly moving.

The first time I actually completed one whole grade in the same school was in 4th grade, between Kindergarten and 3rd grade I don’t know how many schools I attended, but I know it was a lot.

And then she has the nerve to ask me to go out to lunch or dinner with her while I was in Arizona. Why would I want anything to do with her? But still it hurt for me to tell her I couldn’t have a relationship with her, because my heart so desperately wants a mother...but I know it’s just always going to be about her, and she'll break my heart again, just like she did every weekend when I was a child. She broke my heart every time she did drugs and every time she picked alcohol over us. The time she just moved to Las Vegas while we stayed at our grandma's for the weekend.
So my ability to cope with a relationship break up has seemingly been escalated because my heart just feels abandoned and all of these painful memories and hurts seem to come into the light. Memories I thought I’d extinguished. Things I thought I had overcame.

I came home to emptiness and particularly a couple losses, friendships and otherwise and I tried like hell to find something to refocus my attention. So I picked school, and I found out I’m about 3 semesters behind in school, which in the long run doesn’t seem like much, but when you’re in the position I am, it’s a lot.
I have very few friends here and when I attempt to make friends I just end up feeling like a fucking third wheel or desperate case. I fear talking because I’m just another basket case with issues. I feel like I’m placing the burden of my sadness on other people.

It takes away my breath and leaves pieces of me fragmented and lost.

And I'm in love with a guy that logically my brain says "Let it go" but my heart can't. My heart hurts, every fucking love song makes me cry, every break up song makes my heart ache, and everyone around me seems to be so happy in love and I'm here like... "I’m sorry that I'm sad, I just hurt” or I fake happiness so I don't make them feel bad because I feel bad.

And I feel like everyone is just waiting for me to fail. Like I have to keep treading this water because everyone expects me to be strong and push forward because I always have. Like a cat, I always seem to land on my feet.
I’m too sad to land on my feet. I’m too heartbroken to stay afloat. I’m too tired of fighting and I can’t figure out how move forward.

I’m stuck and I want to run from safety.

"Should I give up, Or should I just keep chasin' pavements even if it leads nowhere..."