I had this therapist once who instilled in me the idea of \”looking positive.\” The concept was that if you put effort into how you looked and looked nice, you would feel better, feel nice. The problem with this is if you went to the trouble of spending two hours meticulously bathing, rubbing in various lotions and creams, fixing hair, attending eyebrows, carrying out four levels of dental hygeine, applying make up, accessorizing and then gussying up in some of your nicest clothes, and then think you look like a miserable sack of flaming shit, then you feel even worse for putting so much time into such a futile effort.
I have spent the past week going through this process, dressing myself in sheer stockings, flowing knee-length skirts, elegant tops, strappy-heeled shoes, and then removing the shoes within a half an hour to climb back into bed fully clothed so that I can await the return of the day when I do not see myself as a worthless piece of shit.
That day has not yet come, but tonight at eleven I made the decision to go through the process for the second time today, then to rub in an insane amount of Bio-Freeze and trounce off into the city to tell my friend what I really do not want to tell him. I am about to leave.
It is one a.m., and my past keeps catching up with me. Sometimes I feel like it is chasing me down a street where all the streetlights have been broken by street thrugs with rocks in order to enact sordid crimes in the dark. It\’s breath gets hotter on my neck and then I can feel it wrapping it\’s cold, firm fingers around my throat, throwing me to the ground and pinning me as easily as a grown man of two hundred seventy pounds would pin a child of fifty. It looks me in my eyes and I cannot bear to face it. I try to turn away and it grabs me by my jaw with its palm, then uses it\’s thick and grimey fingers to force the corners of my eyes open. No matter where I look, there is my past, looking back at me with throbbing, accusing, unrelenting eyes.
All I need to do is look forward and my past will not catch up with me. It can only grab me if I look back. But like the clichéd girl in a slasher flick, I keep looking back, and it keeps grabbing me. If I only look ahead, if I only ignore it\’s breathing on my neck and the pounding of it\’s feet on the cracked and uneven pavement, I will eventually gain enough ground that it will never touch me, never push me to the ground and rape me with it\’s eyes again. I have to keep running, and keep my eyes ahead. But I am so afraid, and I keep looking back.
