This Is Thirty - My Mortality - Part One

My Mortality

Edited 4/23/2017

It slept outside my front door unwilling to come in while I still had company. Despite it granting me such a courtesy, its presence was never forgotten. It taunted me, casting his elongated shadows in my foyer from under the cracks of my front door. My friends were in town celebrating my 30th birthday. A milestone that has stopped me in my tracks and has forced me to come to terms with my own mortality. It's unsettling, a 30 year old girl still in the prime of her youth, crippled by the thought of inevitable lifelessness and despair. 

I should be happy right now. But with it sitting outside my door, I knew misery awaited. While I slept that weekend, I could feel it grow at my front door step. I felt its presences more and more: minute by minute. I was surrounded by friends, but my mind was be preoccupied with the culprit that waited. 

I'm 30 now. A friend joked and said that my best years were behind me. Terrible joke, might I add. It seems like it's me against the clock now. Literally. My body won't promise me a chance at motherhood for much longer. 10 years the least. 10 years use to sound like a long time. But now I know 10 years can happen in a blink of any eye. And I've already blinked three times. 

By Sunday night, I dropped my friends off at the airport. I played BBC World News on the radio on my way back home to drown out the sound of my heater blasting. The temperature outside was below freezing… which complimented my anxiety. After arriving home, I reluctantly climbed the two stories of stairs, limping due to my right knee. I was terrified to reach my condo's doorstep, not knowing what I would find. I tried to come to terms that the culprit that sat outside my door, accepting that he would now devour me because I was finally alone. I was vulnerable, left with only my pessimistic thoughts and harsh realities. My cynical outlook on what's to come. I felt it suitable to drown in my emptiness. 

When I got to the door, the culprit wasn't there. I should have felt relief that he wasn’t waiting in the corners of the building halls. But I think that I became addicted to a certain kind of sadness. My ambivalent relief was short lived. He must have thought me to be a fool. His natural instinct to prey on the weak would not deter him from having me as his prey. I knew he had to be close by because I could still smell his odor... Like wet rags soaked in dirty mop water. He was a filthy thing that enjoyed the illusion of being clean.

As I put my key in the door, I happened to look down. That's when I realized that he slipped under the cracks and now resided inside my home.

After an entire weekend of fearing our confrontation, I realized that more so, I was fearing fear itself. Can anything be more crippling than knowing he stalked me all weekend? The anticipation was torture… confronting him head on... our first face to face encounter was now something I yearned to get over with. 

I opened the front door. My living-room was dark but the TV was still on, casting dark shadows that flashed with every change of brightness coming from the screen. In the shadows, there he laid on the floor. His eyes didn't move. His face expressionless until he cracked a sinister smile. 

“Time is ever fleeting. I can hear the thumbing of your heart... as evasive as each second”. 

His voice was like a cold knife running effortless through my spine. The hair on my arms stood to attention, the only thing on my body that was mobile while the rest of me remained paralyzed with fear.

It wasn't that long before he moved from his positioning on the floor and seeped into the air. He disintegrating from  this creature from the pits of despair to a thick smog of black smoke that infiltrated my airways the closer it moved towards me. And from my airways it filled my lungs with a stench deathly foul. 

How can I escape this demon that now lives inside of me? A question that I ask, knowing there is no answer.

Gut Feelings

*** Something I wrote after my break-up with my ex-boyfriend. I initially wrote it on 05/24/14. But I decided to post it now ***

My biggest fear use to be that I would die alone. It’s not my biggest fear anymore. I think I have accepted that this may be my future. There are no violins. This isn't a blog entry of me accepting the circumstances of my pity party, but a realization. A realization that I feel in the pit of my stomach.

When I was 12 years old, my mother became a live in nurse. She worked in Key Largo, which was about 2 hours from where we lived. She would only come home on the weekends. And she worked there until I was 18 years old. Since my brother was too young to take care of himself, my mother took him with her. When I was about 15 years old my sister moved out. There were plenty nights were I was home alone in a 4 bedroom house. I remember how scared I would get if I heard a noise, and I would just lay in my bed praying throughout the night.

During that time, I can’t remember feeling lonely. However, after college loneliness would be a feeling that I would be all too familiar with. It use to sit in my stomach, and grew as my anxiety intensified. After college, life became a mess of intensified religious practices, self-doubt and an unsatisfied desire to be accepted. Discovering. Learning. Lonely. I remember when I rented my first one bedroom apartment after moving to the DC area for my job. I would wake up in the middle of the night and have panic attacks. I was more than a thousand miles away from my family. My family that was used to growing and living life without me. And while the obvious resolution would be for me just to move back home... it’s not that simple. Distance does more than create loneliness. It also creates differences. And most of the time I am visiting I dread it. Why? That is another story all together. But after my mother died, the family fell apart.

I think back at all my relationships and wonder, will there ever be anyone that I can’t live without? Or that one person who needs me in their life? A part of me is happy for the strained relationships in my life because distance means you can’t hurt me. Distance means I am free from the burdens of socialization. I remember a conversation I had with my ex-boyfriend walking through a park. I told him that I don't feel as if any man can every truly love me. I know that sounds bad. I know how it sounds. But its how I feel. I don’t think a husband and children are in my future. I am not sure if I even want it anymore.

Some would say, your still young… you have time. Yeah, yeah. Ever since I was young I knew that I wouldn't be that girl. I wouldn't be that girl who would receive that kind of love. And all my adulthood attempts to imitate that love was forced. Because in the pit of my stomach that feeling would reemerge and it would remind me, what I am and what my life is supposed to be like. No one will ever love you. So I had to start loving myself.

There have been two good things that have come from this… I am stronger. I don’t hate myself anymore. I've accepted who I am. The second thing is that I don’t feel that fear in the pit of my stomach because I accepted that gut feeling.

Dependency is such a crippling thing. Losing yourself when you become close to someone. Someone that you can’t control. Someone that you can never truly understand.

I wish I could see the world from a surface level and have a more ingenuous outlook. But I am plagued. This may be a moment of insecurities overtaking me, but I need to be real. There are women who never get married and never have children. If this happens to me, I don't want to be miserable. I want it to liberate me.