Because being Old”er” and sick isn’t Cute
I wake up every morning at 4 am, struck with worry, wondering how on earth we are going to make it, what the fuck does a future look like?
I have been in the house for 6 weeks, completely, and I am talking almost desperately DIRT poor. Luckily we had some food assistance but that wasn’t but a few hundred dollars and there are other things that need resolving, not entirely dependent on the emptiness of my stomach. It has been incredibly hard to recover from a heart surgery with the kind of strife and starvation I have endured.
When you are young, being sick is a giant tragedy, a travesty of sorts which garners a certain level of attention. Your friends are in awe that you survived shit their parents hadn’t even gone through, stuck on the imagery that you are touching something they probably won’t have to….for another few decades, if ever. I was first struck with heart problems when I was 18, too young for most of my friends to understand the implications. That first Winter I was ill from October through most of November until February of the next year. Some of my friends reached out that Winter, having first started their college plans that Fall, while I sat threaded to a hospital gurney, unable to understand why this shit was happening to me after what was a perfectly shit childhood. Some of my friends refused to acknowledge me, which was, I thought, a perfectly reasonable reaction, though I’ll admit I was always struck by the irony that nobody realized I was the one who couldn’t leave, I was the one who had to stay, that a visit was something you could escape from in time. I hated that people worried, that my mother emphasized how hard it was for them, for her, when I was the one who couldn’t leave.
In my 20’s and into my early 30’s the people I met cared about me and tried to intervene to help in the ways that friends do. At this stage in my life the same novelty isn’t there in the people I meet. The people I meet rarely know each other…and the ones I have met in larger groups aren’t people who hang around in places beyond the singular place of the event. In the city, and I guess, near the city…social networks were tighter and circles crossed circles so it felt like connections were realer than they seem to be for me now. If I meet someone one place, it is very unlikely I will see them ever again, if not for that singular place or connection. It seemed easier there to make the circles feel tighter, more confident to hold you up. I don’t think it’s an impossibility here…I don’t. I just don’t feel it, which makes running away to be away from everyone an easier one to rationalize.
When you get older, sickness is, I guess, an expectation, or maybe you all are used to and bored with me and all this shit. This time there were not the funny visits from my friends in NY to cheer me up, the messages of encouragement that helped lift me out of the expectation, again, of death. This time there was Don, and there was Barbara and there was Don. Nobody else spent a great deal of time inquiring about me nor spending any time ensuring we weren’t starving our faces off (which we did for a time)–nobody to make me feel like I mattered more than as a passing thought every once in a blue moon of the people I’ve touched. In NY I was somebody…here I am less than nobody and even still, feeling less than that a lot of the time. I know that can’t be true, but it’s hard to feel…
I have felt that flatness you feel when there is no hope, no light, no possibility you can see beyond the scope of your own misery. It hasn’t been easy dealing with the sadness pervading things because of his work situation and the fact that we cannot get anyone to talk to him beyond the first or second interview for reasons we don’t understand. It makes things a fuck of a lot harder when you are trying to pull yourself out of the hole when someone else is sitting in it already screaming to get out as well.
Today was the first day in well over a year I can say, that made me feel okay.That things might be okay. We went out to get food. I got one of my disability checks, finally, but I just wanted to go eat. In public, you know, with other people, and Don. And I got excited and I felt alive, and only a little invisible. Only a little. We have this dream, see, of getting one of those tiny houses on a flatbed or turning a bus into a sustainable house complete with solar panels and some geothermal connections to a property that has water access. To pay off insane debts responsibly with no rent nor utilities. To run my own business which I will discuss later, and have Don get into his interests, which involve a billion things. But no mortgages (we’re too old) and I need to figure out a way to retire while I am still alive and healthy and cognizant enough to feel like I am not waking up at 4 am every damn day waiting for relief. Sometimes I do ask why I keep getting saved to live such a mediocre painful experience. I am certainly not the person people will ever be able to say–she was so brave, she never complained. You know that abundance of things people say about people who are ill, how they were so brave and strong and more than their diseases, somehow. I wish I was one of those people, because really, those people are fucking superhuman.
I cannot claim I feel no right to complain, nor do I want to try and be bigger than my fucking disease. I feel like this shit has had me by the balls for so many years I am afraid of fucking everything. I am afraid of trying I am afraid of starting more things I can’t finish I am afraid of dying I am afraid of dying alone. I tried to be that amazing student overcomes 6 heart surgeries to succeed and graduate from an ivy league school. But you know what, you cannot do that alone, and you cannot do that working in any kind of serious capacity. Trying to do that full time–I am surprised I lasted as long as I did leaving with that GPA.
So all those constant dreams I had been having since I was 12 about moving back to Colorado and buying land. Then, well, I figured, fuck it, I’ll go now. I’ll just go. I am leaving nothing as nothing really had me there–my dog was dead, I was dating but not committed to staying through those Winters anymore. I wanted to avoid that Mayan prophecy shit, I’ll admit, too, but at the same time I did leave when the Winters were getting awful, well before this Snowpocalypse experience too. I originally thought I’d land here with money…but after losing close to $50,000 to Columbia and the government, and being as old as I was, and being as tired as I was. I realized I couldn’t do that anymore, I just couldn’t. I wasn’t going to be that miracle story families like to brag about, the girl with ripping arteries who got her shit together and became someone who would definitely be making more than $30k a year. I am not the girl anyone is really proud of…no. I am not that girl. Nobody brags about me, which is fine.
I am the girl who cannot get out of debt, owes money in taxes, and hasn’t had a savings account in over a decade or two. It didn’t help to having the running start straight into shit credit due to medical shit…that’s the tangible legacy I leave.
My life has remained largely devoid of much contact aside from Don and Duke. I do love them of course, but the friends and people I used to have and see all of the time are not here, and the people I have met haven’t enacted the same kinds of change that other people I know have–when I asked for help in NY–I got it, and not just one offer, but many. We’ve been out here asking for years now, and though some help has come in (thanks guys!)…it’s not the help I need to enact massive change. First there was giant rent to pay, then Don lost his job and his car and well, his hope. Then I left mine, got another and still it’s just not enough.
I suppose it’s my own fault, our own fault. Poverty is sometimes self inflicted…sometimes, I suppose. This is unfortunately a situation of people putting no value on the people who work for them, unwilling to pay them a decent wage so they can keep three of their kids in private school and three houses including one in Europe. That’s the budget shortfall resulting in Don’s dismissal. Yeah, his wife was European and demanded that, but come on people?
Marriage is a neat idea that won’t be happening in the way I always dreamt. In Colorado you can basically say, I marry you and then get a certificate issued (after the license, yes). That is all you need. The party and the dress and the simplicity I wanted isn’t over the top and cheaper than anyone else I know–but whatever. It’s not in the cards at this point….and as I said to someone earlier. 7 years is what we would both need at least to clean shit up. A very long time for someone like me who’s not done getting things repaired and is in dire need of an actual stress free existence. At this point this thing has taken half my life’s time. I want more…but quality, because more of this in quantity blows.
Land. I know where I want land and though I’m unsure of any wells, it is in a valley which provides water to a local bottling company…which is precisely the reason you probably want a well. I just want the land. I will make everything else myself. I am putting this out there, Universe, because I need some help. I need some fucking help. I need it. Beyond the word help I need hope. I need hope, pretty please.
So…on the off chance…and I am sure it’s a pretty fucking far off off chance…that any one of you have a flatbed or a bus you want to point me in the direction of anywhere near any place I could get to from Denver, Colorado…I am all about it.
Universe? CANYOUHEARMENOW?
