I Aten’t Dead

In the words of my beloved Granny Weatherwax, I aten’t dead.

It was a really close thing. The second job I thought I had found turned out to be bullshit and I never did manage to land another one. So I spent far too much time sitting alone in a small shed confronting the terrors of my past with no support system.

It was a living hell. And I had to walk through it alone.

The demons nearly won. That shed nearly killed me. Two years of homelessness nearly killed me.

This is why women don’t leave their husband no matter how bad life gets.

And your mother loves your father
'cause she's got nowhere to go

That’s how I wound up staying with a guy who chopped up a kitchen table with a cleaver while screaming that he was going to murder Norman. Or have his “boys” murder him.

He was a bit indecisive on who was actually going to pull the trigger. Or perhaps beat him to death. Fortunately Charles has never been good at fully formulating a plan and carrying it out.

You can have a roof over your head and still be homeless. When you’re huddled on the floor crying and someone is standing over you screaming and berating you for not doing the dishes and their justification for this is that squatters have to earn their place…that is not a home.

And that is not love

Opinions differ as to whether I truly had no place to go. It was and still is the belief of many that I should have simply come to Kansas immediately when I left Norman.

To live in a shed.

To relive in my head the unspeakable traumas that I tried so hard to escape.

To be frightened and forgotten while the last little pieces of my sanity unraveled.

To wake up screaming in the night with no one to hear me and no one who cared enough to help.

Quit your crying
Everyone has problems, you aren't special
You just need to learn to be alone
You just need to learn to find joy in your life
You just need Jesus

I’d rather be with the scary guy, thank you very much. I would rather be terrorized than patronized. I prefer the screaming to the silence.

Charles has always maintained that I was never really suicidal. He said I was choosing to act crazy to manipulate him and get his attention.

But the bad thoughts and urges didn’t go away when he cut off contact with me.

Everything just got worse.

I would cry for hours, only stopping when I arrived at work.

When I pulled out of the parking lot each night after my shift, I would have a panic attack.

I started feeling like I didn’t exist when I was off the property. Like I popped in and out of reality when I turned off of and onto the highway from the parking lot.

Every night I prayed I would die in my sleep.

Every morning I played with my knives.

At one point I resorted to granting sexual favors to an inappropriate man just to have someone to talk to. It wasn’t a positive sexual experience. He never gave any consideration to my pleasure. That was uncool.

But on the nights when the isolation was destroying me, he talked to me. A few blow jobs seemed like a small price to pay for survival.

He’s actually not that bad of a guy. He’s selfish and has trouble thinking of others, but he treated me better than Norman or Charles ever did. And in many ways the man had a measurable positive impact on my life.

It’s not like I had any feelings for him. He was a distraction from my misery. Something to make me feel real.

He served his purpose.

But ultimately a distraction wasn’t enough.

Ever since I came back to Kansas, I’ve had a pervasive fantasy about pulling out in front of an 18-wheeler when I turned onto the highway that bordered the village.

It was an idle fantasy. Right up until the day it nearly wasn’t.

Many years ago there was a television show called Angel. It was a spin-off of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. I wasn’t a huge fan of the series. The main character kind of annoyed me, but I watched most of it anyway.

There was one episode that always stuck with me, where a lawyer named Lindsey McDonald (who may or may not have been evil, he couldn’t seem to pick a side and stick with it) received a possessed human hand to replace the hand that had been chopped off in an earlier episode.

Being a possessed body part, the hand naturally had a tendency to do its own thing, regardless of what Lindsey wanted or intended.

That’s how it felt that day on the highway.

I hadn’t slept well, and I had been crying from the moment I opened my eyes that morning. I felt hollow, detached from reality, like a whisp of a soul floating through a hell I could never escape.

When I saw the truck coming in the other lane, when my left hand drifted from the bottom of the steering wheel to the top, as though I were about to make a turn, it felt as though my arm was acting of it’s own accord, making a decision my brain had long been putting off.

As the truck got closer and my arm tensed for the swerve it popped into my head that I had no way of knowing what would happen to the driver of the truck if we collided at such high speeds.

Killing myself would be sad. Killing someone else would be inexcusable.

I scared the shit out of myself.

I’ve never considered there to be a moral element to my tendencies toward self-harm. My body is my temple, the vessel for my soul, my physical manifestation on this earth to which I am entitled to do what I please.

Doing damage to the vessel of another is both immoral and reprehensible.

The incident occurred in early April. I had already put down a deposit on an apartment that would be available mid-June. I started counting the days, and then the hours, until I would finally have a real place to live.

Rather than calming me down, having an end date to focus on only served to make me more anxious. Every day the situation felt more and more unsustainable. I started having panic attacks at work. I gave serious consideration to sleeping in my car at the edge of a field somewhere, because at least it would mean freedom from the fucking shed that had always felt like a prison cell in hell.

Then one day a kind of creepy guy that I had met at work texted me to see if I wanted to rent his house. We had discussed the possibility before, but at the time he was intending to live there as well when he wasn’t travelling for work, and that wasn’t going to work for me.

This time he was asking if I wanted to rent out the whole house, no built-in part-time roommate, and I was desperate enough that I was willing to overlook the creep factor if it meant getting out of the shed sooner.

I emailed the apartment complex to see if there was any chance of getting back the deposit I had paid because I had found a place I could move into earlier.

I wasn’t optimistic about getting a refund, but the creepy guy wasn’t asking for a deposit and I was desperate enough to actually consider forfeiting the money.

Unsurprisingly, the complex manager said the deposit could not be refunded, but she asked how soon I was looking to move in. I told her I needed to move as soon as possible, and she replied that she would see what she could do to get me into a unit earlier and call me the next day.

That was the last Monday in April. True to her word, the manager called me the following day. Some people had moved out early, and the maintenance department had almost finished cleaning and doing repairs on the vacant unit. I could move in Thursday.

I knew I couldn’t really afford to move six weeks earlier than planned, but I accepted anyway. By that point money had become a trivial concern.

Thursday morning I picked up the keys. I dragged some clothes and my twin mattress from the shed up the stairs, bought a massive amount of chicken wings, and spent the evening sitting on the floor in an empty apartment binge eating and talking to my kids about the furniture we would get and which rooms would be theirs.

That was May 1st.

My folks had some furniture in storage from when my mom was in KC for her cancer treatment, and I talked some guys from work into carrying it all up the stairs to my apartment that weekend. It’s one of those buildings where each unit has an outside entrance off a balcony so there’s no elevator. But we managed to get what furniture there was up the stairs, and the place began to feel like an actual residence.

Over the past six weeks I have dumped most of my emergency fund into making the apartment feel like a home before the children get here. So far the threatened summertime slump has not come at work. If it shows up in July I’ll have to do some creative accounting to keep my head above water.

But Norman caved in and agreed to let the kids come for five weeks (half of their summer break) instead of just two, and I want them to feel comfortable and happy here.

And I got myself a bed. A real, grown-up bed of my own that I don’t have to share and that don’t hold any horrible memories of submitting myself to a truly evil man.

I sleep well in my new bed. Just being out of the village and living in town has done wonders for my mental space.

I didn’t spend much time in town with my birth mom or her husband. We mostly stayed in the village where we lived, except to go to church, which was in a different town in the opposite direction of this one.

Most of the time I spent in this town in my youth was with other teenagers, on school functions or just hanging out, as kids do.

There are no bad memories here. The demons don’t live in this town. I may not like it here, but I am safe here.

Apparently Superman lived in an ice castle he called his fortress of solitude. I’m not actually a Superman fan. I got this information from Sheldon and Penny on an episode of the Big Bang Theory.

According to Google, the fortress of solitude “is where Superman first learned about his true identity, heritage, and purpose on Earth.”

Perhaps this apartment will be my own personal Fortress of Solitude. Maybe here I will find a purpose for myself, something that brings me joy, something fulfilling.

Or maybe I’ll just spend the years that I’m going to be stuck in this town learning how to breathe freely.

Finding a home did not magically fix everything. The pain and the panic did not instantly vanish the moment I first unlocked the door.

I still hurt more than I can possibly describe with words. Dave Grohl seems pretty confident that broken hearts will mend but right now it feels like the pain will last forever.

There’s just so much of it. A bottomless wellspring of despair.

But it is so much easier to deal with the pain in a secure, comfortable space where no one has ever mistreated me, and no one ever will mistreat me. A place where I can feel safe in the knowledge that I will not be berated or belittled or devalued. No one will ice me out or scream me down.

Maybe here I will finally start to heal.

Whatever happens in the coming years, the most important thing for now is that I aten’t dead.