Don’t call me Bukowski, but I’m pretty poetic…

I can’t recall the name or the face of the person that once told me that everything is symbolism. I can only recall my reaction–no, that’s not correct. Everything can’t just be a sign and people aren’t meant to be treated as literary devices. Not everything has an answer, but that’s something all of my math teachers argued against. In any case, if everything was a symbol, weren’t there supposed to be extra brilliant analysts to figure out what it all means?

I cry a lot and often and I often wonder if it’s just a cocktail of imbalanced teenager hormones or if I have a reason. I often wish the answer was the latter. I can never figure out the reason because once my legs hit the tile floor of my bathroom, all of my emotions spew out of my body like a superhuman force crashing onto my very being. I often wonder where I’ll sit when I want to cry after I move out of this house.

In the dawn of my junior year in high school, I began to explore (if you will) self-destruction. Not on a grand scale per say, because there were no knives or lighters involved, but in this, I found my nails to be a grand symbol of release on my thighs until I would stop crying. I felt good after I clawed out of my emotions; relieved, almost. But the relief wouldn’t last long, and I developed a habit that would occur once every two weeks. My thighs were clawed and pinched pretty badly, but no one saw because it was winter and I wore long pants. I stopped self-harming and I started to gain weight which made me want to self-harm even more. I think my mother noticed that cobwebs started to build around my smile when she sat me down and told me she’s concerned. It meant the world to me.

I wish I could give everything to my mother–a woman who wasn’t afraid of rebellion as profoundly as I am when she was in my shoes. Perhaps she scared it out of me. Twenty-two is a number on a grand-scale for my mother. So is nineteen. The two aforementioned numbers symbolize years: the years she spent trying to rebuild something that was never built anyway. My father left home when we weren’t even there. He took everything–clothes, hearts, respect. And even with those, he still had nothing left but was too prideful to even admit it. And maybe, yes, he was in love with another woman and I wish my mother never excused that. And I wish so selfishly that The crumbles that were left of her didn’t lie in my hands, and this is why I’d give it all to her.

Also in the dawn of my junior year in high school, what was left of my heart screamed that I wasn’t born to hold a syringe or watch people crumble. The medical field is a stone-cold trap; more-so than high school is, and I was too grey to look at people who wanted to spend their lives in a false society. But in retrospect, I always wrote–since I can remember; even if it was about stupid crushes in the sixth grade or dark early-prose about how much I think my father really hates me, writing was always something I held dearly. I told my mother I wasn’t going to be a shiny doctor and that I’m sorry and I think she held me tighter than my tile floor that night when I cried about my future and this is why I’d give my mother everything.

My mother met a new man who promised her the world.
I met a boy who promised me coffee dates.
They got engaged.
I met the boy’s family.
We met the man and we loved him–my brother especially, because I’ll bet he’d always see the dads on TV that help their kids pitch a baseball and my brother loved the idea.
The boy broke up with me on New Year’s. Something about depression and unfairness–a battle I was willing to fight. He wasn’t. I cried on a chair that crumbles often in my back yard. My mother and that chair have a lot in common. She held me. Said, “don’t let boys hurt you, baby, you have such a big heart” and I hear this line often replaying in my head when I think that boys will hurt me as much as my mother’s twenty-two-year-long relationship hurt her.
My mom and that man orbited each other; he’d go wherever she did, and vice-versa. I can always tell my mother cares for someone when she feeds them. She fed him so much passion and love and she fed him her whole soul and that’s why I would give everything to my mother. I often glamorize the way she takes a puff from a cigarette and blows it out like she’s blowing out her worries and maybe cigarettes are dangerous, but so are men’s words.

My father and I didn’t exist after everything he had done seemed purposeful. No “happy birthday” was my favorite act of hatred from him. I found journal entries from four years before that expressed the feelings I was living: “I think my dad fucking hates me” is what I said. I was in the seventh grade and I was writing metaphors with language more vulgar than R-rated movies. I prayed that my journal would never be found. My father lived under a similar roof as I did. The only conversations he craved from me were the ones that involved less than twenty words or the ones where he’d yell because I was a bother. I knew I was, which is why his leaving was the most profound symbol of drowning. My brother asked me one night when our mother was going to leave. I told his tear-stained cheeks that she’ll never, never leave and that when he grows up, he has to give her everything.

Because she is everything.

And yes, I still think about that boy. I don’t know why I do and I don’t call it love because every time I want to, the voices of all of the older women that have advised me “you’re too young to be in love” echo in my brain. That’s why it wasn’t love. I was, I am too young. Too immature for love, I suppose. And for what it’s worth, seven months passing made me grow more than I ever did and my mother’s wide eyes always either look at me with anger or pride or both because I cry a lot and often about college and life. She holds me, still, even when I am an idiot. That’s why I want to give her everything.

I often feel like everything I was meant to feel, I have felt, and now all the feelings that strike me are recycled from the first time I felt them. This makes me weary, but I don’t want to destroy myself anymore and sometimes I wonder why I ever did. I cry a lot and often, still. Sometimes after I eat and I think of the years to come, I want to vomit. I’d rather be hungry. And even though my mother thinks that people are so easy to walk out of one’s life, my immature soul disagrees. Moons will never stop orbiting planets, until the sun explodes. I wish she’d understand that symbol.

The words that rolled off of the nameless, faceless person’s tongue about symbols were true, indeed. I look down at my hands a lot when I cry and it looks like I have ten fingers on one hand, because hands are not a symbol of relief; they are a symbol of capability–good or bad or ugly or powerful are in the beholder’s soul. Eyes are a symbol of utter drainage, I have discovered because it doesn’t matter if you’re extremely sad or extremely happy. Eyes always cry either way. Bodies are a symbol of systematic, complicated jumbles of organs, and blood, and chemicals and they’re symbols of defeat because at the end of the night, if you’re using your eyes to cry, you’re defeating your body so strongly. Dreams are a symbol of “go start your life, kid” whether you’re seven or seventy.
Maybe I should learn to walk away when my feelings are tangled in the straps of my bra, and boys use pretty words to acquire symbols of lust.
Maybe I should learn to walk away when smiles mean cheap orange lipstick.
Maybe I should learn to walk away in general, and not break hearts.
And hearts aren’t a symbol of lust or love, but a symbol of power because hearts can give a person everything while still taking away absolutely anything.

I want to give my mother everything.