Medicine Bottle Blues

I wrote this some months ago during a venting moment. I’ve considered not posting it because the writing process was enough to get some of it out of my system but… I feel that if I don’t set it free into the universe the writing thereof won’t mean quite as much as I need it to. Maybe this will show others they’re not entirely alone.

Warning: Mentions of child abuse, drinking, bad thoughts, and manic depression.

~

I sat alone in a place that, until a week before, I’d so easily been able to call my home. A week ago,… things were different and yet so much of it was the same. Perhaps that’s why it hurt the way it did when I watched her walk out the door like she had so many nights before.

It was still early December, just a few short days after my 15th birthday… and the incident.

She’d shouted at me many times before. With reason and without. She’d backed me into corners, verbally pinned me to the wall. She had threatened and roared. She’d walk out left me to my own devices time and time again. She had even pulled my hair once.

None of it had been beyond normal in my perspective until the day she crossed some invisible line that I didn’t even know existed until it was already torn asunder.

Reacting badly to the booze in her system and all the people in our house, having used my birthday party as an excuse to invite all her little buddies over, she was manic. Flipping quickly between cheerful and cheerfully angry as easily as one flips a coin she managed to leave me alone until I drew attention to her by pausing the movie during one of her tirades.

Never before had I called her out. Sure, I’d held school protests, told an ex-step-father off, and even stuck to my opinion despite the ass kicking it granted me from several other girls in my class. That’s all easy stuff. Never before had I stood against her.

Just as I’d never called her out before- she’d never backed me into a corner in front of other before, proving just how far gone she was. Never had she grabbed at me quite like that, a bony hand clasping hard enough to hurt. Some will say she never did it. Others will say she merely held my chin. More still will say for that one moment she held me by my throat.

She shouted things I still can’t remember. Whatever had upset her was pointless and as quickly as it began it ended with her hand back in her pocket. She turned to my friends, cheerfully telling them that this happened every full moon- as if absolutely nothing about that comment was strange, and I pressed the play button for the nearly forgotten movie. I didn’t move from my spot for the rest of the night.

That was nearly a week ago.

I sat there in my too silent house, alone as I had been so many times before and wept freely. Sobbing until I was nothing more than a spasming mess on the floor. No one could hear me. No one ever did and that realization on it’s own was enough to force something unknown to rise up in me. Months later I would learn to call it betrayal but until then I would know it as an increasingly familiar hole eating me from the inside out.

I laid on the living room floor long after the tears had stopped. I had no desire to move, it was only eleven after all and she wouldn’t be back till three- if she came back at all. I’d left the television and radio off even though they were my usual and ever constant companions when she was gone. I needed the noise because the silence scared me. It had ever since she’d been awarded custody of me. The foster homes were loud and raucous to the point of another side of fear but with her… there was this sense of nothingness as potent as seeing the sun after years locked away in a darkened room.

It hurt me.

Even still- I didn’t turn my companions on. I didn’t want the false something.

I wanted… something else. Something I had no name for. There were so many of those then and later I would learn they had so many names and variations… What I wanted was comfort. I wanted to cry and be heard. I wanted to scream and be asked why? I wanted to be told what it was inside of me that I had no way of expressing.

I wanted to be with another person, any person. They could scream at me, drunkenly tell me I was a bad kid or just plain hurt me. It didn’t matter so long as they didn’t leave me alone.

Another hour passed before I finally pulled myself up off the floor. My hip hurt from laying there so long in combination with the winter chill rolling through the house. Cold air didn’t tend to be too kind on my little body ever since a group of girls had chased me down, one of them knocking me off my bike and onto the pavement. Long story short I had more than a few hip and back problems.

There was a bottle of Tylenol sitting in front of me on the counter and as I looked at it thoughts of reducing said pain flew out the window to be replace by another, slipperier sort of idea.

If I took them all how long would I sleep? When I woke up would this feeling be gone?

It was the first time I’d thought something like that and it both frightened and intrigued me far too much for my own good. By both nature and nurture I’d resented everything about pills ever since I was little, having had far too many of them forced on me at such a tender age. I knew they could kill me, they almost had once upon a time, but I didn’t need to take that many… just enough to find the comfort of darkness and yet another scar upon my soul.

It seemed like a great idea at the time.

Until I realized there was no one around to open the bottle for me.

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