I caught the eye of a Polish butcher this morning. Usually I stride numb past his leergruntdarling, my mind immuned by work and love and hate and oh caffeine need clench thoughts; but today i am weak. Weak because of Christmas. So i look him full face and his features turn golden and come away from the edges in surprise and then he grabs a hanfdul of raw sausages and makes fucking gestures at me.
Vicim rage and a day spent imagining scrotum slicing with a ham hook yes; but also anger at Christmas for doing this to me. For changing who I am, for making me tearful and snap mawkish and making fights with my love and taking bites from myself.
Christmas means families. It means migrating south on resisting wings to a prolonged period of my parents, of what they have become. My mother is dead to me herself god whatever; her days exist in pain and madness. 'Home' for me is thus catheters and bedsore ointments and slop feeding and massaging legs swollen like rotten logs while she either disrecognises me or rochester laughs or weeps slow maggoty tears. It is my dad's face alight with joy at seeing me and the guilt gullet twist of how gladly he salutes me as I come through the ticket barrier, his glee that of a puppy that thought himself abandoned.
And I am so angry, so angry for him. And for her, the most independent, the most battling: a single mother in the '60s, who when refused a mortgage by tweedsuits disapproving of her bastard child returned years later to pay for her house in cash. She who caught me creeping in the back door when I was 11 because I was afraid to walk past the builders (at that age I was tall was woman enough to blip on their radar) and made me parade tofro past them, 'becase no daughter of mine is going to be afraid'. She who now lives who for life years has lived able to do nothing other than survey not only the shell of her existence, but how she sucks dry that of my dad, and how she has forced the pink softness out of me.
When you train to be a Samaritan, they tell you that carers seldom kill themselves. Responsibility deters them. As my Russian granny would say, sprasping the words between the gap in her teeth (sculpted by decades of drinking her tea through a sugar lump clamped there): 'In Moskva, there was no such thing as depression. People either killed themselves, or got on with it.'
So we continue our lives. Or rather, so our lives continue. And all you 'I'm so unhappy although there's nothing really wrong but GOD the futility of existence and no one sees it but us oh and I was bullied at school' bloggers?
Fuck you.
Merry Christmas.
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