Something to Think About

I was sixteen.

I was sixteen and I didn't know what I wanted.

I sat in a church listening to people pray to a god that I didn't know if I believed in anymore. In passing conversation, someone had recently questioned the reason for organized religion, and I was beginning to question it too.

These people sit here and read from the same papers and say the same things and it's the same stories over and over again, every single year. How can they all possibly believe in the exact same thing? It's like pop culture, I guess. I gets popular, and maybe it's not popular anymore, but it's still there, and there's still a fan club.

I would like to tell my mother that I don't know if I believe in the same things she does, but I don't know if she'd understand.

There's a weird relationship between her and I. We have our moments, complaining about him, and her, and her, and just complaining about a lot of things, really. But I don't know if we look at things the same. Sometimes I feel like she hates me, and she hates it here, and sometimes she tells me so. And I cry, and she cries, but we get over it, and she's still there when I wake up, even if she's still mad and both our eyes are swollen. But I feel like she's somewhere else. She always talks about how she could die any second, and we'd be lost without her, and she's so old, and her back is aching and she's tired. And I get that. But it's depressing. She lives like she's getting it over with. Before she had some reason to doing things, and she still has some, but she goes back on her word now, spending on things we don't need, talking about how she's on a schedule, but never getting to know mine. I tell her every day, and sometimes I forget too, and I when I remember to tell her, she gets mad. She says that she's always working on my schedule, and she has better things to do and get done.

I don't like being around her when she gets like this. It makes me mad, and I have to leave. I'm not so nice to be around when I'm mad, and sometimes I wish I didn't have to be around me, either.

When I used to get mad, I would break things. Everything. Rip it apart, tear it down, bite it, stab it, you name it. Nowadays I get quiet, and really, really depressed. I still cry an awful lot, not as much as I used to, but more than anyone ever should. After one competition I sat by the closet and sat, and sat, and sat, and people walked by, but I never stopped staring at nothing. People asked me if I was okay, and I honestly didn't know if I was. That one jerk of a guy even came by and asked
"Gorgeous, what's wrong?"
and I couldn't even answer because I didn't know. Everything was wrong. I could think of anything really, and I didn't want to think. It was the kind of thing where you sit there and you drown in your thoughts to the point where you're up to your eyeballs in it and you don't even know what's going on anymore.

But then Willie gave me his hand and pulled me up and gave me a hug. And he told me that it's okay because even if things are awful now and they stay awful for a while, that it can't stay awful forever because we only know it's bad because there are better things out there. And he told me
"It gets better"
and he laughed and said he didn't mean it that way, and I laughed because I knew exactly what he meant.

And it took just that to pull me out of that shit I was in, that hand to save me from drowning, and I had that kind of moment where you laugh and cry at the same time because you're still alive.

And it was funny.