Timeline Of Being A House / Stream Of Consciousness October 23
This post contains discussions of abuse and suicide.
I’m trying to understand where I fit in with of this world. I do love it so very much—-this world. Even when it brings me sheddings and plucks my fur off and drags dead mice into the hallways of the house that is me. I think of myself as a house; I am not built like a human thing, yknow? A short timeline of my life as a house: for a very brief little while (1-4 years), I was a pink dollhouse, the kind the rich kids get for their birthdays, not the small shitty kind dad got me... I was a dollhouse for a very sad girl and she played games with me and in every single game of Family the girl ended up running away, leaving the abusive dad and the powerless mother and dog alone within me and only me, me holding them prisoner inside of my wooden lungs, the family holding me prisoner with their stupid Coraline promises. And, after the girl grew too old to play with dolls and too terrified to hold anything reminiscent of a child, someone came to take the dollhouse of me to the thrift store---then I became a hotel.
My customers did despicable things within my walls. Suffocations and violations and exterminations. You see more murder than desire as a hotel. Who would ever have imagined it? Sure you’ve got your average Joe with the suit and the briefcase full of presentation paperwork plastered with bright lines pointing down to Hell and numbers that mean Bad Things, drinking shitty black coffee in my early morning breakfast buffet and taking two muffins not just one because it’s going to be a day, damn it, and then you’ve got, say, the woman the average Joe meets at night who refuses to come back to my room with him—-back to me—-these are some of the most dangerous folk, the ones who sell their souls to appear faceless and erase their fingerprints in the memory of onlookers. But the hotel does not forget. The hotel watches the crimes for years and years until some angel ends its suffering and burns it down. Then I become an apartment, and so hey guess what it turns out that being an apartment is just a lesser form of being a dollhouse. At least when you are a dollhouse you know who is putting these stories inside of you—-you watch the little kid that owns you stick dolls in your various holes—-every possible configuration—-In and Out—-each and every time telling a different story with the movement.
Sometimes you are a family stuffed full of love love love in abundance, but most of the time you house a family that only exists to be defeated. And there is nothing you can do to help the little girl except hope she faces you towards the wall before it happens next time so that you don’t have to watch. You have no eyelids as a dollhouse; you see everything God sees. As an apartment people similarly rotate throughout your body, each time puppeting different stories into the light, but their stories are much more mundane than the families the girl dreamed up and much less violent than the hotel rooms I/you/we used to be. People live here and I guess I must be pretty nice, as far as apartments go, because people pay a pretty penny to do that but still they always rotate out eventually. My favorite residents are the families with kids because then I am a dollhouse again, even if the dollhouse is in my stomach, and temporary, ultimately intangible.
I don’t remember really when I became a mansion but I know that between being an apartment and being a mansion I was also a hospice, a domestic violence shelter, an animal hospital, and a group home for the disabled. I don’t remember being any of those things either, but I remember the destruction of these selves, how I tore them apart stringflesh by stringflesh and ate them into beauty. Eventually I stopped being separate buildings and just became an amalgamation of empty room after empty room. I am a mansion and I live here with one other person and no one else. I think it’s a little bit like being one of those haunted houses they set up during late October and sell tickets to and dismantle when the clock hits midnight on November 1. I think maybe it isn’t like being any of this and I’m being dramatic. But oh this is the truth: I have been lived in. I have been rented out. Why am I not allowed to make metaphors about it? Why am I not allowed to dress it up in pretty words? I said it: I love this world. Sure it made me a house but it’s—-it’s complicated. I love this world and it gave me so much to love. I think I lost bits of my brain when I got out of there, like I think there are fruit trees in the playground yard that are the descendants of plants fertilized with my shucked neurons, but it’s fine. At least they got to grow.
I on the other hand am trying to stop imagining my empty rooms filled with lively parties and discarded red cups and tongueswallowings in the restrooms, or rows and rows of bird cages where I have built a flock, or or or. I am told that desire is suffering. I don’t think that is true but I sure do suffer because I desire! But community is a human need, you know? I need to feel close to someone else in a platonic sense, to know deep, one-on-one friendship again—-really for the first time. How can I not? The best friend I recently stopped speaking to had checked out of our friendship years ago. I wasn’t worth trying for. I want to feel the comfort of knowing I have a friend—- need a Shawn and Gus type sitch, you know? I don’t know. I’m thinking maybe it’s time to hire another arsonist and burn down this mansion. Maybe this time around I’ll be a wildlife sanctuary. Maybe this time I’ll end up in headlines and not because I killed myself. I am not going to kill myself!!! But sometimes I feel like I am scratching at a door. I will never find the kind of connection others have if all I write about is abuse abuse, but it’s all that I really ever think about. Ya get abused enough and a beacon is embedded in you—-it telepathically sends the ABUSE ME HOW! signal out to any predators within range, tying you to the cycle for life. You just attract toxicity and you have to fight to escape it; in my romantic life I have escaped it, but friendship wise I am terrified of being hurt.
And I can’t stop writing about it, I can’t rip that beacon out of my chest. I can’t find where they’ve hidden it and I checked in every single crevice of me. I am scratching at God's door to be let in and when I walk into the party I am dressed in full goth, entirely out of place among the brightness of the others, torn apart once again by packs of vicious glares. Where is the exit? How do I get out of here? My blogging software hasn’t released an update after the internet went to shit and hell and fuck so I’m back blogging on the web now and I hate it. I can’t get out. I don’t like being on BearBlog because I obsessively check analytics and yes I know you can turn them off. I miss my personal site. I just objectively haven’t done anything besides ramble about being abused for the past 21 years. I must be a bad victim! I am the epitome of letting it define you. But how can I not? How can I not?????? I want to write more about other things now but the truth is I filter everything I do through abuse in some way. Even writing is a competition with my father, who celebrates his 9th year of being dead and having his ashes dumped into a Chic fil A trash can next month. I am nothing unless I am a thing.
But I must move on. I must stop writing about it! It’s looking like I’m pretty stuck at mansion for now so all I can do is try to fill up the rooms but it’s hard when my obsession with abuse is all I can ever focus on. Oh well.