Bitchfaces, how y’all? Happy Sunday morning, or Saturday night, depending on how your day is set up. Sure glad to see y’all.
I’m pretty in my feelings tonight. My favorite cousin is in town with his girl, and I was having a talk with my cousins bestie a couple of nights ago. They’ve been friends since they were in diapers, boy is family, so we talk like family. They’re boys, clowns, children, so it surprised the hell out of me when his bestie said, “Apes, you’re a good woman, you ever think you just need someone there who understands you a little bit?”
Never mind the Apes part, my daddy and them, for some reason they think that’s a fucking nickname. Do I think someone who understands me exists? Oh, fuck yes, for certain. There’s a least 10, 15 of y’all out there. This I’m so sure of.
Do I think I need someone here for that explicit purpose? Nah. I got this shit. I got me, and I got y’all too.
They asked me, “you made it out, you’re good. How long are you gonna keep going back into it to save someone else? You can’t move forward.”
As long as I have to, and this feels like forward. I mean.
Yea, they’re right, they know what I’m doing over here. I should be better. I should move forward with life, forget about what happened, be something else, be presentable. Be some regular ass broad, able to talk to people about regular ass shit, maybe have a life. A relationship, shit, I don’t know, something more than just railing against what really amounts to something broken in me.
But, man, I got this list. I told myself that once I get this list done, I’ll let it go. I’ll go on and try to forget Puffin bringing me back from the brink, with all the black around the edges of my vision drawing in on me. I’ll forget the way that Bunny Girl screamed about her bunnies being dead, her son’s father at the bathroom door with a gun.
While I’m at it, I’m not gonna worry about that pregnant wife of a cop who I’ve gone for twice now, and she’s back again, and he’s beating her again. Pretty soon that baby will be here. I won’t worry about that either.
I’ll close the file on the wife of thirty years who I firmly believe is gonna be a headline one day. Guess while I’m filing, we can go ahead and file away that wife in South Carolina I only hear from once or twice a year, when it’s so bad she usually can’t be understood on the phone. I just sit there and listen to her cry, because leaving any kind of written trail would get her killed for sure.
I’m sure they’ll be just fine. Maybe they’ll be like me, and some switch will flip in them one day, and they’ll become some caped bitch hellbent on revenge. Or maybe they’ll end up like my friend Vaughn’s cousin, stabbed over 100 times by the father of her child in a fucking storage unit, in front of their baby, you know, for good measure. He just came up for parole, that reminds me, I need to get that hearing schedule so I can remember to type up some letters.
But after that, yeah, I could probably find something else to do. I could, fuck I don’t know, what do healthy and well-adjusted women do? Where would I even start to be something else?
I think it might be part of my fabric now. I think maybe this might be all I am now. I tried to remember who I was before, but it just won’t come to me.
Maybe this is all that I know now, maybe this is the only part that came back with me, when I heard that rattling ass noise and thought something was wrong with my Puffin, but it was me. That sound was me, and what breathing in sounded like after that coward ass piece of shit tried to break my fucking throat.
And, true to my own damned form, I patted the tile next to me, and put my hands on my Puffin, and let my love for my dogs bring me back. She licked my face, and laid next to me and I told her, “one day, we’re gonna be free”.
I probably could do a different version of free. Maybe I’ll try that as soon as I wrap up this list on the whiteboard. I’m going to Pinterest right now, might start a board, “Regular Ass Broad”, or some shit. Shit I’ll do when I don’t live and breathe this, because this is the only thing I found that even started to heal me.
Put that shit right next to my wedding idea board. Because if I’m going full blast fucking crazy, may as well go all in.
I’ll send y’all an invitation. Bring a jacket. Frozen hellscapes and all.
I'm kinda surprised Puffin & Tyra didn't latch onto his legs like he was a t-bone.
You just keep being you, wherever that may lead.
You are free and offering freedom to those who doubt freedom exists. You are amazing!
I’m with you in the freezing hellscape….I never expected hell to be hot anyway.