venusoppositesaturn

[venusoppositesaturn]

merry christmas, another suicide note

I’ve spent every single day since that accidental overdose wondering why I didn’t just die. I draft some iteration of a suicide note every single December, right in time for the holidays. A fucked up present for myself. The loneliness that I’m somehow accustomed to year round becomes too much to bear and then I write out all my pain in my notes app or a google document, cry for a few hours, and lie to myself that “next year will be my year” and then force myself to live another day. We’re on the 10th “next year” in a row now. But I’m always too much of a coward to do it myself. That’s why this year, the suicide note draft feels so much worse. I could have died. I almost had an out. I wouldn’t have had to write one of these fucking things. I could have just been gone. No drawn out list of embarrassing reasons to explain to people why I can’t live this way anymore, no quiet agony over how to do it and who I should task with the miserable job of finding my body, it would have been so easy. Just foam at the mouth and everything going black. A perfect end. A final fuck up for a series of fuck ups for 30 years.

Fuck. 30 years. I’ve been wasting my life for three fucking decades. I’ve been sitting around with my hands in my lap waiting for someone to save me. For some cosmic lightning strike to fix me and set me on the right path. A chorus of angels descending down to tell me that the suffering is over, and that happy days are ahead. All that sad delusional thinking has only put more dirt over my coffin, burying myself alive in a world of debt and fear and self pity. I didn’t go outside for 3 days straight this week because I didn’t have the money to make myself look passable, and I couldn’t stand the thought of anyone seeing me when I look like this. When I was little I used to squeeze my eyes shut as tight as I could, cross my fingers, and pray that when I opened them my eyes would be blue, my hair would be blonde, and I’d be beautiful. It never happened. Just like waiting for that magic moment where I’d suddenly figure out who or what I was meant to be, I never grew into anything beautiful. I only got better at hiding my hideousness and pretending it wasn’t clinging to my hunched back at all times. I spent my 20s chasing after men who wouldn’t even hold my hand when I asked, but took every part of my body over and over without guilt or shame. Men who watched me cry with twisted faces of disgust, like I was some rotten meat or defective toy. Men who went on to love and worship and respect the next woman who entered their life.

I wish I lived the life that people think I live. That I’m always out at bars or parties with a great group of friends who love and support me. Who call when I’m sick. Who show up when I need them to. Not the person who sits in her home alone with her cat and can go days without speaking to another human being face-to-face. Who almost throws up on herself in bed because she’s too sick and in pain from a migraine to do anything. Who tries to ask anyone that she can text for help, only to be met with a series of “so sorry I hope you feel better.” But I’m selfish for wanting an out? I’m selfish for being exhausted of trying everything I could to change things? I refuse to justify my existence with all the ways I did try. All the ways I tried to dig myself out of a hole that I dug into out of self-preservation. I was drowning for years and screaming for any one to come pull me out. But that’s the thing, right? No one's coming. If you’re lucky - you find someone or something to live for. You figure out how to swim. But if you don’t, you just keep taking in water. Year after year, until it’s just your eyes above the water line and you just accept it. I want to be at the acceptance stage now. I want to accept that this is over. I want to stop kicking my arms and my legs and feet in panic. Every single day since November 19th I regret not just letting those drugs hit my system with full force and doing what I have been too scared to do for a very long time. I could have opened my mouth and swallowed all the water and sunk. I love my friends and my family. I love my cat with all my heart. But I also know with as much certainty as the sun rising that my absence in their lives will not change things. I am not needed.

There is not one part of who I am that is responsible for anyone or anything. Which is all I ever wanted. I wanted to know so badly what it was like to be needed. To have a family. To be a mother. To feel safe and secure enough to live my life and plan for the future instead of trying to survive a single day. I can’t force anyone to love me. I can’t force anyone to see the value in me. I just pray that if there is another life that I can please get that chance. That I can finally feel what it’s like to not feel empty every day. To wake up with purpose. I pray that I have the strength to finally let this one go.

[venusoppositesaturn]

It makes me so fucking angry that I never sent that email back in October. That I never got to tell you how awful you are as a person without fear that I’d never hear from you or see you again. That I didn’t just leave you in the fucking dark to torture yourself with the knowledge that I would never think about you again. I let you squeeze every bit of joy and happiness and love from my body, I watched you ,in real time, discard me like a fucking juiced orange. Nothing but pulp and rind and skin. Your obsession with me turning to ice cold apathy in real time, and I let it happen. You are like a child who pours salt on a slug. Watching it melt and wither and die before your eyes with the righteousness that it deserved it because of how ugly it is. Your treatment of me made me ugly. It made me hateful and insecure. My brain is so rotted now that even worms won’t live inside it. All I can think of is you. Day after day. How I want to call you. How I want to scream at you. You picked me up and put me down so many times and I let it happen because I am so fucking starved for affection that even now, after all you have done to me, my hatred of you is at war with my love for you. I only wish that I knew what it meant to feel real love so I can bleach every stain you have left on my body and soul away for good. I write how much I miss you in my journal nearly every day as if you actually brought something to my life other than anxiety and self doubt and shame. I am haunted by the ghosts of women I have never even met. Women who will experience all of your affection and attention at once, just the way I did. I think of all of it in such excruciating detail. How much kinder you are to them because they are prettier than me, smarter than me, more successful than me. That you would never even dream of leaving them on the side of the street at 8 AM in the cold because you couldn’t spare the extra 15 minutes on your morning commute. How you’d make sure they’d get home safely instead of expecting them to walk 2.5 miles home in the freezing dark because they live “out of the way” and surely not because you informed them beforehand of that. I feel so much guilt for co-signing that behavior. For loading the gun with you over and over again to shoot it straight at my face with such gross mistreatment. I should have known better, right? In the last hours of being near you, all I wanted was someone to make me feel less scared. I never asked anything from you but kindness. To get you to try and understand me the way I tried so hard to understand you. You couldn’t even give me that. You got everything you ever wanted from me and it still wasn’t enough. I was grieving not just for the loss of another member of my family, but for whatever shred of interest in me you had left. I tried so hard to push through it but the months of abuse just kept rising to the surface. It wasn't fucking fair that you got to move on and be happy after everything you've done to me. The House always winning. But the punishment truly did not fit the crime. I pray every day that you die. That I don’t have to think about you out in the world living guiltless and happy. Knowing that you feel truly vindicated for leaving me on that sidewalk. That I am just some attention-seeking head case who thrives on conflict. Not someone who had the misfortune of loving you and being treated like a dog for it. 

[venusoppositesaturn]

There has never been a single apology you have given

That justified all the pain and destruction you caused in my life

All the nights spent crying and drowning myself in a pool of self pity and hatred and loneliness

To get rushed emails full of typos and half truths and excuses

Yet I always fell into your arms with hardly any hesitation

As if I had not bled onto my keyboard trying to get you to understand me just hours before

Typing line after line of vivid details of the abuse that I suffered at your hands

Reliving it all only to get the same canned responses

Like a sitcom laugh track

Getting louder and louder every time I settled for empty promises

Messages that should have fallen into the void and taken you with them.

[venusoppositesaturn]

untitled 12/16

I’m starting to feel like I’m getting close to the end. This seemingly endless quest to find ‘God’ 

Whatever ‘God’ could possibly be to me. 

I think ‘God’ was just feeling safe. I think that’s all I have ever sought out. Beyond the sick obsession with needing to be beautiful, rich, happy, or in love. I think under all of those layers I just so badly wanted to feel safe. Knowing that I could wake up in a home that wouldn’t be ripped away from me. That I could go through my day and if anything went wrong, my life wouldn’t change drastically. That I wouldn’t have to spend my nights in fear. Instead of counting all of the ways my life could go wrong, I could finally count fucking sheep. 

And I fucking tried. 

I feel like I have been standing outside a locked house for my entire life. From the window, I can see everything I have ever wanted. The walls are covered in so many items and memories I had to throw away because I never had the space for them or the funds. Furnished with pieces that I could only imagine owning in my dreams, knowing that I could never bother investing in such things because I would have to suffer the pain of losing them - the next time things fell apart. The house is sturdy. Unmoving. Always constant. Unaffected by the screaming chaos right outside the door. 

My fingers are raw and bloody, my bones ache, and my voice is gone. Every attempt to get inside the house ends in failure. No amount of therapy, yoga, hard work, or effort has ever brought me a key. With every attempt, a new spectator at the window - celebrating new wounds. “You always land on your feet,” they say. As if this inherent compulsion for survival is something to be celebrated, instead of seen as a life gone terribly wrong. Rotten at the core. They have already found a way inside the house. They have found their own room. Their ‘God.’ 

I wish I could say that having an acute sense of survival is something to celebrate. But it has not brought me any closer to ‘God.’ It has only dragged me closer to hell. I have made the mistake of trying to find ‘God’ in others - only to be ripped apart piece by piece until there is nothing left of me. I deliberately exploit myself with the hope that it will earn me a key inside the house. It never does. I am always told that I ask for too much. That the key, ‘God’, the house - it’s all too much. Finding comfort in verbal reassurance - too much. A loving gesture in the form of $5 flowers - too much. The simple intimacy of holding hands in public - too much. Hell is being taught that you are worth nothing but your body parts - knowing that soon even that will be worthless. 

I think something has shifted. Too many hands have passed over my body. Too many cycles have repeated the same lesson over and over: you will never earn entry to the house. You will never find ‘God.’ 

My life had been propelled forward by my fear of dying. I never stopped to consider that dying was the kindest thing I could have ever done for myself. 

I wonder if this is how my dad felt when he found out his cancer was terminal. Suddenly all the prayers, Sunday masses, and healthy lifestyle changes must have felt so fucking futile. So fucking pointless. Knowing you cannot control anything. The disease will spread and take you soon. 

What is the point of fighting when you know how it’s going to end? What’s the point of constant suffering and pain when you have tried everything you could to change things? 

For the people inside the house? The ones who have found their ‘God’? 

They will shuffle the state of the house for a bit. The paint might change, and the furniture might be replaced, but they will always be inside the house. Safe. 

The dull ache that comes with the passage of time from grief is so much kinder than the fucking oozing wound of living a life you don’t want to live. 

[venusoppositesaturn]

two way mirror. 10/27

I remember screaming at my mother until my chest caved in. “LISTEN TO ME. PLEASE. LISTEN. LISTEN. LISTEN” as if I was trapped behind some two-way mirror and she could not hear me, sitting on the TV room couch reading her book and feigning indifference. I could not tell you how many times this happened. Over things that could have had an incredible amount of significance or been something so inconsequential, so small. But the feeling was always the same. Please don’t leave me here. Please don’t let me die with my fear and my pain. Please don’t leave me alone. Please. See me. 

I didn’t realize then how that feeling would eat away at me for the rest of my life. Either figuratively or literally, screaming at people that I thought loved so deeply to see me. Watching them feign that same indifference as I carved away at myself limb from limb - hoping that at one point they would meet my gaze and understand. They would see how close I was to being swallowed whole by my emptiness and give me what I so desperately searched for. Love. Real love. Not the kind that ends when they tire of my body or my stories or my stormy moods. Not the love that comes with punishment. Not the love that ends in that deafening, silent, apathy.

I always used to proudly state that I have never been in love. That if I had, it was when I was 15 - with my first boyfriend. How in every man since I have chased that high of being awake at 4 am, talking about everything and nothing at all, and feeling like I had finally understood the world. But I’m not sure that I could even call that love. I think, deep down, that I am only capable of loving the idea of a person. The moment they turn to give me everything I ask for - that fear of being lost in the world is gone, and I am suddenly bored. Empty.

I dream of being excited to wake up next to someone. To start our days dancing in a kitchen and end them on the couch in comfortable silence. But that pit in my stomach is so large, so overwhelming. A fucking black hole that sucks up every good decision and turns every impulse into a race for survival. 

“Can I trust you?”

“I need to hurt you before you hurt me.”

“I don’t have the strength to let another person go.”  

I want to know what it’s like to love someone who doesn’t need the weight of my absence to figure out how much I meant to them. Someone that loves me louder than the voices in my head that tell me when it’s time to run, or when to blow it all up.

I know that there is truth to loving yourself before you can effectively love someone else. I have experienced that first-hand. But as I peel back the layers of my skin and expose every part that needs to be fixed, the parts that scream at me the way I screamed at my mother - I can’t help but feel that empty pit. As I slowly build myself up - raise myself and love myself the way a child should be loved and cared for - that tightness in my throat still has a hold on me. The thought that I am building myself up for nothing. That I am too far gone. That I was never made to be anything but a lesson to men who will go on to be the person I needed them to be for someone else.

I want to love myself the way I dream of being loved. I want to wake up excited to spend the day with myself. I want to sit in comfortable silence with me. I want to see myself. I want to listen. I want to understand.

[venusoppositesaturn]

7/6/22

“i just don’t think i could ever love you”

“i don’t know how”

they say

as if love is a choice

but i know

i know

that love is a disease

and it grows

and it grows

until your eyes are swollen

and your head hurts

and your skin is hot

and you don’t think

you’ll ever see the sun again

because the love you had for them

burnt a hole inside your heart

only to be discarded 

like the rotting flesh that you are

waiting for the next man

to reanimate your corpse

[venusoppositesaturn]

4/3/22

i keep getting lost in you

the feeling of walking on the sun

and then sleeping on a freezing moon

do we feel the same things?

i said 

“i want to know what it feels like to be really loved by you”

and you said

“i know”

loving you is like walking in mist

sometimes warm and real

but always just out of grasp

is it just my skin you need?

i don’t want to be the void you fill

i want to be someone

anyone

to you

[venusoppositesaturn]

2/18/22

i never wanted the white picket fence. 

or the dog. 

i just wanted you to look at me,

the way I look at you. 

you measure my worth by the grooves of my skin.

the scars from my childhood,

that make you feel pity.

unfit to bear fruit.

just a beautiful face in a cracked mirror.

good enough to use,

but too broken to keep.

[venusoppositesaturn]

04/3/2020

I have never known warmth I have never felt a gentle hand Or skin against mine I have only known freezing indifference That love comes with conditions That selflessness is not free I have never been held Or kissed Or loved fully I am a transaction Expensive and expired I wonder what it is like to be loved back

[venusoppositesaturn]

12/24/2019

I know I’m still in your phone. A trapped piece of myself. A bad dream. I’m a trophy. One that you get as a child that you let rot on the shelf. A pat on the back for participating. So when the next girl asks about me you can show her with disappointment, “you’re much better looking than she is.” Like a modern teddy roosevelt, you mount the heads of ex lovers to your digital wall. I may have burned the earth of your existence but you will never get rid of me.

[venusoppositesaturn]

12/7/2019

We sit in steel The lights are too bright and burn my eyes I don’t look at you, my nose is red and running and numb I am hiding my face because I feel I’m not good enough I listen to you tell me that the love I have is a lie And that I “deserve more” Just like everyone else Insisting that fairy tales aren’t real “Save yourself” But I don’t need to be saved Your room is too warm The air is still like a casket I fuck you because I feel like I need to Insecure about the smell of my body and the spots on my skin You even turn the light off As if we both somehow know you’re physically superior to me You trace my spine feigning some form of intimacy “How big am I compared to the others” I give a less than honest answer to be kind, knowing that almost all my lovers never fit. “Where do I rank then compared to the others” You are not as kind “Don’t have any expectations with me” You say before you pull me down on you The sex is painful performance art My whole body covered in sweat from the pain Hours of cocaine and liquor threaten to rise to the surface Eventually you cum and there is release in more ways than one The smell in my nose is acrid and the pain in my throat feels like sand I am dizzy and cold and dead I needed this I think In the morning I leave without a word Knowing that you will not notice That no one will notice The hole in my heart continues to open “No new messages” I don’t need to save myself because there is no point in being saved

[venusoppositesaturn]

2/14/2019

the only men that have ever broken my heart are the men who became ghosts

how can you heal if you can never tell someone how you felt when they left