This glowing point of my cancer stick is my glimmer of hope.
I've been looking forward to it since four o'clock this afternoon.
Somehow the rush isn't the reward, though. I've gone longer sans my nicotine.
It's the fact that I must be alone if I'm smoking it. Alone, or with people - but nonadem famileeeeeeeee...
My uncle has beautiful children. And he is a beautiful man, though how he went from brilliant wayward child to the kind of engineer who designs walls for a living, is a little cloudy to me.
Only it's not, really. Nevermind.
I like watching him with his two girls crowded about him. Then they chased me out to the street to catch their frisbee and we played tag in the sand in the park and they climbed the GIANT spiderweb and stomach crumbling, we sat down to eat.
I think I know why whenever I think of a place to go for dinner, I never yearn for steak.
I have nothing against a huge slab of bloodied meat, it means nothing.
But the fact that whenever the "family" gets together for dinner - it's always t-bone, spiced precisely the same way, grilled steak...
I guess it's the sumbol for the wealth they came to find in Canada.
For me, I guess I've just never really had a good steak, or the opportunity to build a craving for it.
At the dinner table, dressed in yesterday's pretty blouse and a tie I stole from John's closet (they took it admirably well), I tried to participate in something. ANything. Just talk...
But it seems that since my furious teenage years have slowly ebbed, I'm the wallflower again. CHildren should be seen but not...
I saw that in my father on the drive over. Sitting in the passenger seat, a frail, old, wheezing man (halfway to 70 now), he looked so left out.
Maybe I get it from him. Maybe we both got it from the way the family works, unable to listen. Either way it explains to a point part of thw great WHY AM I DIFFERENT?
Maybe I'm whining. Everyone's different, unless they've spent their time trying as best they could to Fit In.
But I just wanted to be able to share something with... I don't know. With the people that gave me this insecurity that I can never, ever, show the world.
Instead, I snuck away from the table and back to the book I had thought to bring, curling up in a chair, unnoticed for an hour just like before I ever hit teenager.
It's clear that so much of my anger was a cry for attention, but...
The screaming that happenned after my mother ordered me to put down my book... I guess I wasn't the only one acting irrationally then, either.
But I put down my book, when she called me rude names, accusing me of ignoring my Family.
I gritted my teeth and put all thoughts of self and soul and everything about me aside, and looked at her.
She figured it would be a good time to chastise me for reading the book.
"But I'm not reading now."
"You just always know everything, don't you?!?"
Anyway.
I'm home, demoralized, slightly ill from red meat gone that disconcerting shade of overcooked grey, but free of scars.
The nic fit is over, and I didn't stain John's tie.
And they're my family alright, but there's something I can't explain weighing me down.
People have had crueler parents than I. People have had more understanding parents than I.
There will always be a generation gap, no matter how understanding a parent I ever try to be...
But if family is so great a part of us, what does that say about me? These too-familiar strangers who take and take and take and give nothing but criticism, patronizing glares, and snide comments about how I don't know anything, I'm too young.
ANd yet every time my father pontificates... He tells me about the computer world. He tells me about Bill Gates The Hero. He tells me things about over-sung media icons, dead and resurrected on the learning channel.
He knows all the truths... And I'm misled.
SOmetimes I get that arrogant too.
Now I just wonder if I was born an ugly duckling, or if they are seriously losing it with age. Losing grasp of rationality as the pressures of age set in.
No wonder I was so damned smart as a kid, eh? I wasn't worrying about my mortgage yet.
HAH.
CHOM-boy called during dinner and I somehow managed to ask him why a strapping young lad like him hadn't found a girlfried to be all lovey with for the summer.
I think he got the hint, it was quite obvious that I didn't mean me. I'm not the "dating kind".
No man will ever enslave my heart again, and woman will only manage to soften the lines around my eyes, but never...
Nevermind. My family is too fucked up to mesh with the world, and I'm caught in the middle, overlooking the battlefield from the small hut I built on the back of my hill.
I am fighting to make a difference, because I know I will always be different, and this way...
It's okay to be alone.
Heroes are supposed to be alone, and all I ever wanted was to be the hero who saves the faerie princess, right?
Then why am I so damnably tired.
Oh, nevermind the melodrama. I'll be the wild dancer come morning.
As usual.