[Mechanical Pencil Tragedy|Post It Note Glory|Permanent Marker Tattoos|Erasable Highlighter Comedy]

As much as I don’t want to, as much as I know it would suck, I really need to go visit my parents. I need an emotional recharge, or a break, or a vacation, or a spontaneous road trip, or a reality check, anything… But I won’t be able to go home until the end of March because of stage management thingys and my parents just won’t visit me.

I decided to be happy the past weekend and it worked, it really made this week bearable… even though I still can’t seem to catch a fucking break about anything. I am completely worn down and pathetic at the end of the day. And everything is weird, and everyone is being weird. I have to stop going to bars, I’m friggin’ broke. LAME.

I’ve been sick for a week now and with each morning I feel better without actually feeling better. Nevertheless, the world seems to be spinning out of control. We’re going to war with Iran, Mike Huckabee…really?, I’m terrified of what the results to the Potomac Primary are going to be, it was apparently run into your ex bf weekend, Richmond, Va has a terrible plague whipping out the city, I can’t focus on anything, I said “GO” at a time that wasn’t GO TIME during a performance (cardinal rule of stage management), the stage management department at vcu is experiencing a hostile takeover, I can’t focus on anything, my room is a mess, all I want to do all the time is lay in my bed and hug my pillow (omg, have I ever actually wanted to do anything else anyway?), I’m falling apart in my classes from getting sickkkk…. I know… I’m pathetically blabbing on in a blog in a fashion that is anti-progressive, pro-high school immaturity.

But seriously, fuck. Why is everyone not happy these days?  Why have the past three weeks been like the worst ever?

I keep telling myself to snap out of it, it isn’t like I walk around hanging my head low, being Debra Downer all day. I fight this. But really, as my best friend so awesomely reminded me today, Thursday is Valentine’s Day. And I’m sorry but no matter how much you pretend not to care, or how much you don’t actually care, Valentine’s Day sucks and so, welcome to week 4 of poop.

I’m calling that this week will suck before it even happens.

In forth grade I had 4 cousins and no siblings. I went to the same elementary school my mom went to, my best friend lived across the street and was the youngest of three girls, I rode a pink and white bicycle with a purple seat, my favorite color was red, I had to been to Disney World once, and I wore hands down the ugliest pair of glasses ever seen on an adorable-average-height-for-her-age 4th grader. When I was in the forth grade all my aunts and my grandma and I piled in to my grandma’s new gold Buick and drove around Williamsburg going to various doctors offices, looking for the right one that had the results to whether or not my grandma had cancer. We pulled in to the final office park (which is located across the street from where I would later spend much of my time as a teenager) right as it started to rain. My grandma checked in at the desk and a nurse came out to get her and everyone else and told all of us that I couldn’t come back (real personal right?) so I sat down in the waiting room crossed my legs and swung them back and forth until the girl across the room came and sat to my left. “Why are you here?” “My grandma’s here for an appointment. Why are you here?” “I’m waiting for my mommy. You can play with my gameboy if you want.” I did while she took a nap using her pink sweater as a pillow and the balding man across the room read a magazine. Eventually, my aunts and grandma all came out and were crying.

My grandma was diagnosed with throat cancer caused by smoking. If I recall she started smoking when she was 14 and just never stopped. She smoked Salem 100s, she kept them in a leather case with a place for the lighter. When I was younger, and when my aunt had started dating my uncle Ray, (so I guess I was like 6 or 7) I would steal her cigarettes and Ray and I would toss them back and forth or hide them and I would ask her to stop smoking. Well, it’s unfortunate that my adorable face, and his George Michael style 5 o’clock shadow was never convincing enough.

I only remember going to the hospital to see my grandma once and that was before her surgery. She was laying in the white bed, and there was this big white box thing in the room and all these tubes and wires and other hospital like things that terrorize children. Both my mother and grandmother insisted that I lay up in bed with her and give her a hug. But I didn’t want to hurt her.

For some period of time that feels like it was a decade I spent everyday after school at my grandparent’s trailer with my mom, and probably an aunt or two. I did my homework, watched baseball (cubs or the o’s) with my grandpa, or went outside and played basketball in the dirt court near the hammock. While the adults all tended to the needs of my suffering grandmother, I entertained myself. Occasionally, and by occasionally I mean, maybe once, my cousins would come too and we would play. And once we talked. I don’t know what brought it on, but next oldest cousin told me that my parents wanted to keep what my grandma had a secret from me.

On Friday, I didn’t go into the back room to see her frail body, I just went to my grandpa’s room and watched Jeopardy and Wheel of Fortune with him. And I didn’t tell her I loved her as I left and I didn’t even think about why. She was basically unresponsive but alive at that point, but I didn’t know about it, and I’m happy this news was only recently announced to me over ten years later.

My grandma died early Tuesday morning. I had, had a dream that she died and I woke up crying. I laid with my face in the pillow and fell back asleep only to wake up later to my mom sobbing that her mom had died to my father and running out the door to her house. I sobbed until I fell back asleep. When I woke up for school the next morning, I guess it was my responsibility to let my parents know that I had heard my mother’s cries. But I didn’t. I just went on about my business as if I had to go to school, until finally, my mother hugged me and began to cry and told me that my nanny had died. I couldn’t even cry.

After my grandma died, my mom became power of attorney for my grandfather so we went over there every other day to make sure his life was in order. Once shortly after my grandma died my mom was driving me home and she started to cry. She old me that my grandma had cancer and that’s why she died. All I said was, “yeah.”

Because you can’t keep a secret if it never was a secret to start.