Miracles Among Miracles, My Mom Meant What She Said

My mom, she is always saying things, but I never see any results. It's so hard to know if she means something or not. So I always assume that she won't do what she says, even though I hope that she will for most promises.

This time, my mom meant what she said. She has to, otherwise she just made a series of huge mistakes. She still may have, but at least she's keeping up with what she said.

Which, by now, you may be wondering what she is keeping true to. We're moving. Not just to another place in Conneaut, which is what I'd hoped for. No, we're moving to Nebraska. I would make some joke about where Nebraska is, and how it's all just farms and stuff, but honestly, the state is really nice from what I've seen. I'm really upset to be moving to another plac, even if I've been there before, but I'm also a little excited. And scared.

I really don't know what to expect. Last time...didn't go so well for me. I think it was because I acted really stand offish because I felt nervous being new. If the people in Nebraska got to know me now I think we'd all get along so much better. At least, I really hope so. Otherwise this is going to really suck.

And for any friends reading this now, I'll miss you when I'm gone, sometime from late December to Early January. Hugs for all!

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Now playing:
Lostprophets - A Town Called Hypocrisy
Lostprophets - Last Train Home
via FoxyTunes

Keeping Afloat In A World Such As This, With All Of The Ironic Twists

I have always been pretty skilled in comforting people on the little worries of life. Even when I was in the 2nd grade (my first year in public school) I was able to help people with their problems. I would show them what their choices were and help them make decisions on their own.

I continue to be good at doing it in most situations. Problems that seem to have no solution for the one with the problem are something I am easily able to help them to solve.

My problems, my personal problems, are something I fumble, and stumble through. My problems, my own difficulties in life make me believe everyone is out to get me for no reason, and through no fault of my own, until I take a step back and look at things through someone else's eyes. That oftentimes clears up my murky vision, leading to answers and truths I wasn't aware of. I become more enlightened of myself every time I do this, though it remains just as hard to do as when I first started doing this.

Perhaps this is because for people who aren't me, I can step back and look at things objectively, not emotionally. With my problems, this isn't something easily achieved because in all honesty, I am a very emotional person. It is very difficult to hold my own emotions under control, but in order to solve conflicts in my own life I find I must do this.

It may seem a bit ironic though, that I am very skilled in helping others to solve their problems. Their problems, their lives, not mine, so they aren't my emotions. Their challenges cease to be real. Instead they become logic problems for me to solve, not through emotions, but through just that, logic. Life isn't as simple as always being logical, but if it isn't my life I don't understand this.

This is made strikingly clear when someone close to me has a problem though. Not my mother, not my best girlfriend, not my little sister. No, only one friend of mine am I so close to, even when we aren't speaking, that I can't look at things in an objective fashion as I do with everyone else. I simply can't. God how I tried to tonight. It would have made things so much easier. But I could be of no comfort to this friend, at least, not in the way I can be to anyone else.

Yet, this friend always seems to call me when a problem arises that is very large. I pray I am of some help to this friend, although I have no idea how I could be. Tonight I did very little. I fumbled and stumbled through awkward conversations that I hoped to God would keep his thoughts off of his problems. If it helped at all, I'd be surprised.

Honest to God though, I felt helpless. I could say nothing, really, about the situation. I knew nothing about how he could be feeling, unless I was to arrogantly assert I had ever been involved in something like it. I have not, not even close. I wanted so badly to take the easy way out and say something falsely "comforting", if only to comfort myself. But to assert that things would become better, when they more than likely would not for a while, is a loophole of a lie. I cannot do that, not to myself, and not to this close friend.

So I listened as patiently as I could, and tried so hard to not say something stupid. And it was one of the harder things I've had to do in my life, just sit and listen as my friend told me about his problem.

I hope he isn't angry about me writing this if he reads it. I really hope he isn't, but he's really important to me. I want him to know that. If everything else is going wrong, I'll try my best to help, even if that means I don't do what anyone else does and tell him everything will work itself out, as if it will by the time he wakes up. If he can even sleep tonight that is.

I'll pray that things do work out for this friend of mine. Even if I'm not sure what else to do, I can pray. Something has to help. Something

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Now playing:
Within Temptation - Bittersweet
Violent Femmes - Please Do Not Go
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My Aunt And Her Apples

For those of you hoping this will be a funny post, I'm sorry. I'm just writing to get this off my chest. Don't read it if you are expecting humor, because more than likely there will be very little humor, if any at all.

I can't say that she was my favorite aunt. She wasn't. But I can say I loved, no love, her. And I usually liked her a lot. She had a fun personality, and I enjoyed going to her house whenever we did. Unfortunately, even though I live in Conneaut, I didn't go to see her very often. She also rarely visited us even when we lived so close together. So close together, and I think I only saw her a handful of times in the last few years. I could have just asked to go over sometime, but I never did. So I didn't even see her when she was dying.

Cancer. She died of cancer. They gave her three to four months to live. She stayed at my cousin's house while she was healing from the chemo that they didn't think she would have time to heal from because she was in such bad condition.

They sent her to the house where my cold, uncaring, apathetic cousin lives, no resides. A parasite like her, you can't call what she does living. My aunt had to live with her. because no one else could take her. Somehow she was supposed to get better in a place like that.

My aunt got better. She was reacting well to the chemo that was just meant to give her a few extra weeks, maybe a month. The doctors were hopeful that her condition would stabilize enough that she could go to her home.

The place that she made distinctly hers. The place where I will always place her in my memory. Apples everywhere in the kitchen as the smell of potato soup and biscuits meets you at the front door, past the welcome mat that reads "Welcome Home". We can't stay too long, but we end up around the kitchen table playing card games until the clock strikes Midnight and beyond.

I'll also always remember her when I play cards. All of my family plays cards, but I always played at her house. It's funny, because she always tried to be patient with me when I wanted to be on her team, but I usually made her lose. She hated losing. She even got mad when I made the other team lose. I think she got frustrated at even this because it took the satisfaction out of creaming her opponents since I was so terrible at playing.

You can't blame me for being terrible at cards though, I didn't grow up around people who played like everyone else in my family did. Watching, let alone playing, card games was a rare treat until we moved to Conneaut. All of my aunts, uncles, cousins, grandparents, and any others I'm somehow related to on my mom's side, they grew up with the advantage of being able to watch. They practically learned to play card games while still in their diapers. I learned to draw stick figures while in my diapers. That's better if you ask me.

I apologize, I seem to have gone of topic.

So, my aunt was at my cousin's house. She got better, as you know. Then a spider bit her. A teensy, weensy, insignificant house spider. Bit her. It bit her and she got so much worse. Worse than ever before the treatment. Her entire body bloated up double it's natural size. A spider bite from an ordinary spider would grow no larger than a dime on me. Her size doubled.

Which would have been fine. Just give her some medicine to get rid of the swelling and get rid of what would otherwise be an insignificant amount of poison. Except, doing that would kill her within the day in addition to the chemo she had undergone. She was goner.

The doctors, so informal in their speech, told us she had a week at most. What did they care, she was just a frail, weak, bloated blip in all of their charts and research. One more senior citizen dying. She wasn't their aunt. They didn't love her.

She didn't die then either. Miracle, or curse, you decide. She was in pain while she was awake. Cancer is a slow way to go, achingly slow. To have taken the medicine to get the swelling from the bite to immediately go down, along with her heartbeat, perhaps would have been the better choice. But doctors aren't supposed to euthanize their patients. Even if that is what the patient wants. Even if every breath is a gasp, as the patient wonders if it will be their last.

I'd like to think that her last moments, spent around 2:30 p.m. today, were spent sleeping. At least then she wouldn't have felt the pain as she slipped away. She had endured far too much.

I know I was just waiting for the bell to ring, signaling the end of the school day. And I came home to this news. I knew it was coming, and still I cried.

What right did I have to cry? I didn't go see her. I was afraid of seeing her so close to death. I was so upset thinking that she was grasping at the straws of her mortality. I was upset thinking about my own mortality.

Now I have feelings of guilt. I didn't go see her, to perhaps lesson the pain she was experiencing if only a little bit, because I was too scared. What is wrong with me?

Then guilt gives way to sadness. All that remains physically is a body that has nothing real in it. Her soul, and I do believe in souls, I have to believe in them, goes someplace, perhaps Heaven, perhaps into another being just now born, or perhaps it goes to sleep. I don't claim to know. I can only hope.

And I will hope. I will keep hoping, and remembering her fondly. Because I love her. And I will remember her as she always was to me. And she will be immortal in my mind, and through my words.

Written in dedication to My Aunt Joyce. I love her, and will keep her in my thoughts.

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Now playing:
Evanescence - My Last Breath
Five For Fighting - Road To Heaven
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