sitting on a cold tile floor

not the best place to think. but he wanted to get some sleep, and i can't. it's the old cycle again - things get tough, and i stay awake through the night. so i'm sitting on the bathroom rug, listening to sad songs, and reading terrible things on the internet. these days, the internet is full of nothing but terrible things.

being here has been in turns, difficult and a blessing. my sister is dying. slowly, painfully, and yet not unmercifully. cystic fibrosis is one fucked up disease, and while she is coping admirably with everything the disease robs her of, i have a hard time being around her. because i'm a coward. she hurts, and i hide. it hurts me to see her once vibrant body robbed of movement, her voice robbed of power, her time tied to machines that pound her lungs, the lungs that close, and bleed and close some more. i know it makes her feel rejected. and i don't know how to stop. because i hurt for her, and i can't even face her.

and of course, it's just another place i feel like a failure. a failure as a sister, a wife, a mother, a person, a woman. pcos leaves me shaped like a beer drinking forty year old man, with the acne and wispy beard of pubescent boy, and i gross myself out when i look in the mirror. we haven't had sex in months, because i am so disgusted with my body. and then our friends, who never stop having child after child, wonder why we're not having anymore. well, i guess there's a few reasons. he tells me it's because i can't take care of the one i have. although when i tell him that hurts me, he tells me it's the truth.

the truth is, it all hurts right now. maybe i'll have some better coping mechanisms later on, but i'm a week into being homeless for the third time, a week into finding out i'm about to be single again if i can't fix this, a week into realizing that hating yourself and having a black hole in your chest and wanting to sleep your life away isn't normal. that other people don't forget half their life. that other people didn't have their fathers shove his hands down their throats because they couldn't swallow a pill fast enough. that other people didn't watch their brothers and their mothers being beaten, holes punched in walls, food thrown in bowls at the faces of their mothers. that their mother doesn't still insist that God wanted her to remain married to their father, regardless of the abuse. i still have a hard time stomaching that. i'm pretty sure that we would have been a lot better off if she had left years ago. i wouldn't think it was normal to have memories of waiting to call 911, hiding in my basement bedroom.

it all hurts. so i'm sitting on the bathroom floor, and wishing i could sleep. or that this would all go away.