Andrea Lodge

Thanks for Nothing

 

 

She hated the bullshit tradition that only recently came into fashion- Thanksgiving time comes around; let’s all make a list of things we are thankful for this year.  Watching people make a big deal about it all over social media, doing a daily post- “Day 4: I am thankful for my darling grandson being able to open his mouth,” or some ridiculous fuckedness like that.  Hated it.  But boredom and the fact that she knew she’d be asked at the table to give up at least one thing she appreciated, she thought, might as well make a list of some sort.

 

Things I am Thankful for this Year:

 

   1. I am thankful that I’m not as fat as I once was.

   2. I’m thankful that my stupid friend is fatter than I am.

   3. I’m thankful for cranberry sauce.

 

 Ooh.

 

Her gaze drifted over to her computer screen where a new photo of this man she was lusting after just happened to pop up.  Her family might like this shit.

  

   4. I am thankful for my long fingers.

   5. I am thankful for my vivid imagination.

   6. I’m grateful I’ve got all these tech things and know how to use them.

   7. I’m grateful that no one lives here besides me.

   8. I’m grateful the house is damn-near sound-proof

   9. I’m thankful for Pornstore.com

   10. I’m grateful for fetish videos

   11. And that others like watching other people masturbate

 

And at this point, she was already writing with only one hand- eyes on the screen, hot-as-fuck crush staring into her soul.  She thought about things.  What would he think?  Oh, the things she would tell him if she could!  She’d make him playlists hinting at what she’d do to him.  Janet Jackson.  “If.”  Dirtier?  Liz Phair.  “Flower.”  Blow job queen?  Sure, why not?  She didn’t even need the porn this time.  She looked at his face.  Then she searched his profile looking for a photo of his hands.  Yeah, she wanted to know about his fingers.  How could she not?  But not just because she wanted to know what they’d feel like inside of her.  She’s more than just what everyone thinks of her.  That skanky smut who went down on everyone in her 20s and fucked anyone who gave her a compliment.  Low self-esteem will do that to a person.  She really just wanted to know what those fingers would feel like against her skin.  Were they the soft fingers of a man who worked a white-collar job, or were they rough, calloused, the fingers of a strong man who needed some kind of passion, some kind of release, some kind of something more than a good fuck?  Maybe a fuck followed by a holding of his head, a stroking of his hair, a grazing of her fingers across his cheeks.  Listening to his stories.  Being there.  

 

What?  Back to business.  Manipulating the bean.  All it took was his face and his hands and about a minute and twenty-five seconds and she was shaking and screaming.  Yeah, sex or no sex, she never shuts up.  Then something strange happened.  Something that never happened before.  After she finished, she burst into tears.  She hadn’t even stood up to wash her hands yet before she found herself burying her head in her arms, then doubled over as if in excruciating pain, and she kind of was.  Tears had become dear friends to her this past month.  Seems this time of year takes a toll on quite a large amount of people.  But this was too fucking weird for her.  Who does that and cries before the final moan is silent?

 

She sat in it for a while.  Sat in the feelings that she couldn’t even decipher.  Sat in her soggy underpants with her head on her soggy sleeves trying to explicate the obsessive thoughts she’d become so close to.  Thoughts and feelings that were like old friends now.  Years and years of this and only now, at forty-five, after failing at almost everything she’d ever set out to do or to be, after learning to deal with and living with all the mental ailments she’d had all this time, was she really feeling the falling apart of it all.

 

Sure, she’d fallen apart over and over since she was a young teen.  It actually started long before that, but it only became apparent to doctors in her teens, and it only became apparent in her thirties, maybe twenties, that it all started with the obsessive-compulsive shit she was doing around age ten.  But she was used to falling apart.  So, used to being broken, having the broken brain she never shut up about having, she was boring herself by talking about it by this point.  But this was different.  This was a whole new falling apart.  It felt like, though she’d never been able to express what it felt like before, this was the end.  Not the end of life.  Not by any means.  Yeah, everyone with any sense of normalcy, normalcy being most of the world of crazies, has thought of suicide here and there in their lives, especially those with all the diagnoses of neuroses she had been diagnosed with, but she never wanted to do it and knew she never would.  She had a friend who shot herself in the face at seventeen and she always wondered how someone at such a young age could know that the world was that bad so young.  She knew how bad it was.  And she’s forty-five.  She saw the stratospheric highs though, too.  And she let them be the things that were more present in her mind the best she could for four-and-a-half decades.  They outshone the deepest caliginous parts of life that showed up more often as they wound up, mostly, liquefying in the center of the earth.  She stopped self-medicating long ago and takes her meds on time every day for fear of going the other direction- so far up she loses her being, becoming a suit of herself where someone else is tinkering with the gears.  She threatened suicide starting in eighth grade, even got sent home for saying she had the thoughts before because of some fat bitch named Moira, but she just wanted attention.  Then, it was her screaming for help, and no one really got that.  They noticed when she was playing the woe-is-me pity party game, but not when the deepest sick was about to boil out through her tear ducts, oozing green, metal-dissolving chemicals.  She’s seeing that now, right this instant, her cheeks are burning.  Soon her jaw will be exposed. 

 

Can’t do the life story thing right now.  Summary is even too much.  Gist?  I guess.  Little girl.  Cute.  Teenager.  Awkward, gross, unattractive with large boobs and a large ass.  Thought it was a good idea to satisfy her need for attention, her want and need to be loved, by using those assets to get the guys.  They used her.  Duh.  Found a boyfriend.  Thought she loved him and he loved her but beating the piss out of a young girl and beating the emotional goodness out of her is not something that will help her with her already dissipated self-esteem.  Flashing way forward, let’s welcome a girl who took charge of herself a bit, got thinner, actually felt pretty once in a while, and felt like she had the power now.  During those years, the years she thought she was doing the using, getting back at the entire male gender, that she was sadly mistaken, but hey, she did kind of look good.  But now it’s all different.  The ups and downs of a woman who hates being known as a woman, wants to be called girl forever.  Really, she understood this falling apart.

 

Everyone she knows, those who know her best, know the parts she lets them see.  The newest ones know everything about her because she decided long ago to put her entire life on display so potential friends could decide early if they wanted to be in her life and if not, they could take a long walk off a short pier.  But her past wasn’t a past of a good person.  Sure, a lot of that came from her being misdiagnosed in the world of Crazytown, but she hated blaming anything that happened to her on her mental state and the weaknesses that state brought.  Now, right this moment, this sad, wrongly cold November, she decided no one really knows her.  All the friends she fucked over throughout her life would never come back and she didn’t blame them, and they were probably the ones who knew her real personality.  Now she’s just been trying so hard to keep anyone she meets in her life that she does and says things, presents herself in such a way that she’s most likely doing more harm than good.  They will all leave eventually.  No one can take her on.  She wants to scream from her front porch into the nighttime nothingness, “I’m just this.  I’m a human being!  Just a fucking human being!  I’m trying my hardest here, goddamn it!”  But it’s too late for that.  It’s too late for so much now.

 

She read somewhere about just how many “yous” there are.  There is a you for every person you have ever encountered in your life and each you is different.  And none of the yous in others’ minds is the you in your own.  And so, she sits.  Falling.  Always falling.  In retrograde once again, but with a permanency this time.  Nowhere and no one to turn to.  No answers she is desperately seeking answers to and for what anyway.  Just a mind full of the iniquities of her horrifying past and noir future.  And a wrinkled finger attached to a handful of tears, thankful no one actually sees her after all.

 

 

 

Andrea Lodge resides in Philadelphia with her husband and two disabled cats; Budgie, with only three legs, no tail, and who constantly drools, and Loki, AKA Poki, AKA, Pokapotamus (because he weighs 20 pounds), a Scottish fold with only one folded ear.  She studied English/Secondary Education at Holy Family University and taught middle and high school Writing and Literature after graduating.  She is now a full-time writer and is the administrator of a Facebook writing group focusing on critique for writers of poetry and prose.  She has had several poems recently featured on Spillwords, a poem and story published in an anthology released by Havik, five poems in the Feminist Agenda issue of Alien Buddha Press’s recently released book, her poem Screaming at Tiffany’s was in the 12th issue of Voice of Eve magazine, a few pieces in Alien Buddha Press’s Zine #11 and one piece in their 12th issue, a piece featured on Danse Macabre, and her artwork will soon be featured in the online literary journal, Obra.  She is also currently working to finish and release her first book of poetry, hopefully to be published sometime early in the new year.