The Pain Never Goes Away

Pain and pasts are strange things.

Separately, both could possibly be dealt with.  Yet somehow when the two are combined, they become quite the insurmountable force.

There are so many things in my past that I wish I could forgive myself for.  There are so many things I wish I could forget, once and for all. 

Perhaps it would be easier if everyone involved in my past were still alive.

The funny thing about death is that there is no going back.  When you do something that ultimately contributes to the death of someone you care about, there seriously is nothing that ever makes that knowledge go away.  It’s easy to talk about self-forgiveness and all, but you can never truly forgive what you can’t forget.

There aren’t enough pills to take.  There aren’t enough drinks to swallow.  There aren’t enough cigs to smoke.  There aren’t enough knives to cut with.  Nothing ever makes the pain go away.

And that is all just today.

It’s no one’s fault really.  I’ve spent the past ten years running from who I am and what I’ve done.  Yet just like Frodo from The Lord Of The Rings, this is my burden.

The thing that brought everything up though was that last night my friend got slapped around by her mom after she had gotten busted shoplifting at Wal-Mart.  Seriously, I love Allie to death and don’t hold it (meaning my issues) against her at all.  But finding out that someone I care about got smacked around was the thing that brought up the latest round of things.

When I was a junior in high school, my sister had a friend named Jolynn.  Jolynn eventually went on to become a stripper and died of a cocaine overdose, but the thing of it is that I was the one who fed her first.

My sister and Jolynn had been friends since fifth or sixth grade.  Jolynn was an attractive, seemingly normal girl who I kind of liked.  One night when I was in 11th grade, Jolynn called me and wanted to meet, which was a bit strange since we never really hung out without my sister there.

She was a waitress at a local pizza place and I met her out back.  She got in my car and I could see that she had been crying since her eyeshadow was running.

I probably should’ve been turned on or something by what happened next, but I wasn’t.  For some reason she decided to take her shirt off and show me the bruises that her dad had inflicted on her the night before.

He had a bad day and was in the basement playing pool alone on their pool table.  Jolynn’s mom told her to go downstairs and get her dad cause it was time for dinner, so she tried to.

The short of it is that she went downstairs and he knocked her down, and then used the fat end of his pool queue to leave eight perfectly round bruises on her stomach and chest.

So there I was behind the pizza place, with a hot girl in my front seat who wasn’t wearing a shirt and all I could feel was rage.

And then she said, “I just wanna forget…”

So I sold her $50 worth of cocaine, and away she went.  And thus, I gave her the first taste of what would eventually kill her.

I’ve never been cool with people who slap their kids around, but after the whole Jolynn thing I get seriously pissed.  Every time I hear about some kid getting abused, it brings up the memory of Jolynn and the fact that her dad and I were responsible for her death.

In all honesty, I don’t think anything a kid can do is worthy of getting smacked around.  The fact that you can pop a person out from between your legs doesn’t give you a single right in the world to hit that kid in anger. 

It especially doesn’t give you the right to hit them in the head until their ears are ringing and they still have a headache the morning after. 

Parents are SUPPOSED to be the adults.  They are SUPPOSED to be the role-models.  The thing that is supposed to set them apart from the kids, the thing that makes them the legal guardians, is that they are supposed to be more rational and more mature.

But hey, everyone gets mad and anyone can get carried away.  Or something.

The strange thing about hate is how it is so easily transferable.  It took less than a second for me to remember everything I ever felt when I was getting a free look at the same chest that many other dudes had to pay tons of money to see. 

It took me even less time than that to transfer all that hate, rage, animosity, and loathing to Allie’s parents.

For those who have never had someone die because of something they introduced them to, it’s impossible to explain how it can haunt you.  It’s impossible to explain how every time you’re truly happy, in the back of your mind you feel like shit because you know that you are experiencing something that the other person never will, and that it’s all because of you.

No words will ever make this go away.  I’ve talked to shrinks who charge $750 an hour, and I’ve had meds (both legal and illegal), I tried God…there is no relief.  There is no respite.  This is my doing and this is my hell on earth.

I want so bad to be free from this, and yet I can’t be.  It’s not something I can drop.  It’s not something I’ll ever forget unless I’m lucky and get in an accident and get amnesia.

So this is the weight on my shoulders.  This is who I am, and why I am who I am.  I’m a piece of shit.</font>

But anyhow…back to my bottle.  I know it won’t help anything and won’t make a single thing go away, but fuck it.  I don’t deserve to be fine.  I deserve everything I ever get.

“My mouth was a crib

And it was growing lies

I didn’t know what love was on that day

*

My heart’s a tiny blood-clot

I picked at it

It never heals and never goes away

*

This was never my world

You took the angel away

I’d kill myself to make everybody pay.”

*

Marilyn Manson</marquee