Happy and not so happy Thanksgivings

A boy in one of my classes was in a terrible car accident this weekend. He is in intensive care in a medically induced coma. His mother hadn’t left the hospital to shower, eat, or sleep since the accident, so a group of us from his Masters classes signed up for shifts to be with him so she could go home. I spent 3 hours at the hospital with him last night and two and a half this morning.

Seeing him like that was so reminiscent of my dad. But I held it together.

But when I called the boy to help keep me awake on the drive, he asked "Well why didn’t you kiss him and make it all better. It always works for me!" He was trying to be cute and cheer me up a bit, but I lost it.

I started sobbing hysterically. I hadn’t realized how much it really had bothered me. I couldn’t do anything to save him. I couldn’t fix him. Either of them. And that apparently still eats away at me. I have to fix things, I have to make them better, because that is how I maintain control of my world. And if I maintain control, then bad things can’t happen.

It’s intuitively logical in my head.

I rarely regret things I have done. I figure all situations, however horrible, are learning experiences. You can’t regret learning experiences because they help you grow as a person. And if you don’t think you’ve learning anything then you aren’t analyzing the situaiton well enough.

But I really wish I had gone to visit my dad in the hospital the Thanksgiving before he died. Being 14 is no excuse for being such a fucking coward.

Almost eight years and I still haven’t healed. People lose parents all the time. And they heal. Why can’t I heal? I thought, for a while, when all the self-hatred, the cutting, the sleeping around, the majority of the borderline bulimia subsided and I regained some semblance of control over my life that I was healing. But in the place of all that I clung to that control and the warped logic that it protected me and those I loved. Somehow, even when I’m sad, and I fall apart like I did this afternoon…the tears are there, but that ache that I came to identify with sadness never came back after I went off the anti-depressants. It makes me feel like something human inside me is broken. Tears come, but I still feel numb.

Something didn’t heal. Something is still broken.