MINE IS YOURS IS OURS

..not that I am still on anyone’s favorites list. I am sure I have been taken off long ago! But life has been crazy, it still is. Not that it’s anything exciting really, just so wrapped up in work. I am 20 years old now and all I ever do is work. They can’t keep people hired so I am always pulling extra shifts, missing my days off, training new people who don’t decide to stick around. It’s crazy how many people we have gone through. They seem desperate for money but then don’t show up the next day! Seems to me like people are getting lazy. I’ve been working my ass of since I was 16, but I guess when you can find some one to support you you don’t need a job? Shrug…

I guess to be honest I really feel like venting. I miss Frank, I miss New York and I have realized how depressingly pathetic my life is here in Missouri. I hate my boss now. The past two years I have put up with her and her constant picking and gossiping behind people’s backs and I am just soooooooo tired. I feel its time for a change, things are about to come to a head, but it’s hard to step away from the normal. Even when you’re unhappy. Some how you’re restless but comfortable in your little nich. If that makes sense. I love my job, I just hate my boss. I feel so underappreciated. I’d really like to find another work environment, but I like my job. Ahhhhhhhhh I want out, but I don’t. I think I will let whatever happens happen. Because then it wont be my choice, haha.

I did get to see Frank at the end of May. I spent a whole week with him while he housesat for his dad in Manhattan and it was great! We were like this cute, cozy little couple. We went grocery shopping, fought over the remote and made up…lol…It was a great trip. Not only am I in love with him still after 3 1/2 years but I am in love with his city. It feels like my city too. I have decided to start making plans to move there. If I have a goal, I have to force myself to reach it. Especially since it’s something I really want. I have decided to move and transfer to college there August of 2007. I will be a senior in college, so I think that should be a big help when I try to get into Columbia or NYU. I’ll be 22 by then and I think that would be a good time to be out on my own, in my own apartment and such. I am not sure what my mom will do about some of the bills but I cannot worry about that forever. I can’t let that keep me here you know? I love her, but I need to start my own life. I think Frank will have graduated from Oxford by then too, so who knows what will happen with us? Good things I hope. =)

Okay, so here is an essay I have to turn in for English on Thursday, and if anyone care’s i’d like some feedback. I usually turn in just OK B papers, but I want this one to be great. Like the best I have ever written. We had to write about a tragedy and something good that came from it. A lesson or some kind of blessing or something. So naturally, the biggest tradegy thus far in my life has been my father. (For anyone who has been keeping up with my diary…)  So here’s the essay.

*****

MINE IS YOURS IS OURS

 

            I was new to my job when it happened. I had been there exactly three days and now I had to leave. The phone call came about nine o’ clock at night and I knew something was wrong when I answered. "Hanna….oh God, Hanna…" he sobbed. When I realized who was calling me so distraught, I knew what he was trying to say. My father had died. Without even realizing when I started, I tried to wipe away the tears and ask the dreaded question, "how?" The alcohol finally got him I thought, but no, a rope, and a tree deep in the woods of Michigan got him. His fears got him. My own father had stolen himself from me.

 

            I never thought I would feel such unbearable pain at the young age of nineteen. I had my heart broken by a boy once, but it couldn’t conceivably compare to the pain of Billy’s sobs as he tried to break the news of my father and the realization that he was gone. No explanation, no note, no goodbyes were given or said. No apologies were said for all the years missed and the years being robbed from the future. Inside the three year old girl he left behind begged for her daddy to come back to life, yet the young woman of nineteen despised him of the hurt and anger he created in an innocent. Now I had to bury him alone three states away amongst unfamiliar faces. No one could possibly understand. If they did, they were silent. 

 

            Finally when the dust settled from the recent uproar that was my life, I returned to work, unsure of my emotions and very alone in them. Other than my mother hovering over me and a very patient boyfriend I had no one. No one to relate to, to hold me and say it will pass in time, no one who knew the pain I had been forced to endure. No phone calls were received for apologies, no cards, just uncomfortable stares and skirting around the topic. Except the night my boss came in, a man I had only met but one time. He grabbed my hand, his eyes slowly filled up with tears. "I understand," he choked. "I lost my boy two years ago. Just out of college, he was celebrating when the car lost control. I understand." He stood up straight, squeezed my hand and he made the tears disappear, unwillingly I imagine. He shared with me something so personal, so deep, and so agonizing. His pain was mine, as mine was his, because one loss understands another. He lost his son to alcohol and carelessness and all he is left with is memories of the day he graduated from college and the few days later when he laid him to his unforeseen destiny.

 

<span style="FONT-SIZE: 10pt;

LINE-HEIGHT: 200%; FONT-FAMILY: Arial”>            How unfortunate it is for some one to go through life not having a single memory worth smiling over when they think of their father. I can remember the night he left, the crying, the yelling, the smell of Budweiser that lay thick in the air, in his breath. The glasses he always wore now lay crumbled and unusable on the sidewalk outside our apartment door. He left me without a goodbye then too, but it was never permanent, not like this time. Or was it? I do remember a flash memory of him braiding my hair, carrying me on his back on the way to a liquor store, and the pictures of him holding me when I was just a baby. I remember the picture memories because my mom told them to me. "He’s not a bad man Hanna," she would say. "He just doesn’t know how to love. He’s a product of his environment."  At fifteen when I met him again, he was a little older, a little more drunk, and really unsure of whom I was. The one day we spent at Nell Lake was fun, but as I recall, he slept through that on an old stained blanket on the rocky beach.

 

            I find no loss is an easy loss. With each person that leaves this earth, they leave a story, unanswered questions and a hunger for closure that is so hard to satisfy.  But I am not alone in my confusion and grief. Others suffer too, perhaps not the same circumstance, but they suffer just the same. Just from one person reaching out to a girl he didn’t know, to say it’d be okay, it will get better, I find kindness is what gets a person through. Kindness sustains people, it gives them strength and hope. I know that in sharing our pain with one another we have bonded. No matter where the roads in life will take us, we will always remember that one moment where our tears fell into the same river and that the dark clouds that rained into it endlessly had parted and let the sunshine through. Like Benaiah once said, "This too shall pass…"