I Scream . . .

Author: Annie Wilkes

I scream, you scream, we all scream: Get the fuck away from me and leave me alone!

Everyday I hope, there is something better, something more, something I’m missing right in front of my fucking face. Love, I have no idea what that means beyond my immediate family. I get attached too easily to people, I care (I guess as opposed to love) too much it seems. I am trusting and sometimes people think naïve. If I only ‘care’ it’s so much easier to push people away and hurt them before they hurt me. I trust implicitly upon first meeting, but am reassured all too soon and easily that I just don’t like most people. No big deal, I’m not the kind of person to have a lot of close friends, the ones I do have, like 3 or 4 that I talk to on a regular basis don’t even live where I do, with the exception of my sister.

I don’t often come across as optimistic or happy-go-lucky, I find that a bitter and/or sarcastic remark could easily define my day, but underneath it all, I am hoping, happy and most days content. It helps to know that on any given day I haven’t fucked up someones life intentionally or my own. I work my ass off for everything I’ve ever wanted but know full well I am spoiled and could get what I want by just asking.

This is going to derail now. I must have been someone incredibly fucked up in a past life, because I do believe in that shit. The following events took place within a 3 ½ month span of my life. I can’t make this shit up.

My sister’s significant other has a best friend who has professed his love for me, he doesn’t even know me. I’ve never hung out with him, probably haven’t said more than 20 words to him in my life and he continues to tell people he loves me. It really helps that he’s 10 years younger and drunk almost everyday of the past 5 or 6 years of his life and has no front teeth. This may be the most normal of suitors at this point.

Lets see….my next love possibility was like an uncle to me my whole life. 50+ yr old man, whose wife I adore invites me over late one night for a night cap, while we were at my parents house one evening for a friendly game of Texas hold’em. I had fixed him a plate of food cause he was too drunk to do it himself and it’s what you do for your elders, right?! Wrong. True story of “no good deed goes unpunished.” This man is also a drunk, goes on month long benders, pisses and shits himself and continues to invite me over. His wife left him a couple years ago for her sisters ex-husband.

Who’s next? Anyone? Anyone? Yes, the smelly older gentleman who just moved to town who offered to pay me to cook for him. Under certain circumstances this should be taken as a compliment to being a great cook. Given the events of the last couple weeks of my life I wanted to cry, not to mention this man was asking my brother about “available” girls in this town. I felt dirty, for no other reason than I just did. I still can’t look this guy in the face, he was very adamant on the phone, as if he kept offering to pay me would have made me change my mind the 4th time he asked. I may need to go puke now.

The only man I was sure I had ever loved disappeared on me shortly after I graduated high school, he is 3 yrs younger than me. So the last time I saw or talked to him was September of 1996. I only know this because two months ago he found me on a social networking site and reminded me of the last time he kissed my face and knew it would be a long time before we would see or talk to each other again. He then proceeded to tell me how much he still loved me, would do anything for me and would fly to see me immediately if I helped him figure out how much a ticket would cost, oh wait, “Get a quote for one for my son too. What am I going to tell my wife?” EXCUSE ME?! FUCK YOU. Stop calling, forget you know me, WHAT THE FUCK?! WOW.

The fucked up portion of this story follows two weeks after the last part of my love odyssey. In my last relationship, and I use the “r” word loosely, it lasted a year and was more of a relationship than I had ever known in my little over three decades of life. There were promises made, four letter words exchanged and bliss if in fact that’s what it was. After leaving town for more work there were a few phone calls one or two emails and then this person must have fallen of the face of the fucking earth. And then, one month short of a year since I last saw his face, I ran into him. I saw him in the airport, I was sitting talking to a friend and I looked up and he was standing there, looking at me from across the terminal. He then proceeded to turn and walk away, he had to get on the escalator and put a floor between us. I sat there somewhere between a second heart shredding and the joy of the memories. I had to go to the bathroom and hurl, fortunately for me as soon as I came out of the bathroom my flight was boarding.

So now I’m hanging out with a dude (who I thought was cool) until a week ago when he told me for some fucked up reason that he liked my older sister but he also has a crush on me. “Hold that thought, gotta fly away for a vacation, hang out with my ex and two kids, call me!” HO-LY FUCK!

I am now sure that whoever I was in a past life, my dismembered, beaten and broken body is lying in an unmarked grave somewhere and whoever I knew in that life does not search for answers to my mysterious disappearance.

I wish, I hope.