Category: A Woman’s Plight

“In everything I did, I looked for traces of love – and gave it, even if not returned.”

She met her new intended love briefly in the dreamworld, and it felt good but odd to let her heart begin shifting so strongly to this man she could barely see and little yet knew.

He receeded back into the fog to give her space to process, and she found herself working with a Hispanic family, trying to help figure out their complicated washing machines to get their many loads going.

But then, their matriarch unexpectedly wrapped her in a playful-yet-strong bear hug from behind and began tickling her mercilessly as one of her own, giving official release from assigned labors.

With them both laughing so hard way beyond norms of society, she desperately struggled until she could get free of the matriarch’s grip, and took her happy, grateful leave of them.

Next, she found herself on a college campus, meeting her ex who seemed open to their patching things back together.

She chatted with him and could feel that old, heavy pendulum swinging back up its usual arc into false hope before it would guillotine back down again and woosh into loss’s tragedy.

When she ran out of things to say as the two of them continued walking for far too long back to an apartment that they were cleaning, she realized that he only spoke in response to her subject comments, never offering more or other topics, nor expanding.

That cold, sickening feeling of flat gray silence returned, and as they arrived, she began disconnecting as passed him while he paused in the hallway.

“You’re not really wanting to continue this, are you?” she asked, daring to finally blast through the lies of his playing along to the contrary.

Then she stopped and turned, looking right at him for the truth, and he at last clearly admitted, “I think that’s obvious, don’t you?”

Turning away again to heavily lift her feet up the stairs, she wondered at all of the years that he’d just played along – and shoved at the pain that his walled-off company had created in her, and that sense of being in a.suffocation chamber she could never break out of.

But at last the illusions were shattering, and his dream self was finally releasing her.

Looking around the disarrayed room, she realized that this time, she could leave another’s self-created mess far behind her.

“She needed him in more ways than one.”

Where’ve they gone?
Must have scattered

Into the road at
The car accident

Or fallen out of bags
Navigating homeless

Phases of instability
And missed at prior

Temporary residences
When thought life was

Rebuilding and growing
But found the truth was

It had been undermined
By others’ rotting values

“A retraining option I have temporarily qualified for got put off by the advocator’s jury duty.

Legit.

Now he wants me to recreate all of the prep work we did before he disappeared for months and hand it to him, after I just asked him to help me pick up the scattered pieces due to my brain injury.

Not legit.

(Steam exuding from head…)

I cannot afford the diminished neuronic capacity to even care a literal whit further about this pursuit, anymore.”

I know I’m not special
But I Am

So close
It crazes

Threatening
To disappear

If I cannot
Grasp firmly

In the right way
At right moment

Will it just
Fly onward

Without me
Like a bird

Untamed
And fickle?

Yet if it did it
Wasn’t mine

So they say
Wastefully

Filling in the blanks.

“She had always thought that I’d been successful.

But I just stepped up to the plate – and dove all in to win.”

“I was never given any.”

I need to figure out how to
Cultivate this and flourish

“What’s that, again?”

“I tried to protect my children from my needs, which increased sense of isolation.”

Cutting one lose to navigate better.

“I am a complex being, for I am a woman. And I will no longer bear the weight of shame for men’s transgressions.”

“Why is it that when I try to leave school, then I dream of fascinating classes that I am trying to be a part of – yet am always arriving late?”

“If I keep attending to the income,
Will I ever get to focus on music?”

Her creed had always been to help shelter others.

(Title of multiple meanings)

“I realized today that I dislike going to the laundromat – which I’d glossed over by the upscale, whereas before was in drudgery.

It reminds me too often of the older memories: feeling time stretching in moments wasted, when could have expanded meaningful connection in the simplest of management tasks.”