Zombies and Ghosts.

At fourteen, half my family died. Yesterday, I walked among their corpses.

They hadn't literally died but they made it clear I wasn't welcome in their lives. I spent six years grieving. Now at a funeral for a person who was only a ghost to me, I was given undeserved condolences. I said simply, "I didn't know him."

It wasn't a secret, it wasn't an accusation. It was simply a fact like, the summer sky is blue, grass turns green, and mercury is toxic.

Instead of saying, "I'd love to tell you about him sometime," or something that showed an understanding for the loss of twenty years of missing memories and knowledge of my grandfather, people took offense.

People, but to me animated corpses who'd crawled out of the graveyard of my heart to spend a moment in my life, only for me to offend them.

Call me crazy but I thought being haunted was supposed to be more fun than that and that zombies weren't gotten rid of so easily. Yeah, they ran away from me like I was carrying a bazooka and had already fired a few shots.

In life, I try to give people the benefit of the doubt, I get criticized for this often, but those people don't understand what it's like to be the person whose foot is forever in her mouth.

I wobble around on bleeding stumps in social situations. Awkward and misunderstood wishing I could run away and hide but tethered to a ball and chain of convention and politeness.

Yesterday I did run and hide. I went to a Starbucks and got everyone there laughing at my predicament. This tends to be my M.O. when I'm in deep pain. The barista gave me hug before I left. A hug I desperately needed. I told her she was officially my favorite person in the world for that day.

After Starbucks, I was still feeling like a social pariah and found myself at T.J. Maxx. I asked a sales lady if I was twenty-five dollars upset. I'd found a beautiful amethyst that cost twenty-five and I was debating on buying it for myself.

I explained the situation in the funniest terms possible and while she was laughing about how I got yelled at in the mortuary at a funeral,  I decided I was only ten dollars upset and bought myself a selenite candleholder.

Making people laugh is the best way to manage my emotional trauma budget.

After talking to a few more people I began to understand how my statement came across and apparently it wasn't, "I didn't know him and that makes me sad," which is how it was intended but as in "I didn't know that asshole, thank God." Which wasn't at all how I felt.

The fact that that's what they assumed I meant, means they don't know me at all either. I guess they still see me as the dirtiest piece of shit, to ever have been born.

Which at fourteen, that's how I was treated. It led to slit wrists and a few suicide attempts.

That's why I had to give each of them their own little funeral when I was twenty. Yep, writing names of people giving them eulogies and burying little slips of paper and lighting a candle can be very therapeutic when people don't have the grace to wait to die to abandon you in life but instead just toss you out of their life like you are garbage.

Except I was lower than garbage. They didn't even try to recycle me. I mean come on, they could have at least had the decency to try and make compost with me right?

Apparently, I wasn't even good enough for the worms to eat.

Luckily yesterday I wasn't still fourteen. As an adult their opinion of me doesn't have to create my reality, I went to Walmart bought a card and some pens wrote an apology and tried to explain what I meant.

Chances are whatever I wrote just fucked up everything even more but at least I can say to myself I tried and that's the best anyone can do.

The great thing is I haven't yet managed to offend everyone on earth to the point they won't even feed me to worms and so there are still a few great people who love me and those people mean the whole world to me.

You know who you are!!!!! Yeah you there reading this blog, you freaking ROCK!!!!!!