Apathy

Around midnight Monday morning I walked into my house, stumbling around from the two mouthfuls of NyQuil coursing through my veins, and I noticed my father asleep on an uncomfortable sofa-type object in the living room. This made me wonder if perhaps my parents finally hated each other as much as I collectively despised them, or if maybe my father just couldn't stand the draft in the back of the house and chose to sleep by the wood-fireplace in the north end. Regardless of whatever the truth was, I began thinking about how parents from their age became parents for the sole reason of becoming parents; not because of love or the desire to create a mesh of two gene pools, but for the sole excuse that that is what their lives meant to them. The resultant factor of this has been systematically proven to be divorce; nobody can stay together and not be in love, which seems to be a scientific law made so from the insurmountable evidence that is my parents' entire generation.

I was under the delightful effects of generic brand NyQuil when I wrote that introduction, and I decided in my stupor that it warranted me reversing my writing technique in order to accommodate it. Believe it or not, everything I've ever written has started with the title and trickled down into a sort of analyzation of said title. At least, in my non-collegiate writing. And even those essays follow a similar structure. But this crap is what I prefer. I had been looking for an excuse to write about the parallel between the concept of the love I believe in and the forced abomination that is the love my parents and ninety percent of current middle aged couples believe in. It's actually rather a glue developed from the morality of that demographic, one that stays together for the children involved, one that very often falls apart.

I am not a child of divorce, though I could care less either way. If my parents thought they were doing me a favor by staying together so I could bare witness to their ignorance and disgusting bickering then they should have split up a long fucking time ago so I could have used the alimony to pay for college. If that sounds harsh, well, let's just say that now I am too old to be a recipient of child support, I have dreams about using their life insurance instead. But don't think me a greedy bottom feeder; if you grew up in a family where your sister raised you while your mother locked herself in a room doing homework all day then you'd feel less than appreciative toward your parents too. Allow me to reiterate that slightly for better effect; my mother went to college in her thirties while I was a child. I never saw her. My sisters and great grandmother were more a mother than she ever has been, and my father, well that's irrelevant right now. Now had my mother used her education to make life better for her kids I would have understood, but to become a teacher? And a middle school teacher at that. In a town full of stupid little kids and minorities who have it beat into their heads that they're worthless already. What a waste of life my mother is.

Go ahead and say that I should love her because she gave me life. Anyone who brings a child into this world and then ignores him and only him and not her other children deserves to burn in Dante's ninth circle of Hell. I live veritably well if you consider being stuck in community college in a house of two people you hate "well." I have trust issues like none you've ever seen. I fall in love and hate myself for it because I just want a fucking maternal influence in my life. I have manic depression and that's all well and good unless your parents come from an age where mental disorders require more "stop being a sissy" than "here's your Zoloft I hope you get better." Mostly the love thing hurts. Teenage angst is an obvious necessity in our lives, but there's angst and then there's torment. The worst thing to do to someone with all these complexes is ignore them.

I have two friends at the moment who I would trust with my life. One I have been friends with since I was nine, the other is a beautiful, amazingly talented, smart, and funny girl who I am proud to be considered a friend of. Between them there's not one thing I have hidden in my life. Neither of them can fathom it. Neither of them can say they've been there, because everyone's unique in their own minuscule way. But you know what? It doesn't matter. Friends are there to be a crutch in the bad times and a boost in the good times. For me, they keep me fairly centered on the manic depressive scale, what most people consider normal. Though, when you think about it, if you can understand, and I don't expect you to, there's no real "normal" for people like me. There's only really shades of insanity, the most "normal" of them all being that mundane gray-shaded apathy. The most wonderful feeling for people like me; to not have to care, to not be ABLE to care. To just live, to watch the ships sink, and neither sink nor swim, but to just. . . Exist.