WILLODEAN (THE CUPITOR CHRONICLES Book 1) (30 page)

I should be thankful, nonetheless. I have a good job and it keeps me busy. I’m a customer service representative at the bank. It pays the bills, plus it keeps my mind from dwelling that I’m single, alone, without a man. Doomed to be a
garden lady who talks to birds.  I also discovered the world has no
favor on singles. Everybody is a couple, a plateau of twos, two plates, two glasses, double beds, reservations for two, matinee for two,
blah-dee-blah-blah.  Singles are an outcast.  We are
scarred, marked, damaged. People look at us with strange faces as if we are terribly barren, separate, unrepairable and dysfunctional without a mate. “Oh…poor thing” they say, “I’ll pray for you to find someone.” Or “I know a guy to fix you up with.” Or “Honey child, you need to find a man.” Or “It’s been
how
long since you’ve had sex?” The sex one usually sends them into a tizzy and they declare me as damaged as they come, top of the heap. 
 

Not once do they talk about me as a woman, a whole person,
and what I have to offer.  It’s
always about what I’m missing, what I lack, what I NEED! 
Need
. I hate that word too and have added it to my repulsed list of hate words banned from my dictionary, scratched out, cursed. 
The main topic of conversation is finding a nice man, hooking me up with a good man, what I’ll do when I find the right man, not making a mistake and dating the wrong man, dating several men at one time, going to church to find a good man, and lastly, and most desperately of all, and only as a last resort, hitting the bars to find 
any
 man. Prerequisite? 
Breathing.
 

GOD! It’s no wonder women are pressured to mate and end up totally screwed and marrying the wrong men. We l
isten to other people’s advice when we should trust ourselves. 
They don’t have to bear the results of those decisions, 
we do.
 I swear if one more coworker tries to set me up on a blind date again, I’m going to jerk them over this desk and hip whip the hell out of them, Midge Mayhem style. I mean, for Pete’s sakes—I barely know who I am—so what makes them think I have the time, the effort or the freaking brain power to get to know some other stranger and kiss his ass so he can love me back?

“But don’t you miss being intimate with a man?” they ask.
Intimate?
  What the fuck is that?  I know sex.  I don’t have a damn clue what intimacy is.  What is love for that matter?  Do we know?  All the dating advice chit-chat is driving me nuts.  The alone time is driving me nuts.  It makes me think too much and when I think too much, things get out of control.  But other times, in the quiet moments, when I am at my most peaceful self—she
slips in. 

The little girl tracks me down inside the house, in the Seven
room, mostly. 
We crawl up inside our crackle shell and
ponder things.  We try to sort things out from the perspective we see, feel, and hear.  She takes my hand sometimes, and we wander the house,
through various rooms to so
rt and seek, learn and remember, explore.  The Seven room is our favorite because both of us can’t wait to be whole and complete, fingers touching,
Seven
.  Sometimes, it seems so far away, a twinkle of star barely visible, fading into the night. 

When I wasn’t at work, I tried to stay busy.  I cleaned my
house, rearranged furniture, painted walls, planted new flowers or pulled up weeds.
For some reason, I can’t sit still.  The peaceful feeling I used to have has left and I am on edge constantly.  Th
e Dumas of Umbra quakes and rumbles
and I am clumsy on my feet. 
I should have known it was a warning.

I was in the closet de-cluttering
junk when a box fell off the top shelf.  Branson’
s body fell out of it, collectively in about a hundred pieces.
Why couldn’t he stay
where I left him? 
 His bare bones, his enticing flesh, his hound dog eyes.
My skin gave off hungry vibes. 
Sexy Kodak squares of Branson glare up at me—telling me things I didn’t want to hear—showing me things I didn’t want to see. His eyes said he was waiting on me to return, kiss him on the cheek, wrap my arms around him, say I’m sorry and then make love. After I caught my breath
and wiped the animalistic scent off my skin, I discarded the thoughts.  Put them away—out of my mind. 
Where are my matches?
Torch him, burn it
down, house be damned.  I could do that, sure,
but that was compulsive crazy Willodean overreacting. That's the thing about therapy, bones are always dug up.
The skeletons clatter and clack until they’re dealt with.  

I am a reactionary.
 
Over-reactor.
 

When chaos hits, instead of reac
ting impulsively, as I used to do or rather wanted to do because it felt incredible better, like releasing atomic energy on a desert.  It just felt better.  But the aftereffects are tragic. 
BURN IT DOWN! I
want a match right now to burn it all up.  But no—no, I can’t do that.  I’m supposed to stop.  C
almly take a few deep breaths like some stupid yoga freak. BURN IT DOWN! 
My emotions are wild.  I am so close to blowing. 
Why did I keep the pictures of him anyway? Why didn’t I throw them away months ago? What is wrong with you Willodean?
Tho
ughts waiver in and out and it hits me suddenly and without warning.  My knees buckled to the carpet.  A meteor, a
panorama of left over gunk
spews out of me.   

 ***

Only a few weeks and it would be final.
The fairytale forever girl was given a death sentence of divorce. 
For family and friends it was just another reason to baffle me with bullshit. Offer advice, encourage me to get on with my life, gird up your bootstraps, move on, and experience what’s out there, yada-yada. 
How the hell do they know what's best for me? 
How could they possibly understand what I was feeling? 
All I could feel was spent, emotionally exhaustion, unloved, unwanted, failure, crippled and pissed off. 
Sure, clearly I
was
damaged, but being labeled a divorcee was
not
on the fairytale list.
Marriage meant something to me.  It was an end to my aloneness, my alienated existence, and my wayward wanderings. It was everything to me to be married.  To be loved.  So yes, it
ticked me off to no end that people could easily say,
“Willodean, just move on girl.  Plenty of fish in the sea.” 

Fuck you fish in the sea people.  Fuck you all.
And that’s when I went into my shell. Me
and the little girl isolated ourselves inside our little house of horrors, all alone.  Single.  Alone.  We watched
reruns of sappy love stories
and cried rivers of tears that flooded the hallways and overrun the waterfalls.  We consumed
enormous amounts of Blue Bell and liquor. I made my own topping, ch
ocolate syrup mixed with cognac.  I call
it Triple D’s, short for 
drunk-divorced-don’t give a damn
. 
The more you eat the less you give a shit.
When I wasn’t hoarding food in massive consumptions, I was in nuclear meltdown mode. It was easy to spill over into the darkness of the house inside me, occupying each insidious room as a punishment, a house guest re-visiting the perils of regret. The Amodgian shadows welcomed me back, knowing my bitter struggles and bouts of insanity. They’ve had plenty of opportunity to watch, study and observe me since my birth. 
Yay me!
 
I’m a haunted little house of horrors.
 
Just as an over-abundance of light can cause blindness, an abundance of dark can cause chaos. 
After long periods of isolation, swept up inside the Dumas of Umbra, I would storm out, half mad, in a blind, shattering rage, acting out and releasing something wild and growing inside me, 
unnamable
. 

I am a reactor. I over-react.
 And since I didn’t know how to deal with such raw emotions, the pent up desires, unyielding lust and hunger came spilling out. I
roamed, devoured and consumed anything and everything in my path.  The loneliness unbearable.  The
gaping black hole inside me cried
for filling.  I walked a long tight rope,
suspended over a dark abyss, wobbly, and unsure of myself, no steady ground, no soil or substance to grip my feet, no arms to cling to, no connections to attach myself—alone with nothing but the constant wake of falling, lapsing into a tunnel of twilight without moon, stars without light, blinded in dark, forced to live with the damned and then die, without ever being loved. The vacant arms of the man pillow was not enough.
I allowed strange men into my bedroom, to come and go.  I seduced and ravaged like a wild animal. 
I cared not to know their names, only to feel their bodies next to mine, skin to skin, a fleshly touch, or a
heartbeat to know I was alive.  But every day I felt deader, colder, a numbness more than feeling alive. 

The upheaval of my life played out in two extremes; either I was completely isolated and withdrawn, hoarding up inside the house inside me, nullified by morbid shadows or I was a wild hellion walking the tight rope of anything dangerous and destructive, men with no names, dark doorways and allies, frisky hands and drunken breathes. Defiant, rebellious and
with no sense of balance as if the world spun and took me with it. 

No was not in my vocabulary.  It would not form a word in my lips.  It is not that I didn’t want to say no—it was that I couldn’t.  It was stuck inside the house, in a locked room, no access, couldn’t locate it but knew it was there.  I remember in my upheaval of darkness, while I acted out the terrible inside me, the whole time, the little girl is
screamed
the word out loud and so passionate and painful she loses her voice. 
“NO!” She
screamed.  “Say NO.”  She
wrote it on the walls, acted it out in sign language and carved it in the floors. She screamed it for me, in me, of me and beyond me, a thousand times over, before, during and after the terrible awful. Her screams tipped over into my night terrors. Her screams echoed down hallways and pinged off window panes, never releasing its noise, going in circles, spinning and coll
apsing, absorbing into her skin, unable to penetrate my own. 
It was during these times I fought the worst of my madness, unable to control the wild unnamed adult that had to flee the curses of her own genetic makeup. What’s important to note is that I only remember these things now—because I wrote them down on the blue line inside the black notebook, called the book of pain. Reading it is eye opening. And scary as hell. It’s like I’m reading about some other girl. A very frightening mad woman. I’m a drug induced adrenalin man-junkie that needed a constant fix. A woman that would not touch the pain.
Only circle the mountain of pain, over and over, coming close, so close, tracing the scars, feeling it in trickles and then it takes over and the woman runs.  It is all she knows.  The aloneness takes over, t
he neediness overbearing, void, empty. Her need for affection, to be love, and touched is primal and consuming. One after another, man after man.
Each one leaves her empty. 
 
Black widow—temptress—seducer.
 
That was me.  I leaned on men
like big skyscrapers, only to find out they were weak towers, wobbly and
no stability, cracked foundations, fractured hearts.  They fell and took me with them, crumbling to rubble. 
If I wasn’t sucking up some unsuspecting man, I was dying my hair to attract one. I’ve been a redhead, a blonde, and various shades of brunette, never satisfied with the woman in the mirror. My frustrated hair dresser told me verbatim, “Honey. It’s not a hair problem—it’s a heart problem.” I
glared at her as if she just dyed my hair blue.  I stormed out, pissed as all get out
and commenced to do it myself. 
What does she know?
When I fried my hair and looked identical to the mad scientist on 
Back to the Future
, I figured she knew a lot more than I did. So I surrendered. And when I say surrendered, I mean, moved on to something else. 
This was my life.
Wreck something and try something else. 
A replacement fix. Another addiction.
 Maw Sue’s words haunt me.

“The enemy has prepared an addiction for you.”

I have more than my fair share. 
I am my own addiction.
 I went on compulsive shoppin
g sprees, wiping out paychecks in one weekend, buying stuff I didn’t need or could afford. 
The temporary high would plummet to regret. The material object lost its luster. I’d be right back where I started. Broke, half mad, stringy hair and surrounded by a lot of crap. The house inside me shook, rumbled and quaked on its foundation and the little girl screamed, “No.”
while she ached in the pain that was me.  She cried, “
Make the pain go away. Love me, save me. Help me.
” 
I could not save her. Hell—I couldn’t save myself.