Flashes Before Your Eyes: I

Everybody Hurts

I was standing in the living room of my girlfriend’s family home. Her mother was venting about all her life’s troubles. Work, bills, her son’s inability to follow the rules, her husbands drinking. She was burnt out. It was just her and I in the house and it seemed like she didn’t really have anyone to talk to, at least not like that. She started getting more and more agitated as she continued describing what increasingly felt like a living nightmare. The emotion pouring out a little more with each breath. Until it exploded into,

“Sometimes I wish I could just slit my wrists!” She made the up and down motion on the inside of her forearms. Both of them. She made a point to furiously act it out. She meant it. It was so real that the energy of it cut through everything in the room like it was alive.

I barely knew this women. It was early on in the relationship with her daughter and I was just starting to get to know the family. I went into a strange sort of stupor or shock. I still remember the feeling. Not like anything I had experienced before. I paused for a second, which of course felt like an eternity. Then I did the only thing that seemed to make sense in the moment. I tried to give her a hug.

“Don’t touch me!” She barked, as she back up with her hands in the air like I was mugging her.

I think she walked away after that. I don’t quite remember. The memory gets fuzzy from there.

I think that fucked me up as much as it was fucking her up. I had to hold onto that for a long time. Kept it to myself of course. It was our little secret. A strange burden for me. She was cruel for a very long time after that. The whole time after that. The whole eight years of my relationship with her daughter, after that. I often wondered if it was because of that moment. That I knew something about her that no one else did. Something she was incredibly ashamed of. The years she spent talking down to me, teasing, and picking fights, I spent trying to find elegant ways to help her, without her knowing I was doing it. She wasn’t good at accepting help, or admitting she needed it in the first place.

I don’t think she ever did heal that part of herself.

To this day it’s one of those memories that won’t go away. Every now and then it reminds me of its dense presence in my psyche as it rears up unexpectedly from a dark corner of my mind. “Sometimes I just wish I could slit my wrists!” It was her eyes, tears pouring out, with a hopeless terror screaming out of the edges of her blue grey irises.

Something I haven’t been able to let go of for some reason. The image is burned in. It lives there and will continue to live there for a long time I imagine.

I think maybe I’m stuck with it because there was nothing I could do. Nothing I can do for someone who doesn’t want it done. I knew a lot of people that hurt like that. That felt trapped, alone, scared, and miserable. And I kept their secrets, watching the pain pour out of them in ways most people couldn’t see. I felt useless for that. It was a lot of people. A lot of people that were always hurting.