do you believe you can walk on water?

You wish more than ever you could go back in time
for the briefest of moments,
time key in hand with chain around your neck
to tell 18 year old you
you will get away from her and never look back.
your life will begin again at 32.
you can finally start to heal.

For the first time in 22 years you're
not suicidal and you're
not patting your back pocket
to make sure that the plan you wrote out
when you were 10 and 1/2
maybe 11
is still tucked away in there.
You don't have to look at death
as a way to escape anymore.
You found the light 🕯 at the end of the tunnel,
and it wasn't an oncoming train with
no whistle to blow to let you know it was coming
but trees and mountains and air
you could breathe without any worry.

For the first time you could see colour.
Not just colour but how vibrant leaves on trees could be.
The reds and oranges and golds
the colours you find inside a flame once lit
as they swirl all around when they fall,
dancing as you join in, the wind carrying you both along.
your life is allowed to begin the trees whisper,
as nature tries its best to heal you, return to Mother Earth
so the river can lick at and heal your wounds, these
ever-violent gashes on your heart that you insist will never heal.
they will heal, with time, with effort and with work.

You want to ask Mother Earth why you should hunger
for someone you've never once had.
She cradles you close in her arms and whispers,
Every child deserves to have the very thing you seek.
Sometimes you have to find it in people you would least expect.
Moms you've learned don't have to give birth to you in order to love you,
they will take you as their own without any problem and love you.
Mother, such a cold word for something supposedly so warm,
ends up leaving every single room with a chill in the air
for her barely beating heart is completely frozen.

It's okay to knock the statue of ice over,
watch the ice shatter into shards that quickly turn to water.
Puddles on the ground that will eventually dry like the
tears that leave salty trails down your cheeks.
For once you don't have to contemplate drowning and
for once you don't have to contemplate death or dying or
how delicate life and living can be and how easily it can be taken.
A snap of the fingers and she lost you but
with another snap of the fingers someone else gained you.
family doesn't have to share blood to be family.
family doesn't have to share blood in order to love you.
family loves and respects you just as you are,
flaws and scars and pockmarks.

You've lost nothing, darling... You've gained and regained everything.
She is the one who's lost everything...and will never regain it again.

There's bits of ash floating through the air
smell of smoke and something burning in the air.
Is it a wildfire in a distant land?
On the other side of the country? No,
it's the smell of the bridges she burned.
She holds up the matches and cries out about
how it's you who committed this arson
even though she reeks of gasoline and
reeks of accelerant.
No one believes her, little girl who always cries wolf.
You watch the flames get closer and closer to her and know--

There is one witch that deserves to be burned.
You turn away as the flames begin to consume her.

Growing up what I had in life was
living in a house that was inherited that
ended up in complete shambles and filled with awful memories because of
mismanaged finances on both of my parents’ parts and their unhappy marriage that resulted in
three kids my father loved and two my “mother” had no ability to love at all
one Golden Child on the way to becoming a covert narcissist himself and
two Scapegoats, one of whom is disowned, the other is on their way to S. S. Disinherited
paternal family that absolutely hated my egg donor
probably for a good reason, they could sense her evil
maternal family that outside of a few were complete strangers
the happiest memories I have as a child all involve the Homestead
aka my maternal grandparents’ house
any other place just gave me a fuckton of trauma
my Catholic school
the Catholic church
my psychiatrist’s office
my town
and getting out of New Jersey is something I never once regretted

Here are the things that I lost out on because of my egg donor:
actual family relationships with extended family that wasn’t hers (and even then it was select extended family)
having an actual childhood filled with going to friends’ houses, hanging out with friends, riding a bike, doing regular kid things and it was all heavily discouraged because
I was going to be Egg’s “caregiver” and had been since I was 10 years old because
at 56 my dad died and she refused to cope and opted to try and erase him and
she refused to help anyone else cope either because everything is always all about her and
I lost out on five years with my brother because she manipulated and completely gaslit me whenever he came up in conversation and she forced me to cut him off and
she didn’t ever want me to have any romantic relationships because it meant that the focus would no longer be on her but on someone else and
against all fucking odds I ended up finding someone and she’s once again refused to cope and opted to try and erase her and
I am tired of my growth being stunted and my life being put on hold because she won’t fucking adult and there are
two ways out of this for me and one ends with me no longer existing and once again I must point out that
she would make my funeral all. about. her. and her grief. and pretend that my wife doesn’t exist

So here’s my plan for the best revenge I could have at this point:
buy a house for the same price as this one or a bit more that is
way nicer (and cuter!) than this hellhole and
makes me feel at peace with myself because it's
my home–not a house but an actual home–that belongs to me and my wife and our cats that
we can decorate as we please and
fill with happy memories involving our family and our friends instead of living in some isolated bubble.

Everything I never had growing up.

One neighbour at #7, who declined to give her name when asked, removed the cigarette from her mouth and exhaled the smoke downwind.
"Ain't that what you do with broken or otherwise rotten eggs? Toss 'em in the garbage? You can't do nothing with them!"
"Cracked and rotten eggs are good for throwing at someone's house before TPing it," one of the neighbourhood kids chimed in. He was missing some baby teeth.
"In all seriousness though," continued the woman with the cigarette, "that woman is always causing problems with my grandkids. Like I'm trying my best to keep 'em in line, but it's hard, you know? This is what happens when you don't got no rugrats of your own, you can't relate. Kids are gonna be kids! They're gonna cause mischief but it's not like they're targeting her specifically or being outright malicious. They're not breaking her windows or anything."
A girl with pink shoes looked at the ground when we questioned her about her neighbour at #5.
"The other two people in the house are nice," she said, her voice soft and quiet. "They ask us nicely to stop doing things and we do. They say thank you. We don't like bothering them. But that old lady is mean."
"I feel so bad for the tenants living with her," the kids' grandmother remarked. "The way she is with my grandkids, I can only imagine how she is with other people."
-- CRACKED EGG: A MENACE, page 2 of Mid-Hudson Times Daily News

"You're gonna throw me out like a piece of garbage!"

Says the woman who wanted to do that exact thing to me
and my brother Michael
as soon as I was freshly out of high school
and therefore no longer her "burden" to carry.
Although I think she preferred to call us "losers" and
"degenerates" and "useless good-for-nothings" since
that's what she used back then.

"If anything happens to me then it's your fault because you left me!"

Isn't what abusers tell their victims
so they will feel too guilt-ridden to leave
and continue to be emotionally exploited
all for the abuser's gain?
Do you think H was going to allow you
to continue that exploitation?
Oh. Right. My mistake.
I'm not fucked up enough to have the disorder
that resulted in his existence
because if you say "you were never abused"
then that must be the truth, right?
like a little kid shutting her eyes tight in the dark
insisting that the sun is shining bright as you
feel your skin begin to blister
not from the ultraviolet rays but from the
toxic sludge your lies leave in their wake.

Curiouser and curiouser...

Listen, Eggikins, I'mma level with you.
If you are unable to care for yourself then guess what happens? 
You're gonna have to get APS or some kind of social worker involved.
(Yeah, really!)
It's not gonna be up to me,
or Michael,
or Rob
(assuming he keeps in contact with you after a while) 
That's up to one person: you.

Your behaviour—
let me repeat that for you your behaviour
your behaviour made my life a living fucking hell
but you're going to deny that's the truth too and
your behaviour—
let me repeat that for you your behaviour
your behaviour is what drove me away
but you're going to deny that that's the truth too and
I know you'll glance over the fact that I broke free from your control
because the truth hurts Ego too much for you to bear so you just
completely ignore ignore ignore and try to
grapple for the leash flitting in the breeze like this is a game of
capture the flag
and you're the fool who thinks in ignorance that I will
willingly go back under the banner you continue to wave because
Ego, dear sweet Ego, says that you should.

My answer—no.
Nichts nein nyet no
iyada no
and you talk about how you won't be able to do
all of these things that fall under the
"basic house maintenance and upkeep" header line
and I ask, aloud, "Why don't you sell the house then?"
and you say, "No, I don't want to, it's not so simple and where will I live?"
to which I respond, "2400 square feet is a lot for just one person."

H takes the red I see every time I hear your voice and
smears it on the wall and I know that he wishes that red
that anger
were something else and something tangible
and I know that he wishes that red
that anger
were the result of his own anger at me having to survive and endure
and hide behind him like a kid behind their bodyguard their protector

And I'm tired of my wife coming into my room going,
"She's at it again," and all you're doing is
sitting in the living room chair
keeper of the crypt that is this house
and when I listen in I hear the toxic sludge go splat against the walls
because that is all that drips like nicotine in a smoker's house
when the ghostly woman downstairs spits her greyish green radioactivity
everywhere in the space we're both forced to occupy.

I'm tired of being held in my wife's embrace
as she holds me back from jumping the bannister
a wrestler on the ropes of the ring ready to pounce
and I am tired of being held in my alter's embrace
as he holds my emotions back from unleashing from my mouth
holding my hair back as I vomit your toxicity as offering to an
uncaring porcelain god
for the third time this week.

Let me make one thing clear as a cloudless sky on a sunny day:
no amount of begging or pleading or bargaining
like stages of grief when your loved one is terminally ill
will make me chance my mind and
no amount of begging or pleading or bargaining
like stages of grief when your loved one passes from this life to the next
will stop me from doing what I feel is best for me and my wife.

It seemed there weren't a lot of people on ### Street who knew of Egg, and those who did didn't have the kindest of words to say about her. The homeowners of the house to her left, ###, ####, and ##### of 3 ### Street, looked at each other and shrugged when asked for comment.
"We knew of the two tenants who lived there," ### said. "We accidentally got their Amazon packages. We talked briefly and wanted to properly introduce ourselves, but never got the chance to."
"I hope they're okay but it must be pretty rough living there. From what I've heard from everyone else."
"She likes to go out in the mornings from what I've seen," #### said, "to stand on her porch and stare at the people in #7—kinda weird if you ask me—with her hands on her hips. Just stares. Like she's waiting for them to do something.