imagine we are in a diner, the kind with the formica table that has little bits of glitter in it, we can be in a high backed booth, fake leather, and I am sitting in front of you with my left leg bent and my chin resting on my knee. I’m going to tell you everything so get a refill for both of us when the waitress comes round agin, ok? Ok:

Honestly what a shit show, one thing went wrong and then another, it got so it was almost funny, what catastrophe next? It was a long time coming but I wasn’t ready at all for the speed of it, the marriage that fell apart, the thinking I was loved (yes, really!) and then finding that was some secret third thing that wasn’t quite right or enough, losing that too, my brother stopped speaking to me, and then all that shit with my mother - first the dementia and then the cancer, one thing after another until I thought ok you know what? I fucking can’t anymore. This is without even mentioning the fucking bills that kept coming, like they were lying in wait til I was blooded and weak, and come they did to take their little bites with their awful fucking teeth.

No of course the kids don’t know that part — you know I swore they wouldn’t grow up like I did, everything so precarious. I handled it and handled it and then I couldn’t anymore and then, I just cried, a lot. In the car, listening to music mostly, during the stupid hot yoga class (I know, right?) that maybe saved my life, in the dark with strangers, I cried. It was less crying than leaking, the grief of it all, it was bigger than me and I spilled it everywhere i went. You know how you used to say ‘I hope you are well’, I would think yeah, I’m fucking well, well done more like, stick a goddamn fork in me and take me out of the oven already, enough! So you know I didn’t lose my sense of humour; I know where and who I come from.

The worst, the absolute worst was knowing it isn’t ever going to be better exactly, just different, and the different is shit too - my mother will get worse, physically and mentally and the only thing that will stop this slide is her death, can you fucking imagine? This is the respite, and it’s bullshit. Once I realised it I couldn’t unthink it and that was when maybe when things were bleakest, like how am I meant to keep going? And I have to keep going and I don’t want to.

You know me though, I’m fucking crafty. A week ago I figured out how to take off the grief and put it back on inside out. No one loves me, not like that, anymore. But someone did, and someone therefore could, and maybe someone else will. And I deserve it, not because everyone deserves to be seen in some generic way, but me, especially, me — some days with all my years tied to my tail like a string of dented cans, dragging them over the cobblestones, some days with those years like garlands of flowers in my arms. Me in all my complications. I’m worth it, have always been worth it and I know it now, and whoever didn’t realise that, well, that’s their fucking problem, not mine. And wearing my inside-out grief sweater i am reaching out to people, I’m wearing my heart on my inside-out sleeve, who can hurt me more than any of this shit, I ask you. What I am saying is I’m taking good risks and some good people are meeting me where I stand. My mother is herself, true, this whole business has knocked all the sharp corners off of her, but I like this gentler version, also (also. not instead of, no) because the other one could cut without even trying. This one lets me be an imperfect daughter just as I am, lets me cook for her, and lets me make her laugh. She loves to see me chin up and fighting, so I do, I am, you know I’ve always been a scrappy little bastard, and that hasn’t changed.

When I wokred in the hotel restaurant as a green girl (how green? So green that when the front desk clerk would stand too close behind me and mutter filth and smell my hair I couldn’t fix my mouth to tell him to piss off, no fuck off, I just endured it. Green; fourteen.) there was one disaster shift when it was total chaos, real calamity and I was rushing around frantic, and the pastry chef grabbed my arm and said stop trying to keep up, you can’t. Just move slowly and get things done. So now, on the days when it’s all too fucking much I just move slower.

So what I’m saying is, yeah, I’m actually fucking happy, and often; in the middle of all this shit and chaos and heartbreak, what else would I ever be? Can you believe it? Now you go, I want to hear everything — but order me a monte cristo, I’m so fucking hungry I could eat two, I swear.

See if i don’t.

subtitle taken from Kim Addonizio’s life saving and fucking genius poem, To the Woman Crying Uncontrollably in the Next Stall