Trying to be Good

I have been trying to be good…it’s all a reaction to being certifiably bad, although I don’t know who signed the certificate. Technically, there wasn’t a certificate of badness. There was just being washed up on the shores of life, broken. No job, no home, no friends, family three thousand miles behind me and lost in their own chaos of living. My health was spread out on the sidewalk like puke drying in the morning sun, everyone stepping around it, holding their noses. My liver and thyroid were swollen, ulcers bleeding, severe tremors. It was all the work of the bastard inside me, no not that bastard, there was no pregnancy. Just a bitter, mean spit of a person who used to have the oval office inside my head, now just has a closet. He beat me to a thread of an existence. Hated me so much, he brought me within a sniff of death but wouldn’t let me go over, plunging head long into its abyss; he made me dangle on the edge of it. Don’t get me wrong, it’s not that he isn’t good, he’s merely misinformed, misguided and I am misunderstood. Well, not these days, now I’m a Ms., but then, I was amiss, a misstep, a mistake.

I once found a pickup truck abandoned in the middle of an intersection. The engine was off, the street was quiet. It was just coming on dawn in the late spring. Except for the carcass of a skinned dog in the back of that truck, it was empty. I was struck dumb and motionless, my mouth gaping like a fish’s out of water. I was overcome with vulnerability, I was exposed. The sun, just over the horizon, was a spotlight. Whoever did this was watching me, was laughing. They were enjoying it. And, if they could do this to a dog, then what would they do to a young woman, a woman like me? Dogs were valuable, more so than girls, I knew that. They still got beat, but nobody fucked them, nobody hated them. They were useful. But this bastard, he skinned a dog. It was unthinkable. I fled to the door of the twenty-four hour convenience store. It was locked. The clerk inside was sleeping, head down on the counter. “Show no fear, show no fear” I repeated to myself and walked swiftly out of the area.

That was just the start of it, my opinion of myself steadily decreased for another seven years after that. My isolation steadily grew. That’s when I came to the edge of death, the sweet smell of permanent oblivion tantalizing my senses, but I couldn’t let go. It was as if my foot was trapped behind me and another twenty years of bleak, grey, life, lingering stench of existence was closing in to envelop me. I couldn’t stand it. I said help, knowing I wasn’t deserving of help, knowing the door to help was closed, slammed on me years before when all I wanted was a moment of elusive peace, but I was too disgusting for even God to look upon. It was in that moment, that second of hopeless help pleading that it happened. God, the Holy Spirit, the wing of an angel, swept me up, wrapped me in a warm blanket and carried me to recovery. Then I wanted to be good. I wanted to be worth it. I wanted to be deserving of God’s love, of his compassion. Still ignoring the fact that I already was.