• Why I Never Want a Relationship.

    I don’t know exactly why I’ve never wanted a relationship. I guess it’s because of my retarded childhood.

    I have just…never been interested. Well… that’s a lie, actually. Like all little girls raised in modern American society, I grew up wanting to be just like my mommy. Married to a great, loving man. A couple kids running around. The dream for every little babe at the age of three.

    Blind and innocent to the world around me I missed the pained look in her eyes whenever I went around spouting that. Honestly, who’d want to grow up with ******** up memories and so many skeletons in their closet? Who’d want to be screwed up in the head like her? Pain mixed with the pleasure and happiness of the few moments when I loved her. But like all first dreams it faded. Broken to bloody pieces by the world’s most hated and feared slave driver who goes by the name of “reality“.

    When I was eight -or was it nine?- years old my parents called me into the kitchen of the house I had lived in for nearly five years. Now, a few years ago, I could recall every detail of the house. Which stairs creaked the loudest, the worst places to squeeze behind when playing hide-and-seek, every crack in the sidewalk to watch out for. I knew where every door, chair, and desk was in all three levels of my big, middle-class palace of suburbia. If I went blind, I could navigate through my home as if I had never lost my precious vision at all. Each and every staircase would no doubt be conquered.

    But now, just after my thirteenth birthday, I cannot even tell you how many windows were in the front part of the house, or the color of the upstairs bathroom floor. If I walked into that kitchen right now I could not tell you how many times I spilled a glass of milk on the floor, or how much trouble I got in for locking my cat in the pantry all day. Even the sharpest, most painful memories are dull now and I hate it. I hate, hate, hate it.

    Before then I was what the me as of now would refer to as a spoiled, rotten, selfish, uncaring, stupid, little pig that anyone had ever laid eyes on. I was innocent, but not. I looked at porn sometimes, not for pleasure, but out of curiosity. I bitched and screamed and wailed if things didn’t go my way -or, sometimes, for nothing at all- and I thought absolutely nothing of it. I never once thought to myself, “Hey, maybe other people have lives too? Maybe the whole ******** universe doesn’t revolve around me? And maybe mom and dad don’t have an endless supply of patience, love, or money?”.

    I was still a rather quirky child. I did weird things, thought weird things. So, the day my mother sat me down in that rather blurry kitchen, you won’t be surprised what thought crossed my mind. It’s really the most ******** up thing. Really. The only memory that still cuts as sharp as a fresh razor on my skin. It makes my heart throb even now as I type. I’m bleeding now, and it hurts so bad that I want to cry. I want to scream and thrash and break something. The screen I stare at should be getting blurry. My eyes should be burning and watery with salty tears at their corners.

    But they’re not.

    I want to cry. I want to scream.

    But I can’t.

    They called me to the kitchen that day. Both of my parents. I loved both of them, and I had never thought of the fighting or the screaming that always took place within my home. I was raised on it. Thought it was a normal activity on a “couple’s” agenda. I did as told, for the way they called me out was so demanding…so scary, that no child dare disobey. I grew up with drunks as well. My whole family. I never knew what “drunk” was. I just thought they acted silly a couple of nights out of the week.

    I walked into the kitchen where my mother sat at the old wooden table, in one of our old wooden chairs. Funny what things you actually do remember, eh?

    “Get me a beer, will you?”

    It was normal for her to ask that so I did as told. But they way she was. She was already drunk of course, but I didn’t know that then. Her deep, dark eyes never met mine. Although I was a brat, I still was human. I loved my mom, I never wanted to see her eyes so sad as they were that day. I would’ve much rather had her pissed off and abusing me every night, hurting me, even killing me. The sadness, it was too terrifying. Maddening.

    As I extended my small, stubby arm and opened the fridge something dark and foreboding flitted across the back of my mind. This was the knife that nicked me. The small cut turning, eventually, into a big, never-ending, monstrously, obnoxiously, hideous black hole. It sucked the happiness out of me slowly, like an invisible parasite. It’s amazing…what that one little thought did to me. How it altered me.

    It wasn’t anything out of the ordinary. I always thought weird stuff as a kid. So, when I actually did think it in my head, I thought nothing of it. Just another stupid bubble floating about. But as I removed the Budweiser from the cool refrigerator, it latched onto me.

    ‘Please don’t be getting a divorce…’

    It was pleading, sad voice. Like the embodiment of pain and sorrow speaking to me, whispering in my ear.

    I’m not lying. I didn’t alter the memory, the thought, just to make it fit into this rant. That’s exactly what raced across my conscious mind at that moment when I opened the fridge. That’s why it hurts me so, why it’s ripping me to shreds at this very moment. You may think it’s a stupid memory, some stupid teen fling. Yes, I have my angsty moments, I can be very emotional as well, but this memory isn’t something that I’ll remember for a few years and forget. Like a shadow it follows me, never too far away to cause mischief. Happy days; it likes to steal those away. Memorable moments; loves to ruin them. Dreams; crushes them. Relationships; ends them before they even begin.

    I gave her the beer but she just sat there. I took a seat and it was only a few agonizingly long moments before she leaned forward and said the dreaded words: “We’re getting a divorce.”

    I snapped then and there at the table. I could have probably made record time for the fastest person to cry. They just spilled, instantly and unstoppably from my eyes. Dripping and falling. I won’t go into further detail of that day because I cringe to think of the sappy moments I had with my family after that.

    That’s me: Embarrassed to be emotional. Embarrassed to love.

    It isn’t just this memory that diverts me from a relationship. It’s my older sister as well. We have an unnatural difference in age since we were both accidents. Eight years apart. That’s a lot for most “normal” families. By the time I was six she was already in high school, mixed in with all that boy trouble. She’s a natural blonde, I’m a brunette. Hence her occasional stupidity and sweetly tainted innocence. Another rose with hidden thorns.

    My mother had her when she was only sixteen. She beat my sister and actually threw her down a flight of stairs once when she was drunk. So my sister cut as a teenager. Her legs. She always wore pants to cover the scars. When her boyfriend broke up with her one time she attempted suicide. Right in front of six-year-old me.

    It was nighttime. Mom and dad were “out”. She was watching me, she was crying. I asked why, but she only screamed at me to go to bed. Crybaby I was, but afraid of a spanking (which I was in dire need of anyhow), I crawled into bed, watching her in the mirror of the bathroom across the hall. I watched her take pills. Mommy took those sometimes when she had a bad headache. Maybe sissy had a headache, a big one. She downed the whole bottle of aspirin and who knows what else. I had fallen asleep by then.

    The next morning we were in the car. I asked why sissy was still in her pajamas, why she was holding her tummy, groaning and crying. They just said she was sick and they would take her to the doctor’s while I was at school. The doctor would fix sissy. He would help her.

    As expected, she overdosed on pills. Got her stomach pumped. Stayed in the hospital for days, maybe weeks, I don’t remember. She had a therapist who was “entirely too happy” as she put it. My sister is also the reason why I don’t like doctor’s offices or airports of any kind. But that’s for another time.

    After that experience she attempted suicide a few more times when other boys left her. She was just a stupid teenage girl, but what did I know? All I do know, though, is that I’ve seen her cry way too many times to want a love of my own. What’s the point in love if someone’s just going to poison it with their riffraff?

    Since then I’ve slowly become a bottom feeder. I live in the darkness, I have no friends, dread going to school each day. I don’t like talking to people because I am too lazy to hold a conversation. I crawl into my cozy shell which I call my “iPod” and tune everything out. Music reminds me that other people have things so, so, so much worse off than I do, but only until the song ends.

    I’m not so bad about remembering now. I’m actually hoping that one day I can move somewhere warm, not cold and lifeless like this place. When I ride my bicycle in the sweet, tropical air I won’t remember the cold, biting, icy wind of this place. The bitter, angry memories. When I’m at a photo shoot for my latest novel I’ll smile something real because I never lived this life, never grew up so ******** up and stupid. The “Kathryn” I write about will be a fictional character that everyone reads about in the books they buy. The character they all will write to me about, will fantasize over. Not the person they think wrote that damn hunk of paper.

    It’s mostly these things now that prevent me from getting my first boyfriend (or girlfriend), from getting my first kiss, and my first laugh of pure happiness. But in six years, ten years, the main reason I will go on with my life alone and secluded will be because of the reason I stated to my mother and sister yesterday afternoon.

    The reason why I never want and will never have a relationship is because…

    Why I will die so cold is because…

    Why I will definitely die alone is because…

    “I’m too lazy to keep up with the maintenance of a relationship.”


    -Kathryn Rose
    April 11, 2010