All the Right Places

In times of great distress, I really appreciate my car. Your car loves you; she doesn't judge you; you can cry in the parking lot of your local Walmart at one in the morning and she'll take care of you. She'll take you wherever you need to go while your life falls apart in a matter of hours. All she asks for is gas, oil, and occasional maintenance. Hell, she doesn't even care that you stockpile garbage on the floor of the passenger seat and that there's an inch of grime on her exterior. She'll still create a bubble for you to escape the real world and let you catch your bearings.

Although I'm probably not doing this in the best of ways by binge eating a twelve pack of powdered donuts and an extra-large energy drink. My cell phone is underneath my passengers seat from when I threw it in anger. And now I can hear my phone vibrating two-hundred times per second from God knows who, and I can't do anything about it without moving from the driver's seat. I take another look at my car, garbage everywhere and dust coating my dashboard, the state of my car accurately represents my life at this moment.

I've never been in a worse place in my life. I have never sunk lower and never will.

The day had started as the best of my life. I couldn't remember a time where I had been happier, the times I thought were happy seemed dull compared to yesterday. I had always been melancholy person, I blame the childhood trauma, but yesterday I had briefly become the person I've always wanted to be. Undefined by the cards I've been dealt. Being free of my assigned burdens had felt like feeling the sun from both sides. I remember thinking yesterday, treasure this moment, this is the future you are working towards.

I knew that eventually the pleasant warmth I felt in that moment would fade when we parted for the day, but I couldn't predict the sun being ripped from me. I thought I could hold out. I was so sure. That I could survive seven more months, and then leave for college in a new city where I will never have to explain to my mother my dirty secret until my wedding. Then we can have that conversation. In a public place where she can't scream or hit me with a wooden spoon, with some backup, to calm her down when she inevitably starts speaking in Russian so the people around us can't understand her tell me what a disgrace I am.

You know, I've never met the big guy up there, I don't even think he exists, but I have a feeling that he'd want you, mother, to be more accepting of your lesbian daughter.

I don't even know what I'm doing. I'm sitting in a parking lot of a Walmart that had closed down an hour ago, watched all the cars leave, while sitting in silence and stuffing my face with disgusting food hoping the sweetness can cut through the dense fog in my head. With the cars gone, I just look at the cart stall, emptied by the night staff. A vague voice tells me somewhere, "just like your soul lol," but it sounds too far away to even sound like me. My eyes start watering again and I don't make any attempt to stop them falling. I'm cold and miserable but I refuse to start my car's engine until I know where I'm going. I am not wasting my gas.

Who knows where I'm going to sleep for the night? My mother's house is not an option. I don't have a father to go back to, the guy probably doesn't even know that he has a kid. I literally met my girlfriend a month ago, we're not close enough me for me to ask if I could rent a room. I reckon by now all of my aunts and uncles know that I'm, as one of my uncles have described non-cis-hets, "diseased," so that's not an option. I love my friends and they love me, but I don't know how long I'll be staying with them. I cannot put the burden of a fragile human being during her quarter life crisis, on teenagers, and parents who don't even know why I've been kicked out in the first place.

I see a chasm in front of me, and my face crumples, endless streams of tears stream down my face, I fold my knees to my chest and I audibly sob. I thought I had run out of tears when I did this exact thing an hour prior, but the thought of sleeping in my car, scared and alone, unleashed waves of sorrow locked in my chest. I'm truly alone. There's not a single car in this damn parking lot, and even if he did exist, the clouds are too heavy for him to see me. There's no one to witness my shame. No one to see the mascara and eyeliner dried all over my face, or my blonde, hair, clumped in places where I had pulled at my hair to feel something, other than this.