BAD LUCK BY KALEENA MADRUGA
You can come up with a bunch of
You have done bad things, but that doesn’t make you evil. You hurt me, but I hurt you in smaller, less obvious ways. We are young people who want love and comfort and acceptantance and that is ok. Forgiveness is very hard. It’s harder than people say it is. I didn’t have a car then, I had crashed it, and that was one of the things on my list of reasons, but I only lived a few blocks from PetSmart, so I patted Mia on the head and said I would be right back. When I stepped outside I felt like a traitor. My apartment was dingy and old, but it was surrounded by palm trees and was less than a ten minute bike ride to the beach. Every day the sun came out, and every day the temperature rested around 70. My life now has seasons, snowy days, rain. I’m warm and cold and comfortable and sweaty and chilly all in a year. But when I was living there, facing every day, I would squint at the sun like a vampire, deciding to stay in my room with the blinds drawn. I didn’t feel like I deserved the warmth. I don’t know if I looked sad but I was always lost and alone, on my walk to PetSmart, in my room
reasons to do something, and then a bunch of reasons not to. For me, it was because my cat Mia was hungry. She had been meowing at me from the foot of my bed, her green eyes pleading and angry. I think it took me a long time to recognize that my marriage was just an attempt at normalcy, the same way I thought I could will things into existence, the same way I thought I could force things into place. I remember thinking that everything would be so much easier if I just gave in and lived the way everyone on my phone did, the way all the girls from my high school did. I wanted to make my ex-husband into this evil person, this person who hurt me. I had only allowed myself to be the victim, to publicly be the one who had been hurt. It was so easy to point my finger at him and say: he cheated. It is much harder, it hurts more, to point a finger in a different direction and say: I am difficult. I am depressed. I am anxious. I am selfish.I have done bad things. I take up too much space. I need help. I look for validation. I want to be comforted.
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