Of Mice and Failure.

As much as I like to pretend that I have it all together, truth is I am always hanging on by a thread. Ani Difranco said it best, “As bad as I am, I’m proud of the fact that I’m worse than I seem.”

I have been officially divorced for a short time. The whole process has been like pulling a deeply rooted plant out of the pit of my lungs. I’ve had to find strength down in me to remove myself from a dysfunctional marriage and now I am trying to have the courage to write about it through nonfiction which, let me tell you is a task for me, a poet.

I feel like I have been hiding behind my poems during this whole process. Not to knock poems at all. I love them. They provide an outlet where I can tell as much or as little as I want to about my life. I know my pain and confusion has come out in my poems but for me, to just say Hey, this is REALLY hard for me has seemed impossible to do. And frankly, a bit weak.

I feel that a stigma can surround someone who is divorced. People who might want to date me, acquaintances, the barista or even friends could wonder What did SHE do wrong? I believe there to be a self-imposed stamp on my forehead that says I’ve failed.

Now, I know I didn’t fail at marriage alone. It takes two to tango and all that but there are times when things get hard with regular life and that is when I miss having a partner in life, such as, I have mice in my apartment. I have lived here for a year and a half and the mice show up this month. My lease is up and I am just grossed out. I’ve tried to trap them but nothing. I have no bodies as evidence. And with no evidence of dead mice and continued “surprises,” I feel I can’t go on living here. It seems silly to move but having mice droppings in my drawers makes me feel like a failure of a mother. I have failed to provide my son with a safe and healthy home.

It also makes me wish I had a person that I could still bounce fears and situations like this off of. You can’t do that with a guy you casually date because 1) you don’t want him to know you live somewhere with mice and 2) leaning on someone in that sort of domestic crisis could scream “I want to be serious.” Which may or may not be the case, but shit, it’s a game out there and I’m not up for playing. It's 'take me or leave me' time.

Heavy boxes depress me. The idea of moving to a new apartment makes me cringe. I have to figure out if I can handle it all cause frankly, the divorce and the ex-boyfriend “Section V” have shot my nerves all to hell.

So, I guess what I am saying is: I want to be able to look fear in the eye. But I have: every day for the past 2 years. I’m tired. And saying this in prose makes it seems more real.

In the poem version of this blog, there are mice machinists, torturing the feet of women and we then turn to the sad longing gaze of a hungry cat. Autumn leaves cover the ‘lost hope,’ disguised here as a fallen pet rat, run over by a bicycle. He blinks at the clouds as his life gives way. Somewhere, a clock strikes eleven.