Rainy Days

So I did this for the Jbaz silent thought challenge. I did it in one sitting, no edits, but I did go over the word count by a couple hundred words. Oops! Great challenge though!

“How did I get here?”

She wondered to herself, staring blankly out of the window of her bus.

Another trip to work carless.

“34 years old and still no car.”

Sigh.

“What have I done with my life?”

It was a fairly rainy day, she sat silently for a moment listening to the rain hitting the window, wondering if it was her mood that brought it on.

And if she was being honest, her not having a car was the least of her problems. She felt so far behind compared to other people, like she has been playing catch up her whole life just to become a ‘normal’ human being.

She started tracing the falling raindrops with her fingers, her bodies way of trying to distract her from the dark rabbit hole of thoughts she felt herself stumbling into.

It didn’t work.

There she was again, lost in the memories of her past mistakes, and biggest regrets. Being sucked in like they were a vaccum, an unstoppable force to fight against when she felt so small and helpless.

She decides to stop playing with the raindrops and instead turns her attention forward into the bus.

“Well that was a mistake.” She thought to herself.

There sat a mother and her young child, smiling and giggling at one another while playing patty cake.

Her mind jolted her back to the days she played like that with her daughters. That felt like years ago.

“Shit.”

It was years ago now.

Had it really been that long? 7 years she realized. Thinking on it a little harder she realized the anniversary was coming up in a couple months, the worst day of her life. Why did she have to remember this?

Great, now she knew she was going to fall into a bout of depression for the next few months, and yet again she’d have to fight like hell to pull herself out.

She suddenly had the urge to pull out her phone.

“Don’t do it.” A voice creeping in her head said.

She couldn’t help herself though, see needed to see them again.

She pulled up her gallery and immeadiately tears began to swell up in her eyes.

A deep rush of pain searing through her chest, making it hard to breathe.

There they were, the two little beautiful brown eyed girls that she gave life to, smiling at the camera without a care in the world.

She remembered being on the other side of that camera, smiling back.

That was so long ago she realized.

A pang of guilt hit her gut as she realized she hadn’t looked at any photos of them that entire year. Not because she didn’t love them, but becuase the pain it brought up was too much to endure on a frequent basis. It always made her depressed and she would end up losing herself in the heartache so much that at times, she would end up being reckless with her choices.

Being reckless, that’s why she was in this position in the first place. She had a sudden flash of the traumas she had been through her entire life, the ones she didn’t know how to cope with. The sexual assult at a young age, her alcoholic mother, the abusive men, losing her father who was like her best friend.

All the things she didn’t get the right help for, all the things that led her down that path of drugs and alcohol.

In that moment she hated herself again.

She felt her fist clench as the anger swarmed through her body. The tears now pouring even harder.

She didn’t even notice the other people on the bus anymore, her mind was now holding her hostage.

Her girls didn’t deserve what she put them through. And she knew exactly what that was from growing up with her mother. The person she swore she would never be like. What a joke.

At the time, she deserved to lose them, she knew that. It just cut deeper knowing that if she had just been able to get the help she did just a little sooner, that she could still have them, because with how far she had come she knew she did deserve them now. She had grown so much since 7 years ago, she wasn’t the same person.

She thought about how they would be 18 in just a few years, and wondered if they would care enough to find her. She wondered if they ever thought of her, and what they they thought of her. Well, she wasn’t sure if she wanted to know that part.

Yes she did she decided. She could handle it, because she was not the same person who couldn’t cope with her negative emotions anymore. She had learned the tools to work through them and was ready to take those conversations on.

And there it was, that little rush of pride and hope that she needed to pull her out and bring her back to reality.

She wiped her tears, looked at their beautiful smiling faces, and kissed the screen of her phone.

“I love you to the moon and back.”