The Diary of a Party Girl

2/2/19

I've been high on acid for two days straight.

I started taking tab after tab after a nightmare about my dad.

The pain is so fresh in my mind, pouring from the streetlights, but instantly transporting me into the darkest corners of my memory. I feel the warmth of my father's slap, hitting my cheek and out of my slumber. The sleepiness is out of my eyes and I'm awake in the center of my bed.

Sweating.

But never crying.

Terror shakes me to my core; it awakens me so often and so ferociously that it caused me to move out of my mother's house for good. Living with my grandma...was a blessing...of some sort...I suppose...

I had to leave my parents.

Nothing but trauma kept me put in that troublesome skyscraper filled metropolis that is Chicago. I lived in that city for so long that I was certain that I would be barred there, spend my final hours there, raise children...

You can't get by without some madness in Chicago, mulling in the hellishly hot leather pockets of too tough to talk to men. My form of persuasion was not comparable to theirs-but undoubtedly just as powerful. With the soft gaze, mimicking the ways of my mother, I tethered men and women to my side with empathy rather than travesty and violence.

I liked boys and girls. Which, to my mother, said she found "confusing."

"I don't get how you can like girls as much as you like boys," she had said one day, driving us to the grocery store. I came out to her on July the 14th, 2015. I wrote it down so I could celebrate it each time it came by. It was a weird thing to celebrate, but I did it anyway, every year.

"You can't possibly like them just as much."

"I do though," I noted. "Why do you care so much? You told me go out and date. You said you didn't care if I was gay."

"I..." She bit her lip. "Wouldn't it be easier if you liked one?"

"Wouldn't it be easier if you married a man who didn't hit you?"

I got a slap for that.

Nothing inside of me regret it.

For fuck sakes, I'd say it again and again.

I was confusing? How was I confusing for wanting unconditional love? I didn't get it from her or dad, so for me to seek it in others was understandable. I wanted unlimited attention from whoever I decided to love. I didn't see anything off about that. I was, quite literally, normal in that sense. Nothing else about me was normal besides that.

I missed my mom.

I didn't want to admit it, but I did.

I'm stuck in a foreign land, trapped between reality and fantasy in even perfectly normal situations. I don't know if I am questioning things too much or if people are honestly manipulating my consciousness.

The sounds are not the same; the sights are quite hypnotizing, tantalizingly bright and shiny to the touch of my fingertips. I don't want to be allured by the lights like I was in Chicago. The blistering stars, high up above, is what I saw in the twinkling lightbulbs in Illinois-or at least that's what I think I saw.

Hope.

Hope of getting my family out of poverty. Hope that I could act my way out of my bad times.

Hope.

Is

Such

A

Powerful

Drug.

Not only that, but it's addictive and destructive, creeping upon everything in its wake to arouse the path before it. The world is electrified by hope, and for me, it almost destroyed the spirit inside of me.

My heart has been trampled, but not tranquilized. I am thankful for that.

I was tricked, terribly traumatized and put in a haze by the stardust on the walk of fame the first time I went there...In Hollywood...

None of the right cards were was laid on the floor for me, though. To think, quite foolishly, that stardom was made for me. I stayed in Hollywood all night, looking at the stars and hoping for...anything...

I paused, waiting to find a cooler star to stand next to on the hollywood walk of fame...

I shuffled to a pause....finding the perfect one.

Why was he still here? Did his impact outweigh his abuse?

For my mother, that was the truth.

I feel like a beat poet.

Scoffing to myself, I started playing my music and headed for the redline out of Hollywood. My night was done and my dreams were quite certainly too dead to deal with in the midnight air.