Vision Quest Writer
It’s the last minute of an era. By the dim light of a single candle I’m emptying my Word folder into the ocean of you.
In another life I dreamt of being a professor, on the cusp of realizing my dreams I met an unprofessional school counselor, a university department that would rather let me go than tuck their racism into a pocket before coming to work, and a new professor who used me for free services, slandered students and professors and spoke to my tutorial advisor, this during a period I was separated from my big and scary, verbally abusive, chronically alcoholic husband and trying to figure out how to support two children while going through graduate school, a decision I worried for nothing as I was not able to bear up under the trauma of confronting racism and being forced out of my university job, the confusion I felt as my new "friend" violated my privacy by talking to my tutorial advisor, etc., etc., too much more, and being propositioned by my school counselor who was, by the way, supposed to be helping me study for the GRE with the affliction of ADD, which he diagnosed by use of a small survey.
Funny, after four years alone – I broke away from everyone in my life except my children and am only recently beginning to repair relationships that were not damaged beyond repair - some of the symptoms have disappeared, through research I’ve realized the symptoms he diagnosed me with are the same symptoms people with post-traumatic stress disorder display.
I grew up traumatized, as many children do, one trauma followed another until I was a teenager meeting boys who were like my parents and one of my sisters up the road to my alcoholic ex husband who has, from what I gather, slowed down on his drink, at least I hope so.
He is a much better person not married to me, I didn’t make him drink, he learned to drink as a kid at home but I wasn’t the kind of person he wanted to be with, his anger and tantrums were a response to being in a mismatched marriage that wasn’t a marriage but a mistake we didn’t know how to undo, his later outbursts of yelling were due to my incompetent parenting.
I wasn't the mother he wanted for his children.
I don’t regret my life. I like who I am, I wouldn’t be me, the me I am today, without the experiences I have had. But this is my life as fiction, living my life into this topic I can be, or pretend to be, the slice of me that I’m not as my midnight hour turns the clock to morning.
s are sleeping, too, one in Yuki's bed, the other in Belinda's. Her doctor thinks that having the