April 19
They didn't give you an interview. There was no feedback. She had said she would "fix up" an interview. She didn't bother telling me. I had to pester her with emails even to find out I didn't get anywhere.
About once every two months there's a job I can apply for. Mostly I never hear a thing.
At the end of this month I will finally run out of money. I'm not winning at poker, so next month I will have no money. I don't know how I will pay the rent. I have a decent limit on my credit card, so I can eat for a while, but I can't pay it back.
I am stuck in a town with no work for me. I begged Mrs Zen to move back home, so I could have a life. She refused. Fuck off if you don't like it, she said. Eventually, I disliked it enough to fuck off. It took a lot. I was willing to be hurt a lot before I finally gave in. Now she has a life she loves: a job she likes, a home she pays no rent on, a boyfriend whom she feels superior to, a week off every two so she can go out and have fun, a cruise with her mate. All she had to do to get it was destroy my family, wreck my hopes for my life and act in a way that if she knew any shame, she'd be ashamed of herself for the rest of her days. But she doesn't. No one does here. I am marooned in a town full of people who do not have any honour, any sense of shame, any love for anyone but themselves.
The worst thing is to be hopeless. You would not believe it, I used to be a cheerful soul, hopeful of the future. Not any more. Now I have to grit my teeth in the morning because I know I will hate the day.
My girlfriend tells me she worries for my mental state. You're depressed, she says, and she hints that all I need is drugs. I do not need fucking drugs! I need my life not to be shit. I'm not even close to depressed. I'm just banging my head against the wall. It's different. Believe me, I know. I've been pointlessly depressed and I know what that's like. Now I'm down for a reason.
It does me good to know she loves me. I mean, really, people do love me. God knows why. I imagine they see someone who doesn't really exist. I feel like a mirage as it is. I barely exist. I do nothing, go nowhere, think nothing, have nothing to say.
***
I want to say that I stopped thinking I was worthwhile about a year ago. I feel like I have not been able to recover from something that happened, someone telling me I was not worth anything. Would I have been okay if I had got a job, had my kids with me, made a life? I do not even know. All I know is that when people queue up to hurt you, you find yourself tucked into a ball, unable to reach out, unable to live.
What is the point? She nor anyone else cares a less. I am a tiny infringement on the lives I butt into, except those of my children, who I let down constantly, and will, I fear, let down altogether when finally I have no money.
April 14
So I went for a job interview yesterday and it was relentless: what I haven't done recently, what skills I don't have, what I don't know. They weren't even interested in what's good about me. They asked but they didn't seem to listen to or care about the answer.
I get easily disheartened. I've come to feel I'll never have a break as far as work goes because I applied for a job I used to do and didn't even get an interview. A job I used to do! I did it well too. I mean, I was only on about half power but that's as good as anyone else. I don't mean it boastfully: that's just how I am.
But what's the point of that? If they didn't want me, who would? Now I halfheartedly apply for jobs, expecting to be rejected. There aren't many here, so competition is fierce. There will always be someone better.
In love, I believed I could have a fairy tale. It was foolish to believe but I am guided by my heart; what else can I do but believe in it? But that was crushed too. I was shown that I wasn't worth anything, what little self esteem I had was dashed out of me. I felt my heart wither, so that now I can say I love but I don't ever feel it. I can only feel that I must wait to find out how I'm not good enough. Well how foolish was I, to believe that such a piece of shit as me could ever be valuable enough to care about? I will never be worth sacrifice.
It's very hard to know you are so small. Sometimes, I'm looking at people's posts on Facebook and I can't help thinking that they all seem to have lives that give them joy, that they feel worthwhile. I just dread the end of the day because I know there will be another morning and I will face another seventeen hours of loneliness and despair. I gave up everything for this life: I became solitary and bitter because I had to do whatever I could to make life work for my family. I gave up hope so that I could have my children. It breaks my heart when Zenella says I am the best daddy in the world. I am not. I know I am not the worst but I wish I could find some sunshine so that they do not end up where I am.
I remember how much I loved my own dad, and how little he deserved it. I don't kid myself that children love the man; they love the symbol. I'm glad they do. It's right but it's no comfort when you know you do not deserve it.
Sometimes I wish I could disappear. I wish I could be drowned, murdered, expunged. What was the point of me? I wasted everything I was given, everything that could have been good. No wonder no one wants to give me anything. I'm sure I wouldn't. I hate this cunt more than anyone else could even dream of hating him. What else can you think about him? The people he loved broke him to pieces. He begged them to love him back and they laughed in his face. I could list the ways but what's the point? You know me; you know how to hate me too.
It is no use crying. I still have to wake tomorrow and lose money at poker again, hoping that somehow I can make enough to pay the bills next month. I have to be humbled over and over, spending the lonely hours hating everyone I play and myself, knowing that I am just not good enough but hoping, hoping that somehow not good enough will be good enough. That's my life: endlessly hoping that somehow someone will see enough in me not to boot me even further down.
***
I have been thinking a lot about Zenella. You could not wish to meet a funnier, sweeter child. Mrs Zen says she has a lot of difficulty relating to adults; she is shy and nervous around them. I wish I knew how to tell her that she needn't be, that she has so much to offer that they can't help but love her. I wish I was real enough to tell her about real life. But I'm not and I can't. All I can do is give unremitting love and hope that it will be in some way useful. It never has been for anyone else, but you have to hope. You have to hope, don't you?
Shame
Sometimes I wake with a start in the night and I am thinking, you are *mumblety mumble* and you will never be the man you think you are.
Think you are? Have faith you are is closer, because there is no evidence of it.
It must be nice to be one of those people who just live their life in the belief that they are everything they should be: decent, upstanding, even noble. Most people seem to feel that. I never see anyone who seems to feel shame. Most people, it seems to me, if their life mistreats them, do not feel it is anything about them. Maybe you need to be able to feel that to stay sane. Maybe to be able to live, and not just die away day upon day, you must not feel shame.
Yet I do. I feel ashamed of myself today. I had my doubts about B, but I didn't express them in a way she could respond to. I was cowardly, and let her spin our relationship into a place she couldn't drag it out of. She was an accomplice, willing to indulge what is bad about her too, but I am capable of being bigger.
I know I am, yet when I'm called on to be a man, I find it easier to be a worm. I wish I could have been her friend, when I know that's what she needed; instead, I am one more shitty man, unwilling to be a little bit better.
***
In the evening, the children were playing a game, way past their bedtime, that involved congaing through the dining room, dressed in sheets. I couldn't enjoy it. I felt the pressure of the oncoming morning, the need to get them up and about. I felt too stressed to laugh along.
I ruin so many moments that could bring joy because I am so joyless now that I cannot see it when it's there. I have such beautiful, funny children. I feel like knowing me is more poisonous for them than never to have known me at all.
***
In the early morning, all three of my children are in my bed. I have Zenita wrapped in my arms, Naughtyman's feet in my back. I am hopeless at expressing love. Hopeless at everything. I feel like I have been cruelly punished for not being perfect, for not being quite enough for anyone to want, to cherish or love.
Why am I so terrified of being judged? Surely no one will hate me more than I do, no matter what I've done? Surely no one will do worse to me than I have? I feel like having to deal with me is more poisonous for me than never to have been at all. Yet I do not have any antidote, or hope of finding one, only shame that I can burn in until finally I die, and am nothing at all.
