Big Arms Big issues

Company Description

I am a thirty-two-year-old little girl alone in the world. I’m without a mom and my soulmate just died.

It hurts.

My cells vibrate with anguish. My blood is sluggish. Chugging along but too tired to keep pace as if a marathon runner at the end of it’s miles. My marrow aches. My skin is pulled tight and is tender to touch. A bruised peach split open on a hot summer day. If the breeze blows too big the brittle bones of my body jostle and break.

My ears want to tuck in on each other to make it all end. And like the aging family dog, I tune in on a deeper level. Everything aroud me is sharp and acute. Rumbling voices throughout the house. Whispers. Beeps. Slamming doors. Footsteps. Drip. Drip from the faucet. A scream from the TV. All jolt through me. Tiny strikes of lightning that cause my nerves to throb.

My shoulders spasm like they’ve just carried hundreds of pounds of rock through the desert. They cave under the weight, bowing inward. But when I look in the mirror there is nothing I see. The burden of grief bears down in all its invisibility. My vertebrae crumble, as if made of sand. My spine, once stacked straight, curves like the letter S. 

I long to pluck out my eyeballs, massage them with care and shoo them both off to bed. They ache with what they see. The funeral. The Ashes. The shoes and the shirts and a life once loved tucked into brown boxes. The sum of our parts tossed out with the trash.

My ring finger vibrates with rage under the crime of the gold band Choking it. Each spark of sunlight against the clear-cut gem a blinding reminder I’m bound to a specter.

A serpent’s coils crush my lungs, stealing my breath.

The center point of this mess of meat and bone, my hips drawn taut. It hurts to sit; it hurts to stand. Like cancer this has eaten me through. My new swiss cheese body and I shift and rearrange but find a new tender spot. Is there one place on me that this has not touched? 

I am lost.

Adrift at sea without a compass and no knowledge of the north star. My boat a speck against the raging waves. Battered by tumultuous waters. The wood groans under the strain.

I yearn to rip my heart out from my chest and run to my mother. Crimson blood dripping out from between my fingers. I would thrust it into her capable hands and beg, “Fix her! Love her! Hold her!”

I am a child with a skinned knee who knows who keeps the cure, but she is gone.

Job Description

I am seeking a mom. This is a full-time position lasting for no less than two years. Interested parties must be loving and kind and helpful and funny and make me forget that they’re not really mine.

Job Responsibilities

Live close enough to visit me every day. My own mom is too far away.

Collect the piles of dirty clothes on the floor and from the bags we brought back from his house and from the overflowing basket that I cannot touch because in it is the shirt I wore last when he was alive. Make sure not to wash the magic from his sweatshirts or shorts and use the tide pods that smell just like his clean clothes once did.

Tell me its okay to go lay down and that you’ll clean the kitchen. Take out the trash that’s grown moldy and old and scrub out the fridge but don’t touch that half-eaten pint of Double Fudge Brownie that I bought for him.

Place the back of your hand and a cool pair of lips against my fevered forehead and say “go back to bed now”. Call work and tell them I’m not coming in and remind me it’s okay to take this time-off and to stop being strong for everyone else because “mom is here and I’m strong for you now”.

Turn on the lights when I wake in the middle of the night, wet with the sweat and the tears. Maybe sit by my bed and read a bible verse like mine used to do when the anxiety and fear crept up through my throat and spilled out into the sheets. When the terror became much to bear. Keep it away from me now.

Hand shred two pounds of cheddar and cook that creamy macaroni, the one fat with comfort and love that tastes like family dinners around a scratched oak table as the sun fades out through the front window. Recipe provided.

Answer me when I mutter to nobody there, “what am I going to do without him?” Tell me you know just what I’ll do. Then take me to the doctor because there are too many appointments and therapists and medications and treatments and please just tell me what to take and when for I am only a girl and I cannot think.

Say “honey it’s going to be okay” when I slide into bed and curl my knees to my chest. Be the warm and strong body that I pretend I once grew in.

Let me come home. I need to come home.

Pay & Benefits

My friends started a GoFundMe for me, and they raised $17,885. It is all yours if you’ll just be mine.

I am desperate.