What can be expected of someone who has no expectations in themselves? Apparently everything. I have been on this uphill attempt to extinguish all expectations from my life and just go with the flow in some sort of spiritual ohm-induced cleansing, however that does not work how I initially calculated. It is more challenging to consciously expel things from my life than I anticipated. I have Catholic Guilt syndrome where I feel responsible for the faults of others even if they aren’t my doing. I feel morally obligated to everyone I encounter. I am the product of an equation roughly twenty-two years in the making. I am a defect that kept running forward and now am dealing with those consequences. I’ve tried to expect nothing could hurt me, but then it does. So now I expect nothing could get worse than the worst – so far so good.
Next week will be a year since my mom died a very slow and arduous death – one that I would not wish on even my worst enemy. She is currently floating above this circular and monotonous purgatory that I have acknowledged as life cursing her misfortunes and apologizing for leaving me here. And although it’s been roughly a year, I still seem to feel all of the pain and anger that I encountered when I watched her take her last, laborious, and unwilling breath. I sat across from my grandfather eating a boiled pork chop with beans and spinach, pushing my food around my Chinet paper plate as tears rolled down my face. He was oblivious to my pitted heart and I didn’t expect him to notice, considering he’s been calling my brother and I completely incorrect names for the past month and a half. I felt a familiar, boiling sensation deep within the pit of my stomach indiscernible from the food I was blindly consuming. Although I was not hungry I kept pushing and eating, and pushing. My brain kept lurching forward to the front of my head every time I bent down towards the plate to inspect the spinach, and make sure that there was only burnt bacon in the beans and not dead bugs. A thought in my head kept ticking and festering as repetitive as the crickets outside my window, forcing through the haze and relentlessly taunting me. The idea that I have been dusting my mom’s urn on the mantelpiece and taking care of my grandfather for the past year made me nauseous. It was a decaying reminder, a repetitious mental sickness that pointed signs at me. It told me that I had no mother and for some reason I felt at fault yet again.
I wiped my face and my grandfather muttered, without looking up from his plate, “Take things with a grain of salt.” Confused, I just replied with “OK” and continued to push my food around for several more minutes. He lifted his head to drink his fourth or fifth beer, spinach stuck to his chin. I was going to tell him, but what did it matter? It was just the two of us. I ate the rest of my beans before I had to excuse myself to go sob in my room. And I did just that. I felt an overpowering hold that pushed my feet down and froze me in front of my mirror in my bedroom. I was magnetized to the earth, incapable of the flight my mother gained. I didn’t think that was fair. I felt like she killed herself and she should have been forced to stay with me for trying to and slowly succeeding in her attempts. I labored over my thoughts and cried and listened and hated and stared into the sky wondering where my turn would come from. I did that for so long; and now all I could do was collapse onto my down comforter, floating over my full-sized bed. The only attainable flight I would ever achieve. My grass green sheets swallowed my face as I rained salt tears into them.
I continued to sink into a self-loathing until worldly obligations prevented me from doing any further reflection. I sighed into my pillow, saving it for later, and rolled out of my bed to answer a text my friend sent me.

“What’s going on?”

I should have said “Nothing, you?” and attempted to socialize, but instead I was overly honest and delved into the gaping sores of my emotional being and divulged that I wanted a drink and to just get away from my house. He never responded, and I don’t blame him. I would have probably done the same thing as soon as the psycho flag was flown. I sat in my room, staring at the same perforated ceiling that I constantly envision, and bench pressing my emotional baggage only to come to the sudden realization that I had been longing for an existence that was seemingly dangerous yet less destructive than the sedentary life I stared down for the past several years. Being busy and not allowing myself to stop and listen to the constant ticking reminders were going to help me move on. At least I thought.