Dignity

           I wonder if anyone gets to live or die with it.
           It is Easter Sunday. I have to go visit my grandma in the nursing home. I am dreading it because I cannot handle stuff like this. I love avoiding things like this. It is a shiny day, the sun is bright. I see a woman parked in a car smoking a cigarette. Looking for a reason to exhale. I recognize this expression and feeling.
           There is nothing wrong with these places. Everyone is doing their best. But as I walk the halls I feel paranoia, like something is lurking at every corner. Highly sensitive people have to watch out for emotional haunted houses such as these.
           She looks as I expect her to. I had a dream (nightmare) about it the night before and I am not far off. She can't talk right now but she looks at me, she can't say my name and probably doesn't remember it right now, but I know that she knows my face. I guess that is something to take comfort in.
           By the time the end of the visit nears, tears are welling up in my eyes as they dart around the room. I wish I didn't have to watch someone who was once so close to me decay like this. The person who picked me up from elementary school when I didn't want to be there anymore. The person I had the majority of my formative conversations with, who I asked questions to for the first decade of my life. The person who told me she was dying when I was 10. Who knows just how much meaning that holds in relation to my preoccupation with death & graphic fantasies.
           I feel like I have decayed as well.
           Does anyone die with dignity? I am not sure. But maybe there is something better than dignity to have. Something I can't grasp yet.
           It is yet another Monday where I am unemployed and I don't see anything promising on the horizon. This shit ebbs and flows and it doesn't care about your mental stability.
           We have this tiny fence on one side of my yard that my dog keeps jumping over, and this time she is after another dog. I run for her but can't grab her as per usual because I am high and out of shape. As I chase her, a neighbor is following us in her car maniacally beeping, thinking she is helping? me out by making the noise. I trip and fall face-first thanks to all of this. Normally I would just lay down after injuring myself but for once in my life "fight or flight" kicks in. I don't want my dog to become another statistic of a pitbull that gets put to sleep. By the time I get to her in my next door neighbor's yard I am heaving and crying, and she somehow hasn't injured anyone while I've been flailing around. The boy who was walking the other dog is sitting on the lawn trying to calm Blue down, his face is familiar but I don't know is name. Whoever he is, I am grateful for his kindness and apologize to him for all of this. He is the lightest part of this story. I finally grasp my dog while being reprimanded by my Italian neighbor, and I wail out that I'm sorry and rush home. I see the silver car that was beeping park and a middle aged white woman coming towards me yelling something like, "This keeps happening, you have to get control over that dog!" I yell something like "I know, I can't be berated right now!" And escape into my house with my delinquent dog. We have bigger problems than my crazy dog you fucking cunt.
           I enter my room, gasping for air. I realize I am having a full blown panic attack, maybe even my first. I shove a klonopin down my throat and look down at my knee, realizing my jeans are ripped and there is blood. A chunk of my knee has been scraped out and I am squeamish as I try to decipher how deep the cut is. I nurse a beer as I clean it out and cry a lot. I think often about how anti-depressants' biggest affect could be how much your crying habits decrease from what you're accustomed to. But when something "happens" the effect of the bumpers go out the window.
           I am mourning a lot of things. My life feels like a joke right now, a prank show but a mediocre one. I think finding humor in tragedy is the only way to get through this whole thing with any sort of lightness, but I have limits. I want to laugh about today, about my teens and early 20's; about who hurt me and who rejected me and who never spoke to me again. I do. I hope eventually I find some solace in these things. But right now it seems as though 23-year-old me is unable to live with any dignity.