Wednesday, February 04, 2009

my, my, my,

How things have changed.

I am 22.

Tom and I are still together, but our relationship is rocky at best, sometimes abusive, and overall boring and uneventful. And yet, I stay. I tell myself that I love him. I tell him that I love him. Most of the time I don't know why I insist on it. And sometimes, while traveling through my daily activity, I feel tormented. Yes, sometimes the very thought of him torments me.

Yet, here I am.

After graduating college, my mother told me that a temporary (three month) position had opened up where she works. Well, three months turned into eight, and I am still employed by Village Care of New York's very own Rivington House, the largest nursing home for people with AIDS and HIV in the United States. I am a unit secretary.

A non-profit funded by severely plummeting Medicaid dollars, Rivington House serves as a haven for a population of 200: blacks, latinos, and a few Caucasions, all who come from what I would call, to be generous, "broken homes." 95% were intravenous drug users. Some are schizophrenic. To be frank, every day I witness what I can only call the stuff of nightmares. People whose minds and bodies have deteriorated beyond the point of no return... But we truly bring them back from the dead.

And I tell myself every day that I make a difference in these people's lives because it makes me feel better about the fact that, after 4 years of college, a nomination to Phi Beta Kappa, 4 tremendous poetry awards, publications in every single on-campus magazine at Rutgers University, as well as nearly a dozen articles published online for the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation, I am now "just a secretary."

But it is good to have a job. In these awful, frightening times, it is a blessing to work. To make $17 an hour. To live at home. To be young, without children, and to have the opportunity and time to better myself if I so choose, in whichever way that I decide.

Unfortunately my new, and depressing mantra seems to be: "I used to be an amazing writer."

This is the first thing I've written in months.