The saran wrap is being heated, closing and tightening its grip on main mushiness as a middle age body sits on a dented spot in the couch. My head, brain, and eyes can’t shake the sinking. Can’t wiggle away. Can’t understand. Comprehension is beyond grasping. Then the show goes dark, silencing a dim living room.
Internet is down.
Netflix is swirling, trying to reconnect. Stabilize the comfort zone.
I watch as the screen counts one percent at a time until it determines a final resting place, twenty four percent. Spinning. Spinning, Red spinning. Flashing quickly telling me, ‘done’.
Show’s over.
I wanted a choice. I am the choice. Head of the household making decisions, executive titles with stress and dishpan hands. Woman liberated yet apron strings keep getting caught on the junk drawer. Flour handprints stain my Kitchen Aid mixer. All I’ve done is clean up one mess after another. Too many messes to count in totality. I can’t say ‘No’. I don’t know how to purse my lips into the ‘o’ shape.
My face scrunches, creating lines all over my forehead, and I continue to trudge heavily through sunrises and sunsets. I turn and face tantrums, where I realize that we’re all possibly operating at twenty four percent. No one is giving their all. No one is pretending to care. Not anymore.
We did care once. Those cares were spent, wasted, and gobbled up by greedy youth.
In caring, we applied to handpicked colleges. Held our breaths. Took all their standardized tests, then we paid to take SATs and ACTs. Graduated, only to find out we didn’t learn everything, perhaps next to nothing. Maybe only twenty four percent. We went to those choice colleges. Met boys and dated and made-out in dawn’s early hours as the bartender yelled ‘last call’. Maybe we took some of them home. Maybe we left them in the parking lots. All along we only gave twenty four percent of our heart. It’s all I ever wanted to spare.
He never called back anyways.
Met another.
And another.
Finally, found the ‘one’.
Finished school and got that first degree. But it wasn’t enough. Still hadn’t learned any lessons, only twenty four percent needed to make knowledge complete. Applied to graduate programs and planned a wedding. Burned out because one shouldn’t take Plath for fun. One shouldn’t add English classes on top of Journalism. One is never meant to write so many forced ideas. Stood at the alter, eagerly awaiting to awake early, the next day was special. It was our honeymoon, life’s little sweet spot. Here, we made love, ate, spent those precious few days by the sea. Fell asleep next to warmth radiating from a sunburnt bodies. We woke up for two entire weeks to only our passion with very few actual plans.
Pregnancy. Family. Home. Build a life and pay the mortgage. Never quite getting back around to those student loans from the prestigious, sought after colleges. Those schools promised and probably only made good to twenty four percent of their graduating class. These aren’t facts. Summations. Guesses. Google your own knowledge. Stop depending on mine.
Maybe only twenty four percent can pay back their government funded education. Or twenty four percent actually found decent jobs and aren’t drowning in debt. Unsatisfied by the car payment, utility bills, homeowner’s fee, and taxes. We pay them like cattle heading towards slaughter.
We become Boxer from Animal Farm.
Work. Work. Work.
Save. Save. Save.
For what?
The last twenty four percent of a lifetime where we aren’t forced into submission. Where our arms aren’t bearing book bags and parental mocking about how we have life by the balls. Taunting us like ignorant buffoons as we don’t understand the gift we are given in days gone by.
Where in all this is spent actual living a life we want? Those weekend days? Nighttime? I laugh and spit out my cucumber, lemon detox water. Job three, four, five, or perhaps six. Only twenty four percent downtime.
We spend it trying to watch an internet connect. A show. Hulu. Netflix. We are in our prime. Forty-eight hours from holding anything our hearts desire. Waiting impatiently like children for chocolate bars. Holding a twenty four percent stake in the now.
All we get is twenty four percent. All we probably ever really gave to anyone in our life is twenty four percent. There is a working class, only feeling twenty four percent alive. Breathing, relaxing, and seeing the place which is a giant “N” spinning. Counting each percent as a second. Only ever reaching twenty four percent.
Were we ever connected to this life at all?
Twenty four percent, I guess.
Rachel E. Bledsoe is a writer and an Appalachian Misfit. She enjoys swimming, long walks on the beach, and Marie Antoinette biographies. She is the sole voice and writer behind The Misfits of a Mountain Mama. You can visit her on Facebook or on Twitter @MisfitMtMama
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