“Now, when these invitations come in the mail my heart literally stops for a split second. These people are killing me by degrees with their fancy paper and swirly fonts.”
Jackie would just laugh and nod her “preaching to the choir” agreement.
Jackie understood all too well. Her attempt had followed a friend’s announcement that she was preggers and it had been one of her final straw moments. We felt as though our lives had slipped by us. We felt jaded and old. We felt our insides quite literally drying up. Society had told us we were old maids and therefore doomed to a spinsterdom filled with cardigans and cats. And I’m sorry—but as broken as we were…. neither of us was willing or ready to go that route…death seemed a welcome alternative when faced with unending loneliness, pitying glances from friends or worst of all, tiny, pretty napalm envelopes just sitting in our mailboxes waiting to explode our hearts and shatter our minds into irretrievable fragments…scattering pieces of our souls to the winds…carrying our disappointment and sorrow back to us again and again with written reminders and vellum inserts. It had all been so simple as children…we knew when we grew up that life would make sense…. We’d be safe from the wicked witches…. and all the promises of the early fairy tales of our youth would come to pass. We’d find our prince and our happily ever after. We’d ride off into stunning sunsets and decorate our castles with dream dust and butterfly wings.
We couldn’t have been more wrong.
Excerpted from the memoir, “Lipstick and Thongs in the Loony Bin” by Courtney A. Walsh.
