F*ck off, Dolores.

Preface

On May 29, 2023, I wrote the piece below while in an emotional place that no one willingly travels to. Depression isn’t a destination, it’s an invasion. While particularly down one day, I had the idea of personifying depression. And with that idea, this is what came out.

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She won’t want me to, but I have to talk about her. Dolores creeps into my brain cells and uses this convincing, yet soothing voice that mimics my own. It’s sickening really. 

“You’re worthless. Don’t bother to finish that novel. No one will read it anyway. If you end your life today, the next sixty years will be so much less painful. Think of all the debt and disappointment you’ll save your family.”

“Pour another wine. Keep going. Not like you’ll need a functioning liver in twenty years and you don’t have anyone who will give you a piece of theirs.” 

Her laughter, which has somehow become mine, is so seductive that I’m brought to my knees in merciless tears.

F*ck off, Dolores. I know you can hear me.

Let me tell you all about Dolores.

She’s Auntie Anxiety’s decades younger, born on accident, slutty little sister. I don’t use the word “slutty” lightly. It’s not polite.

Dolores was that stubborn, peaked in high school bitch who abused the tanning bed along with Marlboro Lights and would now look like a leather purse at forty-two. I’m not referring to a timeless, vintage Chanel handbag. Dolores is a horribly constructed fake, black leather purse from the Amazon Basics collection fringed with the destruction caused by any woman’s arsenal of cheap lip gloss and lotions.

Once Queen in her Teens, the decades took a toll on Dolores, rotting everything from her once smooth skin to her frighteningly dark soul. 

We’ll start at the beginning. She was your quasi-friend who complimented your outfit one day. “Love that Abercrombie T-shirt!” But the next day Dolores would decide to seduce your on and off boyfriend, aka the love of your life, and convince him to make a sex tape in the girls’ locker room. Today, the tape would have leaked on social media, but those platforms hadn’t existed when Dolores was in high school. And when you found out about the tapes and confronted Dolores in the parking lot, she would inhale her cigarette and unapologetically exhale the smoke in your face. “Well, obviously Brad is going to go elsewhere for sex. Have you seen your love handles?” Poof. Your courage to bitch slap Dolores has gone up in smoke with one flick of cigarette ash, and a dig at your early 2000s insecurity.

Now you see what I mean by “slutty.” Dolores didn’t just have sex, she was out to stab you in the front for the thrill of taking advantage of having a thigh gap. She was utterly vindictive with perfectly straight, thick blonde hair and straight, white teeth.

Dolores’s rich parents were somehow always out of town, so she threw parties constantly and therefore, held the Keys to Coolness. With the limitless liquor supply and stupidly big wine cellar in the basement, every guy in town, including your now off-again boyfriend that Dolores slept with, was at Dolores’s house. Even your girlfriends, who have their own hate/admiration relationship with Dolores, went to the parties, leaving you all alone on a Saturday night. You obviously couldn’t go - Dolores made a sex tape with the person you envisioned marriage with. 

After high school ends, Dolores goes to community college because she didn’t have the grades to get into any state school. Her parents are the town’s gazillionaires, but even they don’t have the clout to get Dolores into a seat in Intro. To Macroeconomics 101 at Any Private University of America. 

Dolores tries to save her Throne of Coolness by knowingly serving underagers while bartending, at a local dive, the only job she can get. That fails miserably when the L.C.B. comes through. A fine, a firing, and a tantrum leave Dolores’s Reign of Cool burned. 

By the time it’s senior year of college for her high school “friends,” Dolores’s house parties are quickly passed over for the dive bar from where she was fired.

“Guys, party at my house!!! High school reunion!!” she group-texts fervently to anyone and everyone in her Contacts list, which is so not Cool.

Crickets. No one needs a fake I.D. or a house party. Everyone is 21. Another stab to the Queen. The wound deepened as a notification in the group text. “Dolores, no one wants to go to one of your lame ass parties like we’re 17.” Social bloodstain can’t be wiped away anymore now that the Queen is completely disposable. 

Dolores’s twenties pass in a blur, as she attempts to study Fashion Merchandising at community college. Where does that get you? A job at Old Navy. That is, until you’re caught attempting to steal a size 12 pair of jeans. The size 4 haven’t fit over her knees since the bartending stint. Dolores keeps up the chain smoking in hopes of suppressing her appetite, but late night binges are inevitable.  

After bailing Dolores out for attempting to steal a pathetic pair of jeans, her parents are so disgusted that they cut her off completely. Dolores’s much younger, nerdier brother is studying Finance at Stanford. They focus on him, leaving Dolores to find her way through a world that never seems to dole any kindness.

The day Dolores turns thirty, she looks in the cracked full-length mirror, cheaply hung over the back of her bedroom door. Her once long, thick blond locks are thinned from eating a diet of whiskey, percocets, and late night Taco Bell. The cheesy burritos go down easy, but provide the equivalent vitamin content in Dolores’s body that she gets from tax refunds: it ain’t much.  Not to mention the burritos were the reason the gap in her thighs closed seemingly overnight. Dolores can’t wear Mexican fast food at thirty quite like she could at seventeen. 

The lines on her forehead and crow’s feet are more pronounced by the day and Dolores can’t smile because it makes her look, oh god, thirty-eight! These aren’t light lines highlighting a woman’s wisdom that one accumulates after three plus decades on Earth. Instead, the lines are the ugliness of her rotting soul manifesting on her face. Dolores can’t erase them with Botox. Waiting tables at the Heart Diner in a seedy part of town won’t pay for that. Even though she services some of the select patrons at night with an off the menu selection, that cash goes to credit card balances that never seem to budge. Something about interest accruing over the years. 

On Dolores’s forty-second birthday, she discovered Sex-Tape Brad has moved back to town after his failed marriage in Florida, just like everything else that happens there. She found out from Facebook and immediately reached out- to see if she could reignite that good old sex tape spark. “Nah, I’ll pass on getting HIV,” Brad said in response to Dolores’s overtly direct text. 

Dolores read Brad’s text and smashed her phone against the cracked mirror, causing it to shatter into pieces on the bedroom carpeting. Wearing only an old terry cloth bathrobe and cheap leopard slippers, Dolores walked out of her tiny apartment, slamming the door shut behind her. Dolores walked out the back door and into the freezing January night, with only a lit cigarette in hand. She was never seen again.

Today, Dolores is only heard. When the world shoves rejection, heartbreak, stress, and cruelty your way, Dolores is the one to whisper, “Give up.” Dolores just wants some company, wherever she is.

But, f*ck off, Dolores. I’m not joining you.