poison & wine

Life and circumstances will try and turn you into someone you were never meant to be.

I see it happen every single day.

And as much as I knew it to be true in the ghetto, it has become true in my own heart.

Freeze frame.  People are stuck in motion.  Laughing, talking.  Familiar faces surround me and I look at them.  Bits of their lives swirl around my head and I am overwhelmed at what I know.  And even more so by what I don't.  My eyes bounce from each corner of the room and suddenly, all is in motion again.

It stemmed from a deep feeling of defeat.  A sudden giving-up.  Circumstances had piled high around me, blocking out the sun like so much garbage.

From there, direct exposure quickly hardened my heart.  I learned much, quickly.  Seeing what I'd always assumed, but hadn't understood.  And before I knew it, there was little other option.  To survive, I had to learn.  To preserve what little was left of myself, I had to step it up.

So I'm sitting on this big, red couch.  With a sweet little one sleeping in the next room.  And Christmas starts coming tomorrow.

There are tears in my eyes.  Unbidden, as always.  But I suppose if there is a place to let them flow, this big, deep couch is the place.  No one to see.  No one to hear.

I learned how to play the game.  With the best of them.  To separate action from emotion.  To expect the worst and push hope deep, deep down.  Names flow through my head.  And it becomes clear to me why I have become so detached.  It is so much easier not to feel.  All this mess, these hot tears pouring down my cheeks.  I'd rather them not.

So the tears flow in the safety and privacy of this home.  I look out the window at this dreary, December day and feel my cheeks dry sticky with the tears.  No Christmas trees for me this year.  No lights.  No presents.  Just another day I hold my breath and barrel through.  The spirit isn't here this year.

In May I am supposed to leave.  Today, I am tempted to just pack up my station wagon and drive in some direction for some hours until I reach some place that is not here.  Deep, I know that Atlanta is six months away so that Atlanta in and of herself won't be my running away.

I'm pretty tempted though.  Because the only thing that even resembles a solution to this mess is to leave.  The urge, the itch, to just get out of here is so strong I can't see anything else.  The alternative is isolation.  The loneliness I know I must choose in staying here, the self control I must employ if I stay even one more night in Lexington.  I am overwhelmed with it.  Burdened by the knowing.  How do you consciously walk into such a thing?

I can stop playing the game.  I can remove myself from the situations, which are not bad in nature, but have bred deepest hurt.  I could turn my phone off.  Say hello and walk away.  But where do I turn?  Those situations are deeply similar, in both the sanctuary and the bar.  Where do I go that is safe?  Where do I go where I will not be met by the familiar face of that loneliness?  I have been forgotten in that place, and used in that one.  I have been replaced here, and walked all over there.

Everyone has an answer for me.  On their side, they see the solution.  Perhaps they even see the truth.  Less blinded by emotion or hardened by pain.  But it feels more like, in their blessing, they've forgotten the sharp pangs of this life.  I'm not sure they're not totally right.  Actually I'm pretty sure they are.  But ...

But I'm here, waiting for something I've not even been promised.  Wanting something with my heart of hearts, that seems so distant and so unattainable.  I feel nothing but unwanted.  Nothing but worthless.  Nothing but desperate.  Wanting only to curl up and be held.  Wishing that Christmas this year did not mean a lot of moving around and a lot of light cast on my being the only single adult Vaughan left.

There's an ugly paradox.  And it has a face.  Multiple faces.

Life and circumstances will try and turn you into someone you were never meant to be.

Even through the tears, I'm fighting.

And praying a most desperate prayer.  That the good would find me in the mess.