Sometimes I think about writing a long letter and leaving it for folks, with no forwarding address. In it would contain sincere promises that I will check in from time to time to ensure all is mostly well. A promise I would keep. There would be last vestiges of support along with invisible tissues to wipe tears and tiny little envelopes to collect secrets no one wants to share with anyone but me. I would summon up any energy stored and infuse it into each of the pages until the letter was bloated with love. Then I would seal it with the request that no effort be made to find me.
Why? That is the only way I will ever know what it is like to actually, live a life that has anything to do with me as opposed to what others need me to be.
It's a bit like those oxygen masks on an airplane. The instructions clearly indicate that you should put your mask on, before assisting the person beside you. It makes sense on the plane...why is it I always forget this rule in life?
It is hard not to be bitter. The people who depend on me most to be there for them don't understand that my hovering state of irritation is not me being unreasonable or nitpicky or even depressed. It is simply the reaction to being stifled. Just a little. Everyday. Slowly smothered to death with responsibilities or circumstances that are not mine to suffer. And never should have been.
Nothing is as I hoped it might be when I summoned up the courage to look tear filled eyes in their collective faces five years ago and finally turn in my badge as zookeeper in an effort to find a life of my own. I pleaded with people to understand that I had to do this. For reasons I couldn't explain not because it's complicated, but mostly because the hardest thing in the world to do is to tell people who love you that they're also bringing out the very worst in you. I packed up, moved away and thought I would find my freedom.
For awhile, I did. And then I found heartache. Oddly enough, I found that I was the one now clinging to someone for life. Someone who had enough angry water to fight all on his own. I found that nothing really is as it seems, even perfect happy endings you want desperately to come true. And then I found that within all of us is a little bit extra to go on when you think you can't. I found some passion stored away in me. And with passion there is promise.
I left a window cracked when I left that space and town years ago. And slowly, over time...all the dramas, traumas and woes found their way back to me. Slowly. Deceptively positioning themselves as something different and promising to understand what and who I was. And slowly, I let that window be opened. And now I sit, having all the things I desperately needed to be away from to breathe...right back in my face. In and around my energy. Pulling. Demanding. Suggesting. Altering. Tailoring in their attempt to make this new space I fought so hard for, into the same comfortable slow death trap I narrowly avoided.
I know it's the same because that heaviness is back. A sense of something better, is gone. A belief that this is all there is, remains. And now I begin to think...perhaps that's all there was. Perhaps all I was put here to do was take care of them, comfort them and keep them company through their trials until...well, until it's all done.
And then I think again of that dream. Delivering that letter and then slipping off into the night hoping that they'll forgive me and understand. In a way, we want the very same things. They want me, for their very survival. Problem is...I needed me first.
The only person I was ever required to save in this life, was and has been, me.
