Wr1tt3n0ne

Bunches and bunches
2018-06-24 22:45:39 (UTC)

Where are You?

I have a bit of a shared history with a person who puzzles me. Not that it is so hard to bemuse me, exactly, but even for my life this is strange. And my life strayed from normal many, many years back...

It was well after my life had taken a turn for the absurd and the unusual that our paths crossed. Life took on a magical, impossible hue. Things this world hides from us inhabitants were somehow rendered clearly and it was intoxicating. The world was new, fresh, vibrant and I felt I was equally so. Around every bend, there seemed to be more that led me deeper with this person, coincidence lost value to me and things took on the glow of the preordained.

I read a lot of old fairy tales, not the Disney ones, though, I do love them, no the darker, meaner, leaner ones, like Grimm, Aesop or worse. Bloodier, more gruesome and more realistic outcomes for some very magical circumstances. All of this is a long way of saying I should have looked ahead on my golden path and seen it veer into the foreboding forest. Ahh, but truly I did not, moment to moment I lived and breathed, careless of what lie ahead of me.

Then the odd started into my life and took a dark edge. This person I was so sure I knew, into the marrow of my bones, was slowly rendered strange to me. It was as if I had woken up in someone else's life. I was not merely bewildered, I was rendered shocked and speechless. I ran away from them, never wishing that deep a connection again, all contact became quite superficial, if present at all. But the wound I sustained by believing, persisted. Older, and perhaps wiser, I want to say I alter or that life did, but that is not what happened. I wish I could chalk it up to life changes and growth, but that is a flat out lie. None of that was it.

For many years I carried the scars and the questions they gave rise to along with me in my life. I grew, I changed, and I got on with the business of living. In Time, I moved on from my wondering, and the drive to trace back my life to that tipping point darkened within me, until like a spent fire it was merely coals. And in the deep dark of me, it lay, forgotten, abandoned with prejudice against it ever being raised up again into my mind. And so it lay, like a dead, poisonous snake, still dangerous but not able to come after me.

Now you can understand how jarring it was to get what I believe is the final puzzle piece recently. It made me uncomfortable in the shed of my own mind. In with the bric-a-brac of a life well lived there is now a puzzle with the final piece slipped into its weathered place. And the picture it presents me I find revolting. The picture now made plain is a dark understanding that at once robs me of a storybook happy ending and much of my hope. I have finally come full circle and seen just how and why the person so familiar to me was made other. I understand now how to make the way back that I can and what I must confront and accept to get there.

I tread lightly, as I learned to do with the creaky wood floors of my youth. I memorize where the creaks come from and move slowly and so stealthily. It was once in a book about Native Americans that they move through the forests without crunching the dried leaves or snapping the small sticks. Some magic with their moccasins and Mother Earth ways, I suppose and I would add a bit of the magical thinking of a population of men that thunder through the brush, scattering animals, upon seeing real stealth for the first time. And so my path through this ugly truth is one of sidesteps and some peril. And what awaits me at the end? Maybe a sliver of moonshine peace, still and deep, in the hot dark.




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