Life through the Looking Glass....

in which fairy tales have no happy endings.

It’s an interesting thing, this life we lead. We come, we stay, we bond. We connect. They become our people, this becomes our place. We join their tribe. We find our similarities and struggle to understand our differences. We try to speak with their tongue, to learn their ways. We teach them some of ours. We come to know them, to depend on them, to cry their tears with them and share their joys. They become part of us and we of them. And then we leave.

My friend, she is suffering. He has gone. He had to; it was part of the deal. They knew what they were doing when they got into it, or they thought they did, as we all think we do. We’re faced with a choice. We’ve got an idea of the outcome and yet we move forward. We choose love. We think it must surely outweigh any pain ahead. We risk and sometimes we lose.

The situation before me right now echoes my own past so exactly it takes my breath away. It hits me too close to home, although what happened then was a different home and it won’t be the same one I go back to. For now this is the new home, the new normal. I want to escape the whole situation, to run away from this pain I can see and feel and relate to so clearly I have to check my own pulse to know where her sadness stops and mine begins.

I want to run and hide from this pain I know so well and yet I won’t. I can’t leave her like this. I might want to, to hit the eject button on my own seat in this experience and get the hell away from this pain but when you chose love you fly with no parachute. There is only the freefall.

She is my friend. And she is suffering. She wears it well; she carries on about her days quite normally when viewed by the untrained eye. In the daytime her grief is less visible, unlike the battle ready armor of misery I tend to adorn myself with like a shield, thick ugly layers of mesh and netting and wool that makes anyone who sees me wielding it shudder. On her it is a light shawl, a scarf of linen or muslin, bright and airy in the sunshine. It is only noticeable from the outside when a brief shadow passes over her face. In the dark nighttime, or behind closed doors her tears soak through the pain and make it cling to her as a second skin. I hold her as she cries, wishing words actually existed that could truly bring comfort and knowing from my own past there are none.

She is my friend. And he is my friend. And I’ve promised them I’ll be there for them as the distance and time and space pulls apart the strands of what they had and stretches it thin. As this awful and yet ultimately healing trilogy distorts and rearranges and attempts to diminish what was there, and all of our feeble human minds attempt to remember what our hearts still ache for.