π Conflicted Crossroads
Last Updated: 3Β months, 3Β weeks ago
We fought
And yes, I felt betrayed.
I fought with my friend, who is also the carer of the friend I am losing very soon, whom I possibly only have a week left with, which means possibly just one more visit, at her farewell.
I fought, not her.
I lashed out.
Why?
I don't think she understood exactly what was going on, none of them did, that little group huddling around her and those waiting in the wings to see her whenever we got a chance, when her energy permitted.
I won't chalk it up to stress.
I won't say it was the nightmare of over a week I've been through, trying to survive and getting through a mountain of work, enough work to pay all the bills without burning out or crashing down or letting anyone down, but riding that line finely.
I won't say it was the year of knowing I'm losing her, which has been all too short since I learned that.
Or that it was the years of things starting to go wrong since, well, then. Then being even before Covid-19 but culminating then.
No.
I knew the reasons, kind of.
And I made them abundantly ambiguously clear, of course, in my classic fall apart fashion which I'd thought was no longer emblematic of me since Cape Town, my new friends, my new identity as me, and my vastly processed trauma and improved health since what for me had been literal years of lockdown - though that was its own problem.
It made no sense, externally.
Why fight with a dying person's community and particularly her carer?
And right now, so close to the end?
Not that she'd hold it against me.
And I guess I feel safe to lash out.
And maybe it did all culminate, and I was vulnerable and susceptible to it.
But that's a problem.
The reasons were what I opened up about online to someone I'd met not even a week before.
I just want someone in my corner. Is it too much to ask that people could take a stand for me?
There were other things, unrelated, that were still haunting and traumatizing me.
Things I never could resolve or know how to. Things I would never get closure for, or a resolution to.
And as always, I was alone.
No matter who was there, no one was there, not really, and nobody stayed.
Nobody.
I was out walking as I pondered all this.
I approached the intersection where I'd make my turn.
I had (almost) reached the mall.
I had slowed, to prolong the tiny walk, but now I would have to make a decision.
I halted, stopped walking at the intersection, and felt tears start to come inexplicably.
I took some deep breaths to steady myself.
I tried to turn, pace back a bit, and forth as I often did when thinking, stalling, conversing with myself or others on the phone.
I tried to go back, to start a pace, but again, somehow, I couldn't bring myself to.
I either had to go one of two paths forward towards the place I always had to walk to, or backward towards the same familiarity and regularity of home, or to the side and off, avoiding the regular path.
I couldn't bear to go back. Somehow. I couldn't bear it.
The metaphor caught up with me eventually as I sat down to ponder my next move. I knew where back led and I didn't want to go back there. Not let my mind stay in this darkness of thought, unresolved, a train parked in a bricked up tunnel, when there was track to catch and people on the next train slipping away, soon out of sight. I couldn't stay on this train, and soon I would be out of time.
And so somehow, every direction forward felt like the same in any case.
That wasn't surprising, as time keeps leading forward, whether we are ready for it or not, and time was the real journey I was on.
It was the journey in my head I was following, of what to do when and next, and the inevitable, and the inevitable I would have to do as a result, because I'd known from the start of my lash out I couldn't let this go on too long, even while I'd battled my anger, and some sense of betrayal - whether justified or not? Which I couldn't let slide.
Not this time in my life - over the two days prior.
As I turned the corner, the sun flooded out from behind a cloud, a building.
I walked out into the warm, bright morning late autumn sun, my arm raised above to shield my face.
I was going somewhere. Somewhere forward.
But it was ok to this time stop for coffee while I thought about it.
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