Freedom Train

"Reset your password"…The cursor blinked in synchronicity with her nervous heartbeat as it awaited a response in the empty text box.

This mundane task she’d repeated at least a hundred times over the course of her relationship with the internet held the capacity to secure her future and seemingly set her free. Hesitation’s visitation had kept her on pause for at least six months. She mulled over the idea of transferring funds that were never in dispute until recently.

The aftermath of an accident, a global pandemic, an eviction, and several necessitated job transitions and moves while grieving, single, and taking care of a mentally unstable mother had stretched her to capacity such that her mental state was about to snap. A rubber band that once had strength and flexibility was now fragile with hairpin cracks. It was brittle and if you leaned in close, you could pick up on the sounds hinting at sudden destruction.

Advice had become annoying. Irritating flies buzzing about her ears as she swat at the air in vain. Wisdom, she’d once been told by her own mother, is the most difficult gift to carry. Indeed. It didn’t make ease of choices in life. Living in folly removed the burden of choosing right or wrong, justice or harmony. Wisdom was the lynchpin that stabilized the divide between equity and equality.

She scraped at the stickers that had been placed upon her over the years labeling her, selfish, entitled, unlovable, crazy, unstable, and broken. Every time she successfully removed one so you couldn’t see the words on her anymore, it left a residue that other things stuck to like disappointment, sadness, bitterness, apathy, and ignorance. The cycle was vicious.

Her gaze rose to the cursor, still blinking away but she noticed the synchronized beating of her heartbeat had disassociated and run off like a train unfettered by freight interruptions and necessary refueling.

The train could have fooled her. The ticket had said freedom, and so she thought that was where she was headed when she boarded with her mum. Freedom, she had learned, meant different things to different people. Equity and equality echoed in her ears as she sat idle in her prison cell.

Her fingers made contact with the keyboard. Freedom was a few keystrokes away, she had been told. The question was, is this really freedom? She questioned too whether freedom was truly what she wanted.

She was a fixer. She had fixed broken things most of her life. She always saw the potential and when something broken seemingly couldn’t be fixed, it destroyed her. And now, that thing was her. The tension built as her fingers atrophied. She’d noticed this tension that seemed to course through her veins when anything related to the trauma she’d walked through assaulted her.

It started in her mind and then made its way wreaking havoc on her physical body. She felt regularly like an abuse victim stumbling in pain and yet, she hadn’t even been touched….in years. Her body kept the score, and it was winning. No matter what measures she took, the oppressive infection continued to spread.

When was the last time she walked upright, danced joyfully, or spoke enthusiastically about the future? When she boarded the train, she had packed hope in a bag, but sadly, it was left behind at a train station that was many many miles away now. And looking back, she couldn’t even see it anymore.

Reset your password; it sounded so simple, so succinct.

It represented a reset of her life. But her mind was blank. She closed her eyes and squeezed them tight attempting to ring out a new password, but hot tears poured from her eyes instead. And when she opened them, her screen had gone dark. Her computer had timed out and was performing a routine update. The password reset would have to wait and so would she.