You Always Find Your Way Back Home

Need we talk about the things that are obvious? The sky is blue, the sun rose this morning, the moon will set again tonight and the waves are still crashing along the shoreline somewhere. Need we explain the currents? The phases of that same moon which some of us rely so heavily upon? Dare I remind you of our president and the men and women who run our country? No, none of this is necessary, none of this is relevant to what I do need to talk about. Whether or not the waves crash along the shoreline does not change how I am feeling. The stage in which the moon finds itself in tonight does not negate nor does it influence the weight I am feeling pressing against my chest. If you think these things are necessary, if you think the current president and the color of the sky are important right now then I am sorry, but I refuse to use my vanishing breath to talk about things we cannot seem to change. So may I bother you for one moment? Burden you with the pain that seems to be wrapping itself around my barely beating heart?

I cannot breathe. I am up to my chin in grief. I feel a pounding sensation coming from my chest and all I want to do is throw myself into a pool of water but I won’t because the weight inside me will make me sink to the bottom and I do not think I am capable of bringing myself back afloat. So please forgive me for my shortness of breath, my lack of words.

I believe there are moments in each of our lives that we constantly replay in our heads, deciding whether or not we made the best decision, contemplating what we should have and could have done better, trying to come to an understanding of what the consequences of these moments will be. And I do not only mean negative consequences, I mean the changes that will arise following these moments, the good, the bad, and everything in between. Bear with me here.

Three years ago I made a decision that changed my life, physically, probably mentally, and at the time emotionally for the better, and I know that. I know that there would have been drastically different experiences in my life had I decided to stay in my current position, but because I could feel myself sinking deeper and deeper into that pool of water I grabbed on to the first piece of safety I could find. And that is how I ended up in my current home, that is how I convinced myself that all it took to feel happy was to jump to the first thing I could get a grip on. This was not a new tactic for me however, I had used this before, but never so dramatically, never with consequences so concrete. Three years ago I felt like I was living in dead grass with weeds up to the sky; three years later and I understand that I was just watering the grass on the other side, hence why it always appeared so much greener. But those weeds, that “dead grass” that I ran from, that was me, that was who I was, who I grew up to be. What appears to be nothing but dirt and overgrown, uncared for places to you, is my home.

And I want to go home.

I want to go back to the unwashed windows and broken shutters. I want to go back to where the sky lit up the house most days because electricity was a luxury. I miss the smell of the wood burning stove as I huddled around it trying to keep warm. With my family on either side of me, perhaps a cup of coffee or tea being passed between us, whichever was on sale that week.

You see, this life which I have left behind temporarily really was not that bad, it was not painful, nor degrading; it was uplifting, it was humbling. As humans we need to be humbled, we need to be reminded of the true honest reasons why we may breathe. This place, my home, reminded me of that oh so often, I need to be reminded once more.