05.25.08

Time is a funny thing.  I used to believe as many do, that time heals all wounds and will mend all that is broken.  We think we’ll heal.  We just need more time.  I’ve come to the painful realization, however, that nothing is that simple, even time.  Time cannot fix the problems we hold on dearly to, afraid to let go because of the feelings that will come about as a result.  I feel so silly.  I constantly tell myself that I should have healed from the pain of my childhood, from my adolescence, from all the hurt in my life.  I’ve been in therapy my whole life it seems and have worked through it.  But maybe I haven’t dove right in, sorted through it and emptied it all out.  Maybe I need more of … what’s it called, ah yes….time.

I really related to Nina and Jose’s interaction in the movie “Bella” last night.  It reached into my soul and pulled emotion out, yet I was unable to show it.  When Jose asked Bella what it was like dealing with her father’s death, she replied:  “I don’t know.  I don’t remember what the 12-year-old in me was feeling.  I think that my mom took it so hard, that I didn’t get the chance to grieve in a healthy way.  It was like I had to take care of her.  At first it brought us close together, but eventually all that grief turned into resentment.”  I feel the same way about my father.  He suffocated me.   He made me grieve for him, not for myself.  Sympathy gave way to resentment.  I didn’t physically lose my parents, but I lost them in an emotional sense, and I don’t know which is worse sometimes.  I was drawn in by my father and I saw my mother floating farther and farther away.  There was no way of reeling her back in; no way to be a kid again.  I longed to run to her, arms outstretched, like a young child to its mother, hungry for love and affection; yet I could not.  Like a ghost, she faded into the realm of the unknown.  I searched, and continue to search, for replacements for the one I could not have.  I yearn for someone to save me, like a flick of the finger saves a rolie-polie who is searching for the ground beneath its flailing body.

I see myself in Nina.  So jaded, waiting for time to heal her broken heart.  The movie was about how one moment can change your life forever.  Where is my moment?  When will the ground beneath me crack open and shift?  I’ve waited, imprisoned, for years upon years. I’ve been longing my whole life for something I’ve never had; trying to hold onto the hope, yet feeling so hopeless.  How do I go about on my journey to find it?  What is it exactly?  These are all questions that seem to be a theme in my writings lately, yet I don’t know if I will ever find the answers.

I’ve tried to convince myself my whole life that the end is worth all this, that the little moments of beauty I see around me, are worth all the pain and suffering I face day after day.  I feel like a CD with one too many scratches, looping and skipping.  You can clean it and hope some of the superficial scratches disappear, but ultimately, there will always be those deep-seeded ones that remain.  Perhaps, I could even compare myself to a tape stuck on rewind or fast forward.  How I yearn to be stuck on play—to live in the moment and see the word for what so many call…a beautiful place.