Innocence Lost

You can almost always tell when I’m upset. I blog. Or I stop talking to everyone. Depends on which side of my personality is pulling the strings, I guess.

One of the things I absolutely hate is the feeling of being locked inside yourself. The feeling that you can’t talk about what’s bothering you. It’s the feeling you get when hope is lost in a relationship, the issues way beyond talking through. It’s the feeling victims of abuse often have, locked in a prison of silence and isolation.

And it’s a feeling that you can get when you care about a friendship or a person more than they care about you or your friendship. To speak may be to lose what little you have… and you have to decide if you’d rather have the person in your life to some small degree or not at all.

The end of a relationship shares similarities to facing death. Often, what people grieve for is more what might have been than what was. This is why many take the death of a child harder - they had their whole life in front of them. Endless possibilities. What you mourn isn’t just the child that was but all of the unknowns. Who they might have married, the children they might have had themselves, the career, the way their life may have touched others.

But there’s also something devastating about facing a loss and for it to come in twilight, after a lifetime has been spent, if you realize that what’s hurting most is the hope you carried, that things might be different between yourself and that person… and now that will never happen. You lived in a limbo, tolerating what was but always hoping for that moment when you could somehow reverse a decision, switch tracks, make things better than they are. Sometimes you’re left to carry the guilt of what you said and did. And sometimes, what’s tearing you apart is all the things you didn’t say.

It’s being caught between life and death that is the worst. When you can see that a friendship/relationship/person/career is on life support. The prognosis isn’t good. You know it’s inevitable. You might even know, on one level, that it’s time. And maybe sometimes you know it’s for the best, that the suffering is too great.

And you feel guilt for even thinking that, for thinking that it would be better to take away one single second of life prematurely. You play the ‘what if’ game. You know the one. The one where you ask, What if they find a cure? or What if they change their mind and want to start fresh?


What I’ve learned lately is that it’s more convenient to stand for nothing than to care, that defending a person, organization or decision is not only thankless, it’s heartwrenching, but that there’s a mourning that comes with giving up on people, and it’s the kind that rips your heart out and tears it into shreds because it’s the kind of pain you can feel over and over again, every time you have to face their choices. You wish to God you didn't care, but you do, and the greatest form of agony is the fact that as much as you want to, you can't find a way to stop.

And yes, my mood is affecting my writing today. No sunshine and lollipops.