Freedom

Today I stepped out of the office and felt like garbage. I've been feeling steadily like garbage for the rest of the afternoon except for a couple of lulls when I was thinking of something else.

I felt like everything I have ever touched has turned to shit. I went today to repay a kindness and found myself confronted with my own image in my mother's face. I don't want to feel angry or resentful or small anymore. I don't want to look at my future and find discontent and unsatisfied hopes.

This year has been so hard that I can't recall another period of my life when I was this tired. During the last year I've woken up tired almost every day. I'm so exhausted I've officially given up, at least temporarily. No wonder it's been getting so hard to write anything lately.

Today, I heard tears in the night and remembered my chains.

At times they feel very unreal, distorted like trick mirrors. And then I am left to wonder if things are as I've come to understand them. I get to wonder if maybe I haven't been horribly unfair to my mother, if maybe it really is all me. I have avoided her so conscientously since I left that I never stopped to think of what that would do to her now, given the circumstances. I feel like I should have known this time it was different. This time it was for real.

I cry. I feel the need to atone, feel the overwhelming impossibility of it and feel defeated in a way that is so familiar...

I remember Rosetti's poem, I have been here before, and instead of delicious anticipation all I feel is the dread of guilt, of crushing responsibility. I never thought to feel this way again. My head hurts and I am trying to cry very, very quietly. Is it a vestigial reaction to a completely new situation? Has my ability to empathize with my mother been forever tainted by survival mechanisms? Am I truly that monstrous?

I am tired and wretched and empty. And all I can think is, write, just keep writing, just get down to work, forget where you came from and fix your eyes on the future.