Waking Moment

Today I felt it. Today it hit me. Today I realized by a few signs— a look— a look that triggered my mind to link a series of feelings and memories and suppressed thoughts. It was like the tide going out to expose the underlying truths of it all on the bottom of the ocean right before a tsunami.

Just like a tsunami too. People envision a tsunami to be some giant massive wave that crashes over buildings and crushes and pummels and destroys. The reality of one is much less dramatic, but at the same time much more disturbing. It pushes in and pushes in and sweeps through everything, collecting the debris and garbage along the way and presses it against everything and everyone with unrelenting ugliness. It is worse because it is quieter and deceivingly more powerful than a crashing wave. It exposes and destroys and ruins everything in its path, washing away the carefully manicured patina of order and beauty and leaving the dirty scum of truth and chaos in an evidential trail of destruction as it finally dissipates and recedes— leaving nothing the same as you knew it before.

And what do you do with yourself after the loss and shock. (Not even a need for a question mark, or maybe too drained to put one there) You do the only thing you can do. You put things away, sweep in silence, pick up the trash and then figure out a way to move on in your new world as it it now, but with a mind that will never quite forget what it saw and now knows. Maybe what you always knew and now look around to see that all the soil has washed away and are unable to bury the reality again—or too tired to lift the shovel to scoop the filthy mud back onto it — or look around and realize the futility of trying — or all of these reasons— or none of these reasons. It’s like everything you ever thought and believed was wrong and is now exposed, and yet makes sense in a deeply sad and heart numbing way.

I saw behind the wizard’s curtain—awoke from the matrix—floated out of the fog to reveal an endlessly vast, grey, empty and lonely sea ahead with no more wind in my sails and no direction to go with any power or purpose.

I’ll just drift.

I’ll take some time to just drift. Relax my arms from the oars.

Bandage my hands and laugh to myself at the absurdity of having been rowing, and rowing, and rowing for so long.

Yes, I’ll drift for a bit and get accustomed to the calm, the calm I have always sought and never understood why I wasn’t capable of it.

It never dawned on me that I needed to give up….

To stop trying for both of us