nothing is but what is not
I used to think I could see the future. Not in any magical or psychic sense, but because I believed that there were certain supports, certain ties, certain rules that I would always be able to count on, that would be there to shape my life, to define its boundaries, to keep me safe. I believed in other people and I believed in myself. I took for granted that I was working with a net.
It's dizzying to contemplate how wrong I was. I took a step and the ground gave way. I reached out and touched only darkness. Nothing in the altered landscape is familiar. What I see clearly is that I can't see at all.
17 comments:
(((niobe)))
And in spite of your pain, you write about it all so beautifully.
I was going to write something, but yankee t said it so well already.
Thus: ditto.
What they said. And you are a beautiful writer.
I feel like I've just had one pounding after another to remind me there is no net, only chance. I read a book recently by a woman who survived her own axe murder, and she describes being the only person in a large self-help seminar to put her hand up when the seminar leader asked if anyone was was afraid to cross the street.
Reading this I thought, "who wouldn't be afraid to cross the street? People get killed in the street all the time."
Beautiful writing Niobe. I'm sorry for your pain.
Aww, shit. I started to write 2 or 3 different comments, but I'm not liking anything I have to say today. So just, "hi."
sometimes i think only the people who've realized that they can't see, see anything.
sometimes i'm just eaten up with envy over the bubbles of those who still believe they can, who believe the net is there.
Bon -- Exactly. I watch them and keep expecting them to come tumbling down, but somehow they never do.
You really are a great writer. Tell me that you use this talent in real life somehow, and not just by filling out forms or writing contracts or something? Something creative, please?
What Bon said.
And to top it off, it's not like we can go up to the oblivious and say "hey, look, there is no net." They will think we are just bitter bitches busting their high.
Yeah that's the line that got me: "I believed in myself. I took for granted that I was working with a net" It is so exactly the same for me. I am puzzled by how someone can never consider anything going wrong in their lives, but then again, I used to be that person. From where I am now, I can't believe I ever was that person.
I have also found that there are those who will continue to go to great lengths to convince themselves of the net, even when they have been confronted with conflicting evidence. In my subsequent pregnancy, I had one friend who was quite insistent that "it would never happen twice." As though we are all only allotted a certain amount of loss, and then we can count on nothing but blue skies ahead.
Of course, my personal faith is that there is a net. It just doesn't catch us in the way we usually hope for.
I wish I had words of hope and insight like the commenters before me, but I am stuck in the same dark world you are right now. We weep into a stone.
Often life is cyclic...so don't be too surprised if you come back to believing it exists again someday in the future.
And everything else we see dimly is largely a construct of our imagination, of our mind's "filling in" what was never there. We can only hold on to ourselves, and hope that we are not illusion as well.
Aurelia -- My work is not exactly creative. But my job is one thing that I'm actually pretty happy with.
I watch them and keep expecting them to come tumbling down, but somehow they never do.
Oh, we do. We just wait until you've looked away.
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