“Life is like a pipe, and I’m a tiny penny rolling up and down the walls inside.”
Amy Winehouse, Back to Black.
Tonight marks my last night as a born again resident of Paradise.
Starting tomorrow, I’ll be a big girl, an adult all on my own, my own residence to play house with.
One part of me- excited dreamer, optimist to the extreme- is imaging starting all over again.. a pleasant mix of the Purple Before and PlanB. A space to make my own, to nourish my children, to relax.
Have you ever experienced the phenomenon of working, exhausted by your job, only to take a holiday and immediately fall ill with a cold or the flu. Your body relaxes and feels it is finally, finally able to be soft and weak and relax its immune system too. And you get sick.
The other part of me, the realist that is not so optimistic… it wonders if that’s exactly what will happen. I’ll finally felt safe and secure, loved and stable, with people close by to call if something goes wrong… I think my body may just break. My mind just may fall open and expose all the pain inside.
Or maybe not. All this time, I’ve been stronger than I thought.
***
That scared, cynical part of me tells me lots of things. She’s hurt and traumatised and so broken she may never scrape herself back up. She trusts no one at all, and if people get too close to her, she pushes them away.
Burnt.
She screams at me, What if this makes no difference? What if we’re just running again and it brings no relief?
I try to temper her, and talk to her. She is pissed off and angry.
But at least she’s only a bit of me now. Most of her dissolved in Paradise.
***
I’ve had a few people assume that, because I’m moving away from Paradise, a bit closer to where I used to live, I made the wrong decision to move here in the first place, regretted my choice.
I haven’t. Not for a second. I feel blessed to have spent six months here, relatively alone, with my children. We needed a winter near the beach, far away from everyone, to learn to be family again.
To learn to function without Tony.
To prove to myself that I could do this, with minimal assistance in the day to day.
And I did it. It was hard, and I almost fell apart more times than I can count. But it was worth every second, every tear, every second of heart breaking loneliness. I moved here broken, burnt, terrified, traumatised. I’m leaving… not quite whole.
But I’ve come so far. Being whole is relative. I’ll take what I can get.
I’m a survivor. I’m strong. I can handle far more than what I ever thought I could. And I can do it with some level of dignity, some preservation of the spirit.
This is the rest of my life.
Bring it on.