What's the Sound of One Heart Breaking?

It feels like I fell asleep and woke up in someone else's life.

I don't like it. Too much crying, too much pain.

Maybe as a writer I can come to appreciate the unexpected twists and turns, but right now I'm just suffering from motion sickness. Goldie knows how I feel. You see Goldie--whose actual name is Swimmy, but I guess I have her mixed up with another goldfish--is losing her fins. They look like lacey little bones denuded of their purposefulness. She eats, swims, poops, and all that good stuff, but unless the filter swirls her around, she is operating without a rudder. And now so am I.

I really am too paranoid to get into the facts--if there are any--but needless to say I too have been stripped of my rudder: My history, my sense of who I've been. I'm a victim of an identity theft from within the circled wagons. I've been given my marching orders and they are this: Get lost!

And what have I done to merit such a request? I tried to help someone. I tried to help someone who obviously did not want to be helped. I found that out too late. The damage was done. I was asked into a situation then summarily dismissed for having answered that call.

None of this seemed possible just a few hours ago and it is so surreal that if I was able to sleep, I'd think it was some nightmare foisted upon me by too much spicy food. And like a bad meal, a seminal element of my life has been flushed down the toilet. I am undone, unwanted, and unwelcome. I've had to forget a phone number I've known all my life.

I'm reading this now--in black-and-white--and I still don't believe it's true. I wonder if people know the power they have when they empty their words, their fears, their anxieties onto another person. I wonder if they know that their legacy is forever set in the stone cold pain of one night's events. One night that hurts more than all 10 years of the bullying I suffered through in school.

Sometimes you just have to take care of the people under your own roof. It goes against my nature, but I'm afraid that at times that's the way things have to be. "Don't go where you aren't invited," the Native American ancestors say. And I would add, think long and hard about stepping in even when you are invited, even begged.

Be nice to the people around you and be someone they can trust and count upon. Forgive them the little (and not so little) pains of the past as I have done, repeatedly. There will always be tiffs and tussles, but there should never be irrevocable damage done in the name of "autonomy".

I'm grieving tonight because sometimes people die without ever leaving, and sometimes in so doing, they leave us a little less alive.