Tags
fear, friendship, hope, loneliness, love, past, reality, trauma
I’ve been thinking about how we let people into our lives.
It’s an engineering problem, I guess – how to raise a drawbridge – but I think it’s also about reality and dreams.
When I was younger, I voyaged with my sails up and I created my reality with courage and hope. Reality was a living and evolving idea that existed all around me. I swam through it like a squid: alternately reaching then yielding as I glided through its waters.
Now, reality is a concrete pillbox that I wear around my neck. It is a fixed embodiment of my life’s experience and the template against which all further adventures are judged.
Instead of creating reality out of the energy and stardust of our lives, we move through our tiny lives actually constrained by our reality.
It is the cage into which our dreams must fit.
So, what does that mean for a new relationship?
Instead of experiencing him like a child experiences Christmas morning, I am assessing whether he could live within my cramped and haunted reality. Could he give himself to a girl who lives in a ghostly palace of childhood emptiness, teenage confusion, and adult loss?
Would he ever be able to give me enough kindness, friendship and love to break the locks on the structures of my truth? To shatter the lessons that I learnt. To tear down this broken, inflexible monument and free me to create a new reality out of possibilities.
My disfigured reality is fearsome and immutable in the face of all but the most heroic.
And who can find a hero in this world?
The Time Puddle 