Shadowed Companion

"The past, what we have done or not done, slips and flows, like a stream to a carved-out channel, into the things we do years after. It is never safe, or wise, to say that anything is over." --The Last Light of the Sun

Today I am a TCK. Today I am a Missionary Kid. Today, I am Global Nomad. Today, I am an International.

Most days though, I'm just A. I'm A, who just moved here, and is still slogging through the introductions and awkward impression-making. I'm A, who loves cooking and laughing and being outside. I'm A, who wants to work in medicine, exults in dancing, loves the colour green, and who is almost never late for anything. If it's a chore to relate my lifestory to others and wade through explanations and dodge the responding gasps, then it's also a chore to remember it everyday myself, beyond a vague, near-prideless knowledge that I am simply "different".

Today though, today I will be more than a tinge of unusual. Today I will remember who I am and where I come from and all those who have walked with me this far. Today I will glory in the knowledge of companionship in my solitude, and of kinship in my disconnect.

This was a clever title.

There is a particular strain of music which plays in my mind, the days I write here. This is not the entirety of who I am, in these small typed words and melancholic phrases, influenced as they are by contemplation and maudlin, beautiful compositions. This is not even the core of my being--can an amorphous stream have a core? But this is a moment of me, and in this moment, this is the entirety of myself and who I am.

This moment, the entirety of me is old, and tired, and already sitting outside that stream of life and relationships. When one is alone so much, it is easy to forget one's age, and even one's joy's and personality. Impersonalisation and detachment have ever been my peculiar talents.

And I have just become bored. Very suddenly. I think I shall go somewhere are read. Enough of this vanity!

It is finished. What is finished, they ask. I am. I am finished now, for I have given up want for the sake of wisdom. I have given up that which I desired most for the promise of a better future. On some level, I have died; an echo of a long line of choices, marching stoically on, armed with naught but unvalidated promises and fervent hopes has trodden over my many graves. But do not fear--there is much of me yet to die.
I wish it didn't have to be this way; that I could do what I want and still what I need, and both at the same time in the same manner. Is it a fault with me, that I want that which is not best for me? I hope so--personal faults can be corrected, but if it is a fault of the world, of man's purpose, then I fear I will never be freed of this my conflict. Will I always be of two minds? I think so. Even three, four, five minds--however many a situation demands. Will I ever be united within myself? Only in death, I believe. There is too much about life that is war for it to be elsewise.
I will trade my dream for gold--sell out my hope and love for the stability of the future. I am still young. Dreams are like young fruit on a young tree for me--numerous and bright and in a great abundance. I may yet sacrifice some of this fruit, but there will come a day when I can spare no more dreams to the fire, when I can let them tumble to the ground no more. For now, though, I will give and I will grieve and I will heal and be the better for it.
But first, let me grieve. I have already given. You cannot ask more.

I am adrift on a boat that goes nowhere--nowhere I've been before, and nowhere anyone else has ever been, either. My currency is traded in for the shirt on my back and the food at my feet, and my oars have been pitched aside, and now float somewhere far behind in the murky distance, for fear that I would use them to turn back to a dying land. The sun at my front, tinging red the skin on my cheeks and my knees, and the dark of what has been behind, fading into memory a moment at a time.

I don't know what happens now. I don't know what happens next. If you ask me where I will be in nine months, I could not possibly tell you--let alone where I will be in 12 months. There is a part of me which thinks man is not made for such freedom--such a vast and terrible empty howling of option and choice. There is too much to consider, and not enough time or energy to consider it, and only the very rash can get away with tossing their life to the wind.

What do I do now? Where do I go? I don't know who I will be in six months, what sort of me I will have become; I don't know whether this fall will break me. It could--so, so easily. But whether the breaking would be in the coming, the staying, or the going? I do not know. What does it matter? Even if it does not break me, will going back in January--alone--do that for me? With almost everyone who actually means something to me gone, will it just be a painful reminder?

Life doesn't suck, not yet, but it isn't easy, and it is nothing short of terrifying and draining right now. How the hell are you supposed to make any good choices when you're uninformed, inexperienced, and emotionally compromised? And given that, why should good decisions be expected at all? If it were just decisions that were necessary, anything in the universe could do that. But damned if we aren't expected to make good decisions. And damned if I don't demand that of myself.

I will do what I have always done, of course: nothing more, nothing less than what I can do. Than what I really, truly want to do. Have I ever done anything I haven't wanted to do, on some level? Not when choice was given me. The consequences always guarantee you do what you want to out of the choices presented. And I'm not hardly about to stop doing what I want--that would hardly be human of me.

And so I will rage. And so I will tremble. And so I will weep tears which never fall down my face and only burn like smooth rich bourbon in the back of my throat. And so I will make my way through this barren, bustling, brimming world: full of an entire Humanity just

like

me.

It's peaceful now, on the outside. But there is no end to the tumult inside of me. My very soul feels restless, and even aches--somewhere deep in my throat, behind the dip at the base of my neck, where tears ache and gather. I want to be so much more. I want the world to be so much more. I want some miraculous release or outflowing which will somehow give meaning and vision to my world and those around.

Unleash this grief, this deep I keep nestled inside-- I know it is there for a reason, and I know it is beautiful, but it presses, and it weighs, and it calls out and nothing answers but faint echoes from far away. Words fail, I fail to find the right ones, they simply are not there-- but I want. I want I want I want, and that much I know, and that much I do not have, because I want so much more from life, and from myself.

But how much of me first must die? How much of those I love must atrophy while I sit and listen, watch--helpless. How much stagnancy and pressure can I take before I snap all responsibility, all duty, all love, all caution and run somewhere--free?

Give me my wine, and give me my cigars, and give me my silken-shirt, with no underclothes and no regrets. Tomorrow, this summer, this life may be duty and motivation and hard, bloody hard work-- but tonight I will dine on the delectability of what I choose not to regret, and tonight I will sit, dry-eyed and pensive, and tonight I will watch the world burn.

The world has changed, since last I looked on it. The trees are different now; maybe greener, maybe fuller, maybe happier. The water--it slurps cheerfully along its swollen river banks and tows the winter's casualties with it. The earth crumbles and pastes, instead of stiffly yielding spittle of rock and ice and dust.

perhaps it is just me that has changed. perhaps it is just my world which has turned upside down.

Because I am leaving once more. Am I not always leaving? Am I not forever saying "goodbye, it was nice knowing you, you are dead to me now?" But this time will be different. This time, I will come back to what I know to be dead to me. This time, I will return and live in the emotional decay and graveyard of people I have already resigned myself to leaving and never looking back to--and even one person, whose memory's gravestone I will visit every time I do anything I love in this city. One person who can never live again, whom I cannot afford to give life to, whom I have no choice but to bid farewell, forever and goodbye.

I had my last dance tonight. It was good. It left me missing. I will not bury this one thing. I may put the others aside in a tight little box, all secured against the unsteady tide of reaction, but this one I will leave in peace, as it left me peaceful.

Or as peaceful as a world turned on its axis ever can be.

Can I just sleep now, please?