Once again in too short of order, another friend has joined those I pray to now instead of for. I still pray for him, it’s just different. There were five and now there is two, A rag tag bunch of brothers from other mother’s. As wildly different, and at the same time attached at the hip through an idyllic if not completely dysfunctional sets of childhood.
Tomorrow I bury a friend that did not make it, one that was not on that list of five, but one that I was trying to help. With no other family it is hard to try to comfort someone’s Mother when you are fighting back the misplaced spite you place on yourself for not doing enough. There is not expected to be many and that part will hurt as well, knowing that when it all came down to it, you were it… the friend. While this was being played out in life on life’s terms one of my brothers had a heart attack in the middle of the night. It has been less that 48 hours since I heard, but it seems like an eternity. The replays of the scenes of life don’t stop, the emotions that well with them come and go like waves onto the shore. It’s as if you are in another planet being pulled and swayed by the winds and pulled by the stars.
Now I am in the middle of change, for that I am certain. I have the ability to separate myself from my situation. To say those words that I am ok, it is just my finances suck, and everybody gets something, this is just my turn. That separation that I am not the one that died, I am not the one that went out again and drove into a bridge support. In all of that though is the part I have the hardest time with, forgiving myself. In the program, there is so little of that spoken about that it is being left behind. I cannot forgive myself for some things for quite some time, and for that I am getting eaten alive by my own practices; My gut the only evidence needed.
That change also includes the huge lump of acceptance that I have to swallow that I just am not getting this new math. That math that’s written out formulaically that baffles mom’s and dad’s everywhere, or more like grandma’s and grandpa’s everywhere nowadays. So in that acceptance goes my hopes of going to college, to get a degree, my nieces and nephews have some, but in my family only a sister and a brother out of nine went on to any real education post HS. We were raised that you got a good job and worked hard, and that would be enough. By the time I rolled around there were no mills to work at like your Pa, and Grandpa before you kind of thing, the world was cutthroat, and I could do that part in the restaurant industry. Since the family had me working at various jobs by the time I was eight, I was being brought up to be a worker, I busted tires when I was ten and assisted safe mechanics at 12. When I was six I went aboard a NOAA vessel to help change a filter for the company my brother works for. He was in the office, and his boss took me there to loosen the 236 bolts that were around this six foot filter. Yes I remember that, and I remember all of my friends too, all of the little things about them that would be lost to time if someone else might have tried to remember them. I was/am the memory vault and it hurts like hell to open it this wide anymore. But I am ok, I have faith that they are in a better place, and this too shall pass.
I am just going to test out of home and then go to the college to do the actual tests. There is no need to take any time away from those kids that are making their way, my time is done kind of. Another acceptance that wallows up in the throat and makes talking all that much harder to do. So a part time job that has started off with all too much drama will probably go away too as we try to figure out where we can go to on such weird notice. They just gave my wife a raise on a job that owes her much more and that she will probably have to lose if we move too far. I just don’t know, I don’t know what I am supposed to do or not do. I am stuck in a grace that doesn’t fit and it is unsettling. I feel a grand walkabout coming, with just the stars to guide me.