My tears were always prettier at sunset

“Music is the only thing that keeps me sane here.

It feels like I’m constantly wishing for things to be different. Things start out deceptively hopeful then just fizzle out into a nothingness that is more isolating than the concept of anxiety-induced loneliness. I keep trying to fill that nothingness with people, ambition, work, food, movement, music. Nothing really works, because after my little joyful romp I’m still coming back to the nothingness that is ‘existing within this space’.

There is no love here.

That is the truth. I do not feel love in this environment and it’s a shame that I am now the bearer of emptiness to the little ones. I cannot give what I do not have. I cannot pretend to be the sun that lights up their day, I cannot pretend to be comfortable with how we live, how we work, how we ‘love’. Lately I’ve started thinking about how different it might be if my father was still alive. Would she be less absent? Less high-strung and unbalanced? Would she still be my hero? Would I be more tolerant of her idiosyncrasies if she didn’t constantly project her disappointments on me? Or am I the one who constantly projects my disappointments on her? Am I the evil that lives here?

It feels incredibly strange not being the apple of my mother’s eye anymore, almost painful. Life has relegated our relationship to “mother (occasionally) – daughter (occasionally)”, and the roles reverse often, sometimes I’m simply “member of household”. I’ve stopped looking for love in her arms because she simply doesn’t have it to give. She cannot do all things. We can fail.

I wish I had friends here.

More specifically, I wish I had my friends here. The family I got to choose, people who just made life seem that much brighter. I was already so sad and disillusioned, I didn’t anticipate that it could possibly get worse. Parenting is not just making sure that your children have what they need, it’s also simply being there. People forget that last, most important part and proceed to populate the world with little humans broken by their absence. I scattered my beans of happiness and sanity around my little circle of dreamers and they pulsed with love and healing. Now that I’m so far away? I feel nothing.

Or is it my lack of a spiritual life here?

Is that why the nothingness keeps prodding and poking and yelling at me? Curiosity served me where religion failed me, but consistency keeps slipping from my fingers. I believe in God and I believe in harmony, I believe that joy lives where you’re aligned to purpose. Now even purpose is lost on me, nothing seems to fit, nothing except this. But I cannot put all the pressure on this, because it is so delicate, so precious, I’m afraid it might break.

I’m afraid I might break here.”

With a gentle sigh, she placed her pen down on the mahogany dresser and shut the leather-bound notebook that held all the promises she made towards finding clarity. Nothing terrified her more than unanswered questions. She couldn’t stand having gaps in her knowledge and it hurt her to label circumstances unknown.

The sun was beginning to set and the pinky-orange hue cast a certain air of wistfulness across her dimly lit bedroom. Chin in palm, heart in mouth, eyes weighed down by melancholy, my tears were always prettier at sunset.