The Honest Work They Did

Beautiful sunny day. Traffic sounding busy-like in the distance. A few doors down dogs bark. Three woodpeckers playing tag on the branches of a broken tree’s top. A line of cloud trails a plane in flight overhead, before disappearing. You take it all in, especially the bright blue of the sky and the warmth of the sun on your skin. You know in an instant, or in the blink of an eye eveything you had come to know, everything you had grown accustom to, is soon to be taken away. And you don’t know what to do with yourself, with life still happening, still teeming all around. Memories all messed up in your head – the past six months a blur. Held in the public’s eye you know you’ve made some terrible lasting impressions and mistakes. You know you’ve done wrong and have come to realize the world is your witness. All they want from you is closure – nothing more.Your family is elsewhere but here, beside you, but not. Try as you might you cannot win back their unconditional love, or it is still there but existing as something unrecognizable – and deservedly so. All the songs declaring something of your story – Leonard Cohen sounding most effectual of all. Poets and authors telling in their own way what they saw. It is coming at you from all around – the sheer contempt and bitter disregard for your character, for your very being, for the essence of who you are. You know you’ve been pinned to that spot for a long time. But you can’t blame or condemn the family to put you out there, to show you in the best way they knew how to let others be aware of this travesty. What they pulled off is unreal but so necessary and just. And yet you want to tell your family who seem so foreign to you now, that they deserve to be done with it all. They deserve to get on with that better life – having come this far with the one they knew so well. Putting up with it all and not sounding a word right to the bitter end. How they managed it you’ll never know. You know yourself that even though you’ve been exposed you still love your family, no matter. And you feel such a pang of remorse and guilt-ridden shame at the wound that runs so deep.And you know in the end you are nothing and will soon be swept away like dust from all your angst.

You went along with the routine of things for the last six months – playing your part the best you could while it seemed that somebody else had all the control. Those days seemd to be lived so far from the truth, but you were thankful to have lived them just the same.

Stepping bak, confronting its end – a lifeline is many things tethered as we are to that exact moment of its creation. To be sure it is brief. The challenge is ours for a while to probe the intrigue of all it imparts. To be there for one another regardless of the circumstance. To love unconditionally.