![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Though it doesn't happen as often as it used to, I still find myself stepping on landmines. They once littered my home, my life, my memory. I would open a book, and find a dinner receipt used as a bookmark. I'd stare at it for hours, trying to remember the meal. Did she laugh? Did I smile? Was it back from when we still shared easily from each other's plate?
Or a trick of the light would reveal the ghost of a photo that once sat in the frame I now use to hold images of more recently lost companions.
Today, it is the mailing address on a box. I'd meant to open the box, to steel myself against the tides of memory and finally deal, seven years later, with the contents inside. But my hand began to tremble even before the lid was opened.
It was the address, you see. It was shipped to the home I had so many plans for. Delivered to the life I planned to build around another, now lost to me. It was meant to be part of a future I denied.
I walked away from that home, that life, when I realized that my partner had no plans to ever listen to me. She was so concerned with What Other People Would Think if they knew we were having problems that all her energy and effort went in to keeping it secret, and she could spend none on actually repairing the wounds between us.
It's been seven years. I've made my home 500 miles away, made and lost friends. I've spent 5 years in therapy over what she and I had done to each other. Yet, I look at the problems I'm having right now, the places my attention is focused on, and I have to wonder if I've really moved all that far away.
Does anyone ever really recover from an addiction, be it to drugs or alcohol or emotionally abusive relationships? Or do we just learn to mask our fears more quickly? Still our trembling doubts, shoulder the burdens we've set upon ourselves and take up the long and forking road once more?
Some days I think that I have learned nothing since leaving my father's house, except fear. Fear and bitterness.
Today is one of those days.
Or a trick of the light would reveal the ghost of a photo that once sat in the frame I now use to hold images of more recently lost companions.
Today, it is the mailing address on a box. I'd meant to open the box, to steel myself against the tides of memory and finally deal, seven years later, with the contents inside. But my hand began to tremble even before the lid was opened.
It was the address, you see. It was shipped to the home I had so many plans for. Delivered to the life I planned to build around another, now lost to me. It was meant to be part of a future I denied.
I walked away from that home, that life, when I realized that my partner had no plans to ever listen to me. She was so concerned with What Other People Would Think if they knew we were having problems that all her energy and effort went in to keeping it secret, and she could spend none on actually repairing the wounds between us.
It's been seven years. I've made my home 500 miles away, made and lost friends. I've spent 5 years in therapy over what she and I had done to each other. Yet, I look at the problems I'm having right now, the places my attention is focused on, and I have to wonder if I've really moved all that far away.
Does anyone ever really recover from an addiction, be it to drugs or alcohol or emotionally abusive relationships? Or do we just learn to mask our fears more quickly? Still our trembling doubts, shoulder the burdens we've set upon ourselves and take up the long and forking road once more?
Some days I think that I have learned nothing since leaving my father's house, except fear. Fear and bitterness.
Today is one of those days.