Left Behind

I am honestly to a place where I feel like most of the days are okay. Some are even good.

It feels like a betrayal to say that. Like I’m forgetting him. Or even that I’m leaving him behind. But then I wonder was it him that left us behind?

Who knows? Maybe he hoped we would just move on and forget him. Maybe he thought we would and hoped that maybe we wouldn’t.

Either way I keep fighting myself about whether it matters or not what he wanted. Sometimes I want to do what I think he may have wanted. Other days I want to kick him in the face for wanting things, if he did. I wonder why it matters to me. Why it should. What he wanted really doesn’t matter. He left.

And then I think that he didn’t feel like he had a choice. He felt like it was his only option. He hated everything about it. And that makes me sad.

The question is, what doesn’t make me sad? The answer, now, is that there ARE a few things that don’t.

Now, I have some things I’m looking forward to. I have friends I can have fun with. I have things I enjoy doing. Which is a change. For a long time I didn’t enjoy anything at all.

We are eight months into this, and there is a long way to go yet. But now? Now I feel like there is some hope out there somewhere. Now I feel like there might be a glimmer of progress. Now I feel like this won’t go on forever, necessarily.

Whether I am leaving him behind by moving on or he left me behind already, I don’t have much choice. I need to keep living a life. It’s certainly not the one I wanted. But it’s the one I have, so I guess I have to make do with it, don’t I? Don’t we all?

Talking to a friend this weekend, he came up with a good analogy for life. Our life is like a sailboat, we have control over what we do with the sails and the wood. But we don’t have any control over the wind that comes at us or the currents that carry us along. We can turn the sails to catch the wind and make us go the direction we want, kind of. Sometimes we even get really good at it. But there will always be times where unexpected winds come and blow us off course, and when that happens, we have to adjust our plan. Maybe even make a new one, whether we want to or not.

It’s not fair. It’s not fun. But it’s life. And life goes on.

Written 10/21/2014