Time Has Passed

It has been years now; years since life was so radically altered.  So many seconds have passed since...  Well, truthfully, I don't even know the moment I should point to and say, "since then."  To be able to indicate the moment when it all began to change, I would have to identify the date and time when the dream exploded and it all started to crumble into a heap.  I can't do that.  I can tell you the dates when everything seemed to fall into spiraling crisis, but I think the destruction started a very long time before that.  The foundations were never solid, and the edifice that we tried to build could not stand.  Probably, it really doesn't matter when exactly the first crack appeared.  There were cracks.  That is enough to know about the beginning of the failure.

Now, though, time has passed, and we remain.  We have learned a variety of ways of living together in the rubble of what was.  I think, in some sense, we are healthier here in our rubble pile than we ever were in the castle in the sky.

I am approaching my 61st birthday.  So much of what was part and parcel of who I am in the world is now gone.   My past is only barely remembered.  The places I once knew.  The family I once had.  The people I once knew.  I am a long term transplant in this part of Ohio.  It feels familiar.  This is where I am.  I am no longer feeling pulled west.  That is no longer home.  In fact, the notion of home seems foreign to me.  To have a place where one undeniably belongs; that is a gift that only a few lucky souls ever really receive.  Not me. I have no home.  I have a place.  It offers shelter and a way to live.  I am not endangered here.  I clearly don't really belong in the spaces available here, but I am not obviously foreign either.

Time has changed so much.  They say that time heals, but I don't think it really does.  It allows the bleeding to be staunched, the scars to form, the new patterns and realities to become habitualized...  The wounding, however, remains.  For me, the grace is that I have come to accept most of it.  Not all, but most.  Like the losses that came with the hysterectomy, now almost a decade ago, I have become accustomed to the emptiness and the distance and the toned-down politeness of my life.  It is what I expect, and those other expectations have largely expired due to lack of any sort of sustenance.
I remember, early on, when I was still on fire, trying to do IT all right.  I felt there was a bargain in place within my relationship, and that if I held up my end sufficiently, there would be some sort of reciprocity -- a payback of sorts.  I talked at some length about it all to a domme friend of ours.  She told me, quite sternly, "You say you want to be a slave.  So slave."  I did not know what to do with that then.  The wants and the needs and the expectations were all still alive and kicking.  Now, at almost 61, most of that drive/demand has passed on.  I can take care of my own wants and needs for the most part, and I have very few illusions that anyone else really cares much.  And me?  Do I care, really?  Not enough to fight for it all.

I've made the choices that brought me here.  It is all on me.  I can't go back and change the story.  What lies ahead is exactly what lies behind.  Time has passed.  What time remains will pass as well, and this story will become just a memory.  Nothing more.