Such as Life

Brenda sat there snickering as she watched the tower of television screens in front of her. Soccer on one, music videos on another, the countdown to the New York Times Square ball drop on two others. It was all so exciting to watch the buildup of everyone making such a big deal out of 2020! Hell, in December 1999, she was at the Luxor Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas Nevada, partying like it was 1999!

“Bartender, I’ll have one more,” she requested, tapping the rim of her almost empty glass as the young man walked by.

“Another year,” she thought to herself as she tilted her head down in silence.

She laughed at how she had been seeing more and more television commercials and had been receiving a lot more spam email lately, that began mostly before the holidays, with the typical ads for in-home gyms and machines, diet programs and pills, all of the marketing madness that comes in its own traditional fashion.

She felt sad in a way, but more than sad, Brenda was frustrated and angry with that whole idea. How many times had she fallen for it? She’d been part of the “cult of resolutions” since she was about twenty-five, and she was fifty-something now. She felt her stomach grind and turn as that thought went through her.

“Damn, I’m old!” She giggled as her head raised back up, just in time for her refill.

As she looked around the floor of the Indian casino, seeing all of the people coming and going, she smiled and felt a kind-of joy, just being able to feel the energy that came with the night’s revelry. She had come with a date, but he had wandered off to go lose more money, and truthfully, she didn’t really care as long as he was her sober driver home.

“No love connection here,” she thought to herself.

He’d seemed nice enough at first but, he had admitted to her just before their date, that he had a gambling addiction! Then, he proceeded to pick the casino as the place he wanted to go to ring in the new year.

She sat there, alone in the crowded bar, sipping her freshly made Kamikaze, smiling, swaying to the music, remembering back to how she had spent the last few New Years Eves.

To her, most holidays, were just another day. She wondered why she felt and thought the way that she did. She had always seen things differently than most everyone else. She was a rebel, and an over-thinker. Holidays were just capitalism and marketing to her. She saw the way the masses became manipulated, and just like obedient puppets moving to their master’s will, they followed, unquestioning.

Last year, she was asleep by 10:30 pm. The previous two years, she was in her travel trailer just south of Eugene Oregon, pondering life.

Before that, it was a mish-mosh of memories spinning around in her head. Before that, was when her life had almost crashed and burned. It was a time where days and nights all blended together, as humiliating reminders of what a failure she felt she had become. Time was painfully stagnant, as she went to a job she could not stand. Having to go home to a studio apartment in Pomona California, that may as well have been a prison cell, or a coffin. There seemed to be no escape from the life she found herself in. If her father had not become ill, she may have actually gone through with what she had been planning. Back then, Brenda didn’t want to live any longer, she wanted to die.

Her attention popped back to the present, as she saw the bartenders begin to pass out the party hats, and the party horns! She opted for the full-sized white fedora, with the words “Happy New Year” in bold letters wrapped around it.

“Thank you! I am having so much fun!” She exclaimed to the bartender.

She looked to the couple to her right, smiled at them, and wished them a “Happy New Year!”

The man and woman smiled back cordially and wished her the same. They held up their glasses towards her, and Brenda happily toasted with them, “Cheers!”

There was a warmth and an excitement around her. “This place, New Mexico, is such an awesome place,” she thought.

Life had definitely changed for her since the time when her dad got sick! “I am so grateful to be here,” she said quietly, as a tear welled up in her eye.

“Thank you, thank you, thank you,” she said to herself, as she gently placed her hand over her heart.

Taking a deep breath, smiling, feeling invincible and perfectly happy, she looked around the room, and knew she would never be the same. The person she was, just a few years ago, was not the same person she was at that moment. There was a peace, and a joy, and a knowing. She was in a space of blissful gratitude.

Brenda had only been in New Mexico for about six months. She moved from southern California after yet another very unhealthy relationship had ended in a painful eruption. She was always the adventurer, so the idea of once again pulling up stakes was not frightening to her at all. As a matter of fact, it seemed it was just another new chapter, like all the chapters before it, fitting into her pattern of sporadically following her heart, no matter where or what it led to.

She had been born and raised there, in California, but Brenda was a very restless soul. She had sought answers ever since she had learned to talk. She wanted to question “why” for just about anything and everything. The problem with that was, she was born into a time and family, where girls were really just pretty pieces of furniture. The fact that she questioned her parents, or her teachers, even her bullies, created frustration and perhaps resentment in those she queried. She was shut down from a very young age, systematically censored, and controlled to the point where she became introverted, because she realized her feelings were unimportant to others. She was groomed to be a follower.

Throughout her twenties, she was promiscuous, and constantly placing herself in unsafe situations. Throughout her thirties, she was trying to live up to the expectations of motherhood, which she was totally clueless about, and woefully unprepared for. Throughout her forties, she struggled with the expectations of being what the world said she was supposed to be by the age of forty. It was always about living up to other people’s rules, other people’s expectations! She felt that she was powerless in the world, and had grown up with such low self-esteem, it was all she knew.

There was something else about Brenda though. She was different. She had visions, she had voices inside. She felt different, but had never been able to put her finger on it. She believed it must have been her weight, her body, her looks; Or, perhaps they could see through her facade. Years of putting on a mask, to hide from the fact of having been abused and molested by her older sister’s husband, over and over and over! She tried so hard to cover that dark side of herself; One of those things had to be it, because she had always seen herself as being so ugly, so imperfect in comparison to everyone else around her.

From a very young age, she was teased. She was a chubby child, so of course, she was teased about her weight. She felt things very deeply, yet her mother never saw the human being inside of her.

Her mother just threw the same cliches at her, “sticks and stones may break my bones but words will never hurt me.”

Her mother never saw her. Words did hurt, and they left deep, lasting scars.

Her father would laugh at her if she showed any emotion or sadness. If her feelings were hurt, it was just a childish response, that warranted being laughed at apparently! He was an emotionally absent man who never showed any form of love towards his children. He worked, came home, drank, went to bed.

A family without nurturing, just systematic obedience and a lonely existence, was how Brenda saw the world. She spent most of her childhood alone. When she was not marching to the public-school system’s drumbeat, or hiding from her brother-in-law while at her sister’s house after school, she was in her room at home, talking to herself. As she grew older, drugs became a welcome relief for her. She had at least found a peer group that accepted her, and even welcomed her. The drugs helped mask her pain.

All those years, Brenda struggled. She became a “seeker.”

She knew there was something going on, there was more out there, but being sheltered, it was difficult at first to grasp.

Over the years, she began to coin her own phrases when certain events would occur. One of the many concepts to her, were the “Road Signs.”

Road Signs, were those little, subtle synchronicities, messages and insights that she would get. At first, it was just the brief recognition of them coming through from time to time. As she got older, Brenda began to realize there was something tapping on her shoulder, but even then, it was like having a conversation with someone that spoke another language. She was not yet able to interpret the dialogue.

She had already determined that God, was a concept, an idea, a metaphor, and that religion was just a method of control in which they used “God” and “Jesus” as their dictators. These thoughts and ideas came to her without ever reading a book on the subject. Her grandmother had taken Brenda to Sunday school every week, back when she was very young. Her grandmother was a devout Christian, but Brenda seemed to see something in that movement, that again she questioned, to her grandmother’s dismay. Organized religion was not something Brenda felt was any type of answer for her.

She was in her fifties when her dad got sick. Her mother, had passed away about nine years earlier.

In that tiny studio apartment, in the “anus” of Los Angeles County California, Brenda had, on several occasions, begged the Universe for help! Help! Because deep down, she really did not want to die. She wanted to stop feeling so hopeless. She wanted to stop hurting. She wanted to WANT to live!

Her dad got sick, and Brenda, out of some form of obedience, went to him, to help, to take care of him during his last months of life. She didn’t like him, but she loved him just the same. Watching him, and her mother before him, deteriorate, were the most excruciatingly painful experiences outside of herself, that she had gone through as an adult. 

That decision, however, probably saved her life.

Brenda found that she was able to quit her job that she hated, and have time, to think, to breathe, and to run away. After the house was sold, she had a small inheritance, so she took that money, bought a trailer, a truck to tow it, and went to Oregon, alone.

The purpose was not clear at first. Brenda had no idea what she would find, she just knew that jumping off of that hamster wheel to nowhere, that wheel she had been on for so long, was finally in her rear-view mirror.

Without the distractions of the system, it allowed her to find the answers she had been seeking. She studied, and learned, and realized that so many of the messages and road signs she had been shown throughout her life, were all finally beginning to make perfect sense. She asked the Universe for guidance, and she was given guidance. That foreign language, was finally becoming easier to understand.

Over time, Brenda decided to make a resolution, a personal commitment, to give up smoking cigarettes. She had tried before she left her dad’s house, but failed. She knew it had to be done, after removing pictures from the walls of that house, and seeing the distinct, and disgusting stains, from the thirty years her parents lived and smoked in that house.

It was not a New Year’s resolution, in fact, she planned it for the Summer Solstice, June 21, 2017.

While Brenda was conquering her demons, and learning about the great mysteries of life, she made another resolution to herself that, just as the Universe had been planning all along, she would go forward in her life, as a positive light, to shine for others.

That was the key!

She knew it was going to be a difficult task, but, as she learned and understood, she knew it was why she was still here. There was no longer a hold on her soul, she was free.

Brenda came to believe, “Once you see, you cannot unsee, and once you know, you cannot unknow.”

By the time Brenda left Oregon in the spring of 2018, she had been resurrected.

Her brief and rocky year back in southern California, was just a trial run for her. Perhaps it was too close to being a step backward. Either way, she was not meant to stay there, and thus, she ended up in New Mexico, "The Land of Enchantment.”

As she gazed around the casino bar, looking at all of the people there, coming to celebrate a new decade together, she stood up, announced she had to go pee, and walked to the restroom.

As she finished her business and was going towards the door to head back to her seat, a young girl stopped her, smiled at her, and asked, “So, what is your New Year’s Resolution?”

Brenda giggled and smiled, and explained the following to that young lady: “I don’t DO New Year’s Resolutions. My resolution is every day, to always strive to be a better person today, than I was yesterday, and to try and spread love and light to others.”

The girl in the restroom seemed shocked to hear this. The look on her face was either confusion, or she just thought that the old lady must be drunk! She was not quite sure how to respond, so Brenda smiled at her, reached out to give her a hug, and said, “Bless you, Happy New Year.”

As she began to head out of the restroom, she heard the girl say back to her, “Thank you. Happy New Year.”

Brenda got back to her seat at the bar, and as the bartender walked by, she said, “This time, I’ll have a Long Island Iced Tea, change is always a good thing!”

Such as life.

Brenda has not had a cigarette since Summer Solstice 2017.