You Are Here

“I’m forty two!”

“What has that got to do with it?”

I stare at her face and I will her to understand, to at least try to understand. My eyes are upon her face, but I don’t see it. They bore into her. Searching for her essence, looking for something that resembles hope.

I am here, and yet I am not. She sees something that is not me. She sees something unreal. I wonder whether she ever saw me as anything other than what it was that she constructed.

There must be something I am missing. A single word that will unlock everything and reveal the truth of it all. My truth. Our truth.

A bleak and chill wind courses across the landscape of me and with it comes a dark understanding. There is no our truth. No us. No we. 

She stands a yard from me, but she may as well be the moon. Distant and inhospitable. 

How did it come to this?

Where am I?

I tried. 

I tried and I tried.

Gotta love a trier, right?

Wrong.

I’ve tried so hard to get somewhere. I had something to prove and I did everything I could to prove it.

Now I see that I all the time I was trying, I never really looked up. I had no clue where I was headed. I think I was running away from something, but I’m so far away from whatever it was I ran from, that it doesn’t matter anymore.

Or does it? Something is making me feel bad. I am ill. I cannot decipher the feelings that roil within me, only that I am dizzied by them. I am spinning. There is a threat within me. I have to do something or I will break apart and lose something important. I have this desire for control, but there is nothing left to control. 

I am lost.

Were we ever in this together?

Was it fair for me to expect her to follow me along a path that I wasn’t even looking at? 

I have worked tirelessly and come so far only to find myself alone and in a place that does not welcome me.

She has what she wanted and it is not me. I think she did want me once, but the call of another place and another life was too strong and she is there now, perhaps always was.

Why didn’t she say anything?

Looking back. Making sense of the senseless. She walked away a long time ago, but I was too busy doing what I thought was necessary. I climbed higher and higher. I went out into the harsh and dangerous world and I brought back the spoils of my endeavours. I strove and I provided and I thought all of that work and dedication to creating security for us was enough.

It was never enough.

Never valued.

We have different values. 

We see the world differently and so we live in different worlds. Maybe that’s how it is with everyone. Other people provide assurances that this is not the case. They live a pretence of sharing. They act out a connection that does not exist. They want something so badly that they feel it when all it is, is an illusion.

What has that got to do with it?

She asked me this and I wanted to reply, but now words are meaningless, any reply is futile. We use the same language, but it means something so very different to the both of us. I am an alien and my presence makes her feel uncomfortable. I can see the waves of anxiety that I am beaming across at her. She ripples as I breath my existence at her. I am an unnecessary risk. 

I am unnecessary.

She does not need me and she does not want me.

She wants me gone.

What has my age got to do with it?

I want to tell her that I feel old. That I have only now realised that I am on the wrong path. That the prospect of starting all over again with less than nothing does not scare me, it is worse than that. I am empty and that emptiness is filling with such a weight of weariness that I can barely flail against the injustice of it all.

All my best endeavours. All my good intentions.

They have brought me here to this place of desolation and I am done for.

“Midlife crisis,” I tell her.

I do not know where those words have come from, but once they are out they make about as much sense as anything else right now.

“I’ve hit a wall,” I say to her, and then I shrug, “I hit a wall some time back, but I didn’t see it for what it was. I tried to shrug it off and carry on as normal. Like I always have.”

She looks at me, but she does not see. She does not care. I wonder when she stopped caring. I still care. I just wish I was worth something. To myself. To her.

I try to laugh, but I can’t. All of this is farcical. I am the punchline of a sad joke and it is crushing me in its dark maw, “we laugh at midlife crises don’t we? Blokes going out and buying a penis extension car, dressing in clothes intended for people half their age. Trying too hard to be something that they are not. It’s a crisis though. It’s mental health taking a nose dive. A cry for help.”

A cry for help.

I’ve tried to explain, and now I have told her. I need help. I need her help.

She is unmoved. Cold. And yet I see her anger. She will not help me. There is nothing here for me anymore. Never was. Why could I not see that? That I was on the wrong path. 

Now I am about as far away from where I need to be as is possible.

This isn’t even a path here, not really. Nothing under my feet that makes sense anymore.

There is only one real path. We are drawn to that path and that path is good. All is right with the world and with us when we find our path and walk towards a light that shines upon us and lights us up. The trick is to find that path and once you are on it, never, ever to leave it.

The trick.

I have been tricked. 

Was she a part of it?

Of course she was. An unwitting part, but she should have said something all the same. She should have told me the truth. She could have told me the truth a long time ago and then I would have known and I could have made a choice. A choice for me and for her. Instead I kept going. Going further and further out into the cold and lonely darkness. Ploughing on into a self-imposed and meaningless isolation.

I am forty two and I have spent over a decade with her, only I was never with her. She let me think that, but she was always holding something back. Now I see what she was holding back and as I see it, she changes, and I see her for who she always was. I see her as she was before we ever met. And now I recall the clues she provided to me. The snippets and nuggets about her past life and how it hadn’t worked out. She was describing the person she had been, but really she was still that person, but she knew to be that person would be the end of us. That person does not want the threat of another person in her personal space. That person wants to be alone. Well, not alone exactly. She has our child. Her child. That was all she ever wanted. Not me, I cannot be controlled. I am a loose cannon. An extraneous variable. A headache.

She is that person again, and with that person there is no room for me in her life. That person yearns for control, a control that is not healthy and cannot be successfully and healthily exerted over another human being.

I am alone and I am lost, but I have to be strong and I have to find my way, if not for me, then for my child. My child will need to walk the right path and I have to help show my child the way. 

I smile.

“What?” she asks me, there is a hard edge to her voice, “what is it?”

I shake my head and I feel a tug of pity, but mostly I feel a certainty and with it a resolve, “I know what I must do.”

“And what’s that?” she asks bitterly.

“Live,” I tell her, “find myself and be myself.”

And find the path that I should have been on all along.

She looks at me like I am crazy. She looks at me as though what I have might be catching and she does not want it. She does not want anything to do with me.

I turn to leave her. She left me a long time ago, so I am surprised to see her looking bereft. I wonder what has prompted that, but then we none of us like change, worse still change that contains loss of any kind.

As I walk upstairs she calls to me, “don’t wake her up!”

Her words are loud enough to do just that and it is all I can do to supress a smile. Always the attempts at control and the assumption that I am lumpen, clumsy and unthinking. She does not see me as a co-parent, she sees me as a problem. The relief she feels when we separate will be temporary. Just because I am no longer under the same roof as her does not mean that I will be out of her life. We are eternally joined by the life we created.

I gaze down upon my daughter. The small and perfect slumbering face of the most important person in my world. I stand motionless and I am filled with love. I feel it rising up in me and there is no end to it. With that love is hope, and a simple truth.

I see the path now. 

I see it and I understand where it is I am supposed to be.

She is my guiding light. I must never stop focusing on her. She is all that is important and I owe it to her to find my way in this world and be the best I can possibly be. I make that my mission as I stand in her room and watch her sleeping. Then I whisper two things before I leave our home for the very last time. Before I leave to find us a new home and begin a new life.

I said “I love you,” and I also said, “I am sorry.”

Sorry because I never wanted it to be this way. This was not what I wanted. But sometimes there isn’t a choice. Sometimes we lose our way and when we wake up to that, a change is necessary. 

Her mother did not want that change. She would not come with me. I don’t think for one moment that she is on the path she needs to be on and that is why we are where we are, but only she will truly know that and only she can find her path. I hope she does, for her sake and for our child’s.

I can only do what I can do. 

As I drive away I still feel spaced out and sick. I am dying. This life is over for me. I will have to see the end of my self before I can begin again. This part will be painful, but the pain will end and I will prevail. I have to. There is no alternative. No other choice. 

I will remember to keep looking up this time. I will not allow my head to go down. I will not plough a senseless rut. I will focus on the light and I will let it fill me. 

This time it will be OK, and I will be OK and I will do everything to make sure that my child is better than OK. I will do everything I can to find the way.