I am still lost. A traveler here. But I’ve recognized I have no home where I came from, no place to go back to. This sets my course.
I lost everything I had. I lost very little.
This is not the first time I’ve suffered a great loss, turned my back on people I’ve loved in the name of self-preservation.
People always congratulate me when they find I’ve been sober for 10 years. What they don’t know is that the drugs were not what I missed. It was my chosen family, that I fit in – that I’d found a place where I wasn’t persecuted simply for being different.
Leaving is a form of emotional cautery; it staves off recidivism.
Loss has been a key part of my life cycle. To cope, I’ve compared it to shedding a cocoon, likened comforts to a husk, the known to afterbirth. As much as I struggle to rationalize it as the cost of my personal telos or minimize it with slogans,* the truth is I’m tired of loss. I’m tired of starting over.
I want to stay here. I want to unpack, make plans, get comfortable. I want to stop trying to read his mind, waiting for the other shoe to drop.
I want to make myself at home.
*”When you’ve got nothing, you’ve got nothing left to lose.”