STUCK

STUCK IN LIMBO

She often wondered had she had waited too long to decide and then once she made that decision she wondered if she had made the right one. Decision that is. It’s this in between time that wastes so much energy. That time filled with what seems to be useless questions. I’m not talking about day to day stuff like what should I wear or what am I having for dinner or do I need a haircut. No, I’m talking about life changing, knowing that if she made a decision she might not be able to turn back or worse yet that sheA will turn back. This is most apparent in relationships, friends ,lovers, . Did she really want to cut them out of her life completely or did she want to maintain a negative destructive course of action and for Pete’s sake why didn’t she do something about it. Well, I’m thinking fear is the emotion fear of failure, the result holding her back and although it is a very strong emotion it is also so abstract and one only she wasthinking and no-one else. Yikes does that sound convoluted.

Have any of those she had turned her back on ever come back to haunt her or hurt her? Well haunt her maybe.

It was a great time in history to be coming of age. She had it all but then maybe it was too much for one so young to handle. Freedom. Yes, leaving a life so different than the one she came from, small town to big city. Ways of living so different . Wasn’t that what she set out to find a different lifestyle. She didn’t think of being famous or anything, in fact I don’t think she thought anything through. She went away to college and they put her in a room bunking with girls that were like her or that’s what they thought. All three were from small towns, white, Christian, values accepted by everyone. Don’t be different for Christ’s sake you’ll never get on the cheerleading squad or date the right guy which could if you were lucky lead to marriage you know. College well maybe only if it gives you a steady reliable career like teaching or nursing.

The Vietnam War was raging already two of her classmates were killed, guys that enlisted because they thought it was the right thing to do. And what did she do, protest; not really knowing what the War was about but all the folk songs sang about how wrong it was. On the streets Blacks were fighting with Whites and Whites with Blacks, but they all got drafted. The military didn’t see color, it saw dispensable bodies. Women were just starting to question their roles of wife, mother, homemaker. Maybe just maybe did one really have to get married if she was pregnant, was there an alternative way?

She looked in wonder at all the different people from around the World that had seemed to gather in this one big City. Her friends became not the roommates but the Jewish girl from New Jersey with the smart mouth and quick wit, the Georgia peach dance major who came from a family of artistic political siblings and parents. They walked the streets where artists and musicians hung out, smoking and drinking and dancing to the early hours and then sleeping wherever they found a bed. There was a wicked innocence to all she did. She could never be hurt by her decisions she thought. She was just having fun. She didn’t think there were people out there who could and would abuse you. But she was wrong and, in her dancing, and singing and protesting she whirled herself into destruction. Was that destruction meant to teach her a lesson, to examine how frivolous her life had become and how tormented it would become. One would think if it was a couple of months, it would have been a good teaching moment but it lasted for years and wasted so much time. Time she would never get back. Didn’t someone say time is wasted on the young.

It seemed to her that everything was pointed in the right direction. She was encouraged by teachers to develop her art talents, something she didn’t think you could do and still make a living. I mean how was she going to make a living? She only knew she wanted to travel and work in the art field, and she did for a few years but then was drawn back into the abusive web which in the end would dull any aspirations of being a free spirit. No, she wasn’t going to hang with Andy Warhol or Bob Dylan . The closest thing she came there was working as an art director in a camp for troubled kids next to Woodstock and the summer of love. No, for whatever reason she let herself be strangled by a powerful force that is unexplainable to everyone as far as I am concerned. They’ll call it many things but mostly it ends up as one being more powerful than the other and exerting that power to control and ultimately destroy.

She eventually worked her way back into the small town mindset. Get a stable job, clean the house cook the meals. Dreams of traveling seemed to float out the window as the day to day job of work took precedence.

Her new friends became by and large teachers. Her Georgia peach friend had to give up dance for a medical condition and her New Jersey buddy married and had three children.

Her reputation at work was one of the wild girl, she never knew exactly why except that it seemed that everything she undertook turned into comical disasters. She made people laugh and perhaps that was her best quality, they waited in the teachers’ room to hear her recount the silly things she had done.

Why did these things seem funny to people she never truly understood. In the end they were quite destructive as she never seemed to learn anything from what were obvious mistakes or at the very least detrimental to one’s mental health.

When does one make a decision about where they see their life going or do they ever. They could just continue on living a lifestyle or they could finally open the drawer and take out the handgun.