Moving in and moving on

Bob-Eye by Apol Sta.Maria

For a month now, I have been sleeping either in my brother’s room or on the couch downstairs (and sometimes in strange houses).

I had to move back into the house because we found someone to rent what used to be the concrete bunker that I called the lair and I have been putting off settling back into what used to be my room but is now my sister’s study area when she is
home and the cat’s exclusive domain when she is not.

There is an impossibility to reclaiming a space once it has been vacated. I can put my books back, store my clothes as neatly as I can in the closet I used for most of my teenage years and early adulthood, but it won’t be the same. That is not a bad thing, necessarily. There is something to be said about clinging to the past, which, mainly, is to not do it.

Daunting as putting my room back in order is, it is nothing compared to the prospect of putting my life back in order yet again. There is a feeling of having had the rug pulled from under me and then finding that the floor has also disappeared, if it had even been there in the first place (in which case, that was a very stiff and magical rug).

It took me more than a year to get past the first breakup and there was a price to pay for that — mainly in a missed connection that could have been great had I not been too damaged at the time to do something about it. How many years will it take to bounce back from a second betrayal when the stakes were even higher?

I am not sure if that is even possible.

It is easy to say that I dodged a bullet with what happened, and that is, in a sense, true. But that does not mean that being shot at at all is a fun thing. That does not mean that there is no price to pay for surviving.

And I did survive — will survive– because this has not been the worst thing that has happened. It has been the greatest betrayal, though. Made worse because I knew it would happen. I hoped it wouldn’t, but people can’t help being who they are in the end. Foolishly optimistic, in my case, and in hers, well, something else. There is a lot of good in people but there is a lot of people in people also.

I don’t know what’s going to happen next, but I guess I will try reclaim as much as I can. Replace the light bulbs and sweep the floor. Put up bookshelves and defenses.

It’s a terrible mess and there’s really just me to do the heavy lifting now.