It feels like this has all been a dream, a nightmare with waves of beauty weaved through it, just the opposite of real life.
I sit down to write several times a week. No words come. But the questions come daily. “Hey, I read your blog, how are you? What is your plan? How is the island?” and so on. These are all questions that I either have no answers to or little answers to. But I am going to write what I know, which I warn you, is almost nothing.
I have NO plan. None.
I’ve basically been rendered still.
I don’t want to go home, and I don’t want to be here. I feel like I am in a holding pattern of uncertainness. I’m afraid to breathe. I think so many people feel like I do. The displaced are without a cause, without a home, without old or new normal, we are just in the waiting room of our lives, ones we don’t have any picture of what might be.
My Grandma always said, “When you don’t know what to do, don’t do anything at all”. So I sit here with a ball in my stomach, the unknown eating at me. No answers.
It doesn’t matter anyway, we can’t run our business there even if we wanted to go camp out. We can’t earn a living to pay for the home we are lucky enough to have there. We have been able to let someone who lost their home live there, and he is caring for our cat or was supposed to be, but somehow he has some other cat there, and our cat is somewhere else. Whatever, everything is fucked up. Oddly, that probably bothers me more than anything, that there is another cat in my home, not my own. Having Bella taken care of in our home was one of the only things that made me feel okay.
Stupid and weird, I know, but it was something I was holding onto.
It’s the little things that drive you mad or make you sad, or maybe they are the things that finally crush you.
I’m scared because I don’t know what home is like. People who were once kind and gentle are snarky and angry, everything has changed, and I miss the way things were. When tragedy strikes it has a tendency to shake your world up enough to see who your truest friends are, you even find some new ones, but some also fall short, and you realize that you love some people better than they love you.
The people that I love have been shattered like glass on terracotta around the world. We are everywhere. These people are the people I see and love daily, but they’re gone, no goodbyes, nothing, just gone.
You might make a plan to see someone from the island, and maybe you can swing it, but for the most part, it’s an instant message about how someone is, or a like on Facebook when their kid does a milestone that you’d otherwise have been there to bear witness. I mean, these kids are like our babies, and they are just gone. The magnitude of it is really just too much.
I’m in Naples, there are much worse places to be, this is paradise for so many who worked all their lives to retire here. I’m so grateful to be able to be so “beautifully displaced”. We’ve been able to spend time with Jason’s parents and I will consider that the most beautiful silver lining of all of this. I have met the most real and wonderful people, and am reminded that you attract who you are, and I am real and hilarious.
Our little one is thriving here, she is riding horses a few times a week and is loving school. Just enjoying her enjoyment feels like I am cheating on The Virgin Islands so badly, but I kick myself in the ass and remind myself that I am supposed to be giving her the best life I know how. I’m supposed to keep her safe. I am supposed to make sure she lives happily, that is the whole reason we even moved to the islands, so I push that feeling away hard.
Please, don’t get me wrong, I don’t regret leaving, nothing about me regrets leaving, but I miss home, and I miss the people I love. But enjoying this life feels like I am abandoning that life, and I can’t seem to stop crying, and I can’t seem to get my shit together because I don’t even know what that might look like.
I’ve been lucky enough to have my heart shattered before, so I know that it sparkles and shines when it lays all over the floor, and I know that the beauty and strength that comes out of this time will be incredible, but I also know that growing pains leave marks, and those look like change and loss. Something has to die to be reborn, and letting go hurts.
That’s what I know.
