Snap out of the
past, tensed against
a grizzled corner of memory,
but a wisp of rancid smoke seeps from
a crack, paneled grooves
echo back voices that left me
no choice;
these walls hold too much (hold
me too tight)
and the only way free
is (let me go) forward.
Are you able to envision your future life and self?
How has trauma impacted your sense of time?
What do you want your future to look like?
Time has felt distorted lately; sluggish, murky, inconsistent. I know it’s partially a function of the cognitive impact of this pesky cluster of chronic neurological conditions, of being housebound, often the equivalent of bedridden. But it’s this project, too.
It hits me as I write this that I’ve been forcing myself to sit in the past – and that it’s necessary. I wasn’t a child who daydreamed about the future; my response to the “what do you want to be when you grow up?” inanity from adults was nothing more than me parroting what they wanted to hear. A rabbi (I might have been wonderful at it). A lawyer (I became one, but not because I wanted to). President (no).
But until this second-chance life I’m living now, the future came up curiously blank when I tried to envision it. I think I understand it; the future I was indoctrinated to want was a vague collective of others’ projections, and limited to professional achievement.
And now that in this fourth decade I can finally picture it, that I can imagine growing old (please, let us grow old together), that I have to confront the past. Have to stare it down and see it for what it was, what the impact was, what pars of it – of me – are worth keeping, what I’ve shed, what I still need to examine and choose to discard.
The more I do that, the more possible the future feels.
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