Here I begin
Here I begin. Finding myself in a place where I'm unsure, of myself and of my life. I have always been so confident of what I was to do, what I was meant for, and where I was going. However, now I find myself in a foreign land, though it looks suspiciously like the place where I have lived my entire life. I do not speak the language, and no one can interpret my frustrated attempts for understanding. It is not that I hate it here, I did once love it, and I know that my family and friends can't quite grasp what has happened to me but I suppose it is because the same thing has happened to them. The death of my father months ago has created a sense of detachment from where we all once were. But for each of us, it feels as if our pain is greater than that of the others. My mother has lost a husband and a best friend, someone by who her life has been defined. We have lost a father. My sister has lost a knight in shining armor who always came to her rescue and loved her unconditionally and will have set a standard for every man she ever dates from now on. My brother lost a mentor, a best friend, and the person who always had extreme faith in him. Being tagged the screw up couldn't have been easy for my brother, but our father constantly encouraged him, giving him more credit than he deserved and constantly gave him chances to be something better. And me, well, I lost the one person who understood me. I had always been the even mixture of everyone in my family, and I received most of my father's better traits. His logic, his humor, his strength, his pride, his confidence, his intelligence and his love. I suppose that is why everyone is so desperate to keep me here, as if I'm the last piece of him in existence. He was a sun in the universe, holding the planets in orbit, but I am not a sun. And now we're all spiraling out of control.
But in that hurt still lingers the trival wants that I suffered before that tragedy. The desperate needs of a teenage girl, but no longer one. Wanting to be adored, wanting to be pretty, wanting to be just what everyone else wanted her to be. And now I find myself knowing that loneliness but it being more intense and sharp. Perhaps now, because I've known romantic affection and love, and those feelings are not limited to what I had once read in books or heard through love songs and seen in overly optimistic friends, movies and sitcoms.
Perhaps that is what is missing. What I long for, what I am desperate for, what I need. Affection, understanding, love. But then of course, Herr Rilke would scold me for thinking it was so easy. And I must continue the much needed embrace.