Changes

It’s like nothing has changed. My family is not fazed by my brush with death; they still dismiss most of what I say; act like serious things are nothing serious. Had I died I doubt it would have made much of an impact on them… the adults, anyway. I lowered my expectations so low, yet I am still disappointed. I came home from war and no one got excited to welcome me here. I find the comfort of being with my friends is helping me to ignore my family’s lack of apathy. I am an island, lost at sea, floating and floating… I find myself, back at the house I grew up in, feeling my mom all around me. She is everywhere; in the pictures on the wall, in the way they were hung, in the furniture, the food in the refrigerator, the boxes of random papers scattered everywhere throughout the house… the shag carpet, the wood paneled walls, and in the dolls on the shelves. She is this house. This house is her. I come here to find her, but she’s not the same, yet nothing has changed. Anywhere else I go I can imagine my mom here in this house, watching tennis on TV or watering her plants in the back yard, but when I am here I have to face that, despite her presence still lingering within everything she left behind, she is gone. Gone forever. And I am here. I am here, trying to smile through the disappointment; trying to cling to my sanity in the land of the insane; trying, with all my might, to be a better person than I was before cancer. Being in this house may not be healthy for me. I’m pretty sure this will be my last visit here. At least for a very long time. It is time for me to let it go and move on; to live my life for me and no one else. I know I needed to come here, but I don’t need to stay. I can choose my own path and it is not this. I am learning every day to be okay with what I do have, and if I want something I can simply go out and put all my strength into getting what I really want. I am an island, and I will float alone. If anyone wants to join me then great, but I’m not changing who I am for anyone but myself. Because, despite the fact that nothing has changed for my family, everything has changed for me, and I am determined to make the most of it. This place no longer defines me. My mom is here, within everything, but I am not. I don’t exist here. I’m okay with that.