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Enough
I lived for an entire year alone on my boat. Looking back it was the best year of my life. Once it was dark I never left it, not once. You see it was the place of my suffering. I wrote journals, I wailed, I cried over the outcome of my choices, my trustings, my limited experience in some things. I agonized at doors closed to me from my family. One let me stay a few days the fearing I might stay too long told me I couldn't stay there. Until the boat, I kept it inside along with other agonies, personal demons, thanked them for what hospitality they had given and left. The depth of hurt, they and others could not know. I burn no family bridges. They are after all, family no matter what...but I hurt and deeply.

So my days were filled with inner pain mixed with self contempt for bad choices with now permanent results. All this while I watched the sun rise and go down again each evening. Even in the worst of my sufferings there was some joy, pelicans, jumping fish, a brief word from a few others who also cut themselves off from the world. Sometimes I would come out of the cabin and smell the salt air and notice how beautiful the sky or the water was on this particular day before returning to my scribbles.

A divorce then a fortune hunter to devour my meager funds that took 25 years to gather, no one to understand, I needed to travel this rocky path all alone. After all I did try to reach out and my troubles were multiplied. Yet then, life reached out for me when I was alone. Memories of grandpa, home when home was home, and more so, the fleeting at first glimpses of life all around me, schools of rightly colored fish, the markings on the narrow boards that served as dock for my boat, the palm trees waving in the distant and the soft warm breezes that sometimes came at the end of the day. Nearby I chanced to find a docking space for a fishing tug and on its shores, silver pie plates filled with cat food anda couple of strays munching away. Soon more cats came, as many as twenty strays and raccoons too, all eating from the same dishes. Then a limo from the island causeway pulled up and the capped driver brought yet another plate. There was goodness in the world. Though clouded, I knew it all along. Love was al around me but in my pain I wasn't reaching out with smiles, sounds and hands to touch it, to contribute to it, to immerse myself in it. I started with a box of food and a paper plate and it became a daily ritual.

Yes sadness was still there. But, it is amazing how one little change can take enough of the edge off to make a difference. Rarely do things change all at once or completely but little things matter.

Life is all around me. I just need to take a moment and open my eyes. It is enough.

 

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