“How do you pick up the threads of an old life? How do you go on, when in your heart you begin to understand, there is no going back?”
-LOTR The Return of the King, filmscript.
How do you weave together the threads a life? Consider the warp and the weft, our world condensed to lines of longitude and latitude intersecting, interlocking, interacting. Life caught in the cross hairs, and our tangential paths are running at odds. In any moment we are walking along silk veins, a spider’s web emanating from ourselves to all of the options that we could choose, but we do not. Direction has already been determined by the past, intention has been decided. In the moment we are easily swayed, our perceptions become mistaken, they become paranoid. But it is a long game that we are playing, and a long tapestry we are weaving.
And what of the loom we would use? I used to think mine was red, with four wheels and an engine, but now I see that keychain as a temptation, as an offer of escape.
“Do you never want to just drive away? Leave it all behind, even if only for a weekend?”
He looked at me in confusion, some clear disconnect fueling the basic misunderstandings that eventually would lead to us walking away from each other. But this was a long time ago, a lifetime ago, so why do I feel the same again?
Where does the feeling stem from this time? My personal brand of anxiety leaves me weak, and my stomach tortured. My chest aches and I stare at walls and I lose myself in my mind. I breathe shallower, think slower, spinning and whirring as if constantly caught in the fixated mentality of a THC high. But this is a high that doesn’t have a definite end, one that you cannot reassure yourself with the thought that it will eventually fade and you will return to yourself once more, one that you do not choose to take on, no. This is one that you know will ebb and flow, will come and go, and can be overcome in the moment only with the full understanding that it will be back.
It will always come back.
March, 2017