Quiet Solitude

It's a weird feeling not knowing where to turn for support and comfort, because the people who are supposed to give it to you are actually the ones causing your distress.  Coming back from Chile, I had no money, no job, no home and no family.  This is why it is so easy to go back to the ones who have hurt you, because without them, you are entirely alone.  Is it better to turn to people who cause you harm for the support that you need or to face the world on your own?  Two years later I am still wondering if I made the right choice.  There are many days that I cry myself to sleep wondering if I was better off in an abusive family than spending Christmas alone and receiving no phone calls on my birthday.  Even though I was the one who walked away from my family, there wasn't much of a family left for me to walk away from.  Support was only an illusion.  Although the lack of its presence was now more apparent, I really hadn't had much of it to begin with.

I couldn't stay in Monument knowing that my parents were living their lives around me without being a part of mine.  At this point, I had been moving so frequently that I didn't have a very stable friend base in Colorado to turn to.  Most people had no idea what had been happening in my life, because I had been so secretive and did a spectacular job of putting up mile high walls around myself.  The only option that I could think of was to go and stay with my brother in Buena Vista until I had enough money to pay rent somewhere.  Even though my subconscious knew that this would not be anymore successful than all my other attempts to reconcile with him, I had to believe it would be.  I had no where else to turn.

There was a slight hope in me that the saying, "sometimes you have to hit rock bottom before you start climbing back up" would apply to my brother.  Maybe this whole situation with him losing his wife and everything he had then getting a restraining order placed against him would wake him up to the person he had become and push him into changing.  I just want to scream when I think about how many times I went back to my family thinking things would change.  Anyone who has loved someone who gave promises of change but never kept them knows how hard it is to give up hope that someday the change will actually be made.  Just the tiniest sliver of hope can keep you hanging on.

I moved to Buena Vista and moved into a closet sized room in brother's house.  I have to thank him for giving me this opportunity to get back on my feet.  Without his generosity, I don't know where I would have gone or what I would have done.  He helped me to get my first job in town as a dishwasher at a Thai restaurant and introduced me to many people in town.  But, like every other time that I began to rebuild my relationship with him, the honeymoon period only lasted a few months.