Consequences #4 — Caroline

Whatever you do, never let go.

I have aban­don­ment ‘issues’, I believe. “Everybody’s going to leave me and I will be alone in the end. I am a nasty per­son and nobody wants to know me.”

It’s not so much an issue now as it was when I was younger, when my mother passed away. Even­tu­ally my fam­ily ended up on the oppos­ite side of the world to me. It left me all alone in a house I didn’t know, with a dad I had to be reac­quain­ted with, a step­mother I didn’t get on with, in a vil­lage where nobody spoke a kind of Dutch I could under­stand, and without a single friend.

It isn’t as prom­in­ent as it was in col­lege, when my decision not to gradu­ate com­pletely ali­en­ated me from the group of people I thought to be my mates.

That’s all a long time ago. I’m all growed up now and whatever else may be wrong, my cluster of friends feels right. Some­how, along the way, I man­aged to con­vince a bunch of people I’m not a nasty per­son at all. I cher­ish them, these people of all ages, all kinds of back­grounds and noth­ing much in com­mon but all man­ner of tie-ins with me.

I’m not sure what I have done to piss off the year 2002, but it has been try­ing its best to tear down what I’ve so care­fully built over the last 20 years. In the space of four months I lost two of my best friends. Lost as in irre­voc­ably, undeni­ably dead. They couldn’t have been more dif­fer­ent from each other, at oppos­ite ends of the spec­trum. It has left my world a little nar­rower, a little duller.

Between two deaths, I lost my job. That is 8 hours a day when I am left with just the voices in my head. I should be drown­ing myself in sor­row, wal­low­ing in the mire and [fill in some more mor­bid meta­phor], but I’m not. Where there’s dark­ness, there is light. You shed your tears and you grab hold of each other. You reach out. You touch. I have come to appre­ci­ate the mer­its of the all-American ‘hug’.

Whenever key fig­ures are gone, rela­tion­ships shift, hier­arch­ies change and there’s beauty in that. There’s beauty in the com­fort found in unex­pec­ted arms. Wel­come that, and don’t let go. Don’t take it for gran­ted. Cher­ish it now. Build a new fort­ress, defend it with all your might.

I feel more defi­ant, more angry than I have in a long time and more will­ing to make changes. But I’m not will­ing to lose any more people. You hear me? If you want any more of my friends you’ll have to come through me.

This time, it’s personal.