pained to pack

I’m sitting in the middle of a pile of clothes. My muscles do not dare to move. The only thing to cure this paralysis is a cool splash of tonic and gin (with a twist of lime) but there is none to be found within arm’s reach. Within arm’s reach the only things around are suitcases, clothes and boxes galore and my arms are disgusted by the sight, smell and feel of this new move.

Where am I going? I’m going way across the country, beyond the mountain peaks, straight to the edge of the land where the sand meets the ocean. Sounds lovely, like paradise, but to me it’s a sentence to a dark prison where the judge has decided a year would be enough to rehabilitate the disgruntled monster buried beneath a mind that once knew of only daisies and sunshine. Daisies and sunshine will sprout, they say, will sprout again like spring after winter. Months of cool, blue death transformed suddenly by the sprout of life signaling a season’s end and beginning. It’ll come again.

But it came too soon, before the rehabilitation began, and now to be sentenced to the dark confines of the northwest will do nothing but strangle those already beautiful daisies, like an onslaught of weeds fighting natural selection because their entire existence depends on it. My entire existence depends on freedom from those confines, but I dread that I must pay my dues to the unfairness of life. Bow down to that great overseer of everything: he who spins the wheel of fortune and cuts short the threads that perpetuate life through decades and eons. My life is in his hands.

And just yesterday I believed, so greatly I believed, that life was in my own hands. But I’ve been trumped and the wages were too high. And in a fortnight, where will I be? Away from the one I hold dear to me, whom I dream to see each waking moment of my life. To hear their voice call out my name, to see their eyes examine mine, to feel their hands inside my own. That is where I’ll be, and months from today when freedom is given back to me, will I be a better man?