Another Goodbye

Most of the time, it's not possible to travel back in time. Then a memory so intense returns as if you're reliving it. As with all scenarios of time travel, there is no way to change what is happening. Only witnessing history is possible. With that in mind, I am witnessing my own history. The time folded in on itself, today, 24 years ago.

I haven't mastered future time travel, but I am a professional at going into my own history. Today is a day that will always live in my head as if no time had passed at all. I close my eyes, and the traumatic phone calls, the angering relaying of information into the last moments of my mom's life, and my first drive through a snow storm in the mountains is right before me.

When the tractor trailers gathered around me, and drove in formation around me, while blinding snow blew at me, I was just numb. As I came into the Ohio Valley, where there was just a meager rain and wind, and had very little washer fluid left, the world looked more grim than ever. Little did I know then that this would be the constant in my life for several years.

Had I known, I wouldn't have come back. I'd have cut the ties, as I was trying to do. Hindsight is better than glasses for correcting vision, though. Everything was a blurry mess, to me, then. There was no future time travel for me. Only living in the moment, trying to survive. As it would be for years. If only I had known I'd cut the ties just a bit more than two years later, I could have perhaps evaded so much pain.

Coming back to the here and now, I am glad that this is all the past.

No grave stone can give me comfort. I've only gone a few times. A name engraved serves no purpose to me. So I look back in my own mind, and I do what I couldn't do, in the midst of an anxiety attack far greater than any I've ever experienced.

Believe me or don't. I'm fucking done with caring whether the shitheads I cut ties with believe it was true panic, and not just "for attention." Go fuck yourselves. I'll keep saying that until I die. All of you, go fuck yourselves. I spent every day of my life with her for about 19 years. You didn't. I had every right to feel what I felt and to panic.

Now I get to the end of this day, again, as I have 23 other times. As I close my eyes to sleep, again the safety of distance that comes with the passage of time comforts me.

I look at the picture and I can say "Goodbye" now.