Road

I just returned home from watching The Road. I wasn’t sure what I was getting into, I just knew it was another end of the world flick. I was expecting something along the lines of 2012 or whatnot. Wrong. It was hand’s down the most realistic portrayal of what I truly think survivors of the end of the world would be like. There was nothing fancy or beautiful or Hollywood in the film. Just raw humanity in every form. It was powerful and devastating.

Here’s where I get dramatic. At least I know looking on, it would be dramatic and if I heard someone else say what I am getting ready to, I would roll my eyes and discount everything else they ever said. Comparing heartbreak to the end of world. How cliché and lame. I hope, truly, that I can look back on this blog one day and think, wow-I was really dramatic, I’m so glad I don’t feel that way anymore. I don’t see that day coming, but I hope it does.

The movie clarified something I’ve felt for months, something that I think I’ve tried to say a millions time but haven’t been able to verbalize. Knew it in feeling and in gut, but not in form. In the movie, the characters weren’t trying to build life back the way it was, they weren’t trying for something better or to fix things, it was all they could do to simply keep going, take another step, to survive, and for most, even that was denied them or proved too much. I know the feeling.

Everything in me tells me that I’ve reached the peak. I think I even knew it at the time, and I’m thankful for it. I knew I was living a life I hadn’t even dared to dream of. I knew I had to relish every moment. And I did. I was at the top of my life, the pinnacle of my happiness, contentment, joy. I don’t see that returning. I see days and years filled with people, family and friends, that I love. Maybe even highs in my career and hopefully writing. However, I also see me at fifty, seventy, eighty looking back and knowing that those few years were the greatest gift I’d been given, and nothing else compared. Even as I try to explain it, I’m not able to. It sounds forced and hollow, but my soul recognized it tonight, and it terrifies me that I might be right. I pray I’m not. People say I’m not—people say a lot of things all the time. I’m not sure how it could be so true for one of us and not the other, but that seems to be life as well.

Maybe it is just the grief still talking, maybe it’s the depression singing, maybe it’s reality, but I’m broken, and I’m fully aware of it. My laughter, and there has been plenty of laughter, is never as deep as it was; my smile never Brandon’s smile; my excitement never more than a flicker; my hope nearly, if not completely, non-existent. I am a shell of who I used to be. I am afraid to go to parties because I may see him and crumble. Plus, I don’t want him to see what I’ve become—or anyone else for that matter. I’m afraid to be with my old friends that I love so much because I don’t have their friend to offer them. It’s easier to be with new friends who never knew who I used to be. I don’t speak very much because it’s hard to find something important enough to say. It’s weak to say I lost myself because of a man, and its not like it was his intention, but part of me shattered, and it really feels irreparable. Everything is dulled by a thick layer of ash, including me. But, I keep walking my road, only leaving footprints to prove I was there.