There she is. I thought I'd never see her again.
You see, I wasn't the one who put her in that box, she was never meant to go in it.
She was carefully wrapped and set aside in order to be hand carried, by me, in the small suitcase of things I have to keep with me (like my medicines). I am piecing together in my mind what actually happened.
I wrapped her and set her aside to put into that suitcase.
Then I got really sick and someone else, being helpful as they are, took everything on the shelf she was on and put it in a generic box marked 'living room' and then sent that box off with the movers.
The movers buried that box under every other box and believe me, there were dozens, at least half a dozen big ones of books alone.
I, not remembering that I hadn't actually packed her in that suitcase, did not understand when all the other things I intended to put in there were there but she was not.
I've taken away several lessons from this I will be pondering for awhile...
Not the least of which is that I related entirely too much to that little figurine stuck at the bottom of the last box, the wrong box, not where she was meant to be at all.
I realized that sometimes in trying to help you, people will put you into a little box all their own, with expectations and wishes and hopes for you that may not be possible even if you wish they were.
I've realized whatever 'box' I am personally in, in my own head right now that it's the wrong one and that I have to change that. I am the only one who can change that, if it can be changed (with Bipolar 1 in the bargain, that isn't a certainty. It might just be life as I know it to learn to accept.)
Now it just remains to be seen if I'll find myself at the bottom of the last box and make my way out of it, just like that little angel figurine.
It would be easy to say that all I need is someone to see me stuck in there and help me find my way out of it. That someone will just rescue me. Things are never that simple.
Like the hardest things in life this is a dark hole I am going to have to face climbing out of on my own.
I know a large part of what keeps me down here is that I'm still buried under heavy, weighted things; mired in the grief process over my daughter. I was at the mall on Saturday and saw a gaggle of teenage girls and it was heartbreaking. They all looked like her, sounded like her, made me ache for her. She still really has no idea what her choices are doing to me, to all of us. She may never know.
All I know is that I don't like it here at the bottom of the box. It's pitch black, and I long to find my way out of it again to find a quiet little corner in which to recover, bathed in the brighter light of the sun as I sit on the windowsill.
bru
