My wife is an incredible writer! Recently I have asked her to work with me to write my story. Here is something we are working on…
The cracked paint of the white lines hypnotized me as I stared out the passenger side window. I was slouched as much of a slouched young man could be at 6”5 in a car well suited for below average height parents. It was kind of how it always was. I stuck out like sore thumb amidst the family photos. Red and strawberry blonde parents and my sisters took on the resemblance of our parents, but me? There was no resemblance. I was thin. I was tall. I was lanky. I was brown hair and hazel eyed, while my blue eyed family stared back at me. I knew I was loved, but I did not feel I belonged. These were the thoughts my overused and wrapped up self would continue to believe until I would eventually reach a place of certainty to my actuality.
I looked down at my nicotine stained hands, rubbing them together, hoping my dad wouldn’t pick up on my nervousness. I was going into a place of rehab and I was uneasy. I had been in places before but never a Christian one, so this was going to be something different. I had even been hospitalized, placed in the Stratford Psych Ward, all to no avail. I think I was most worried this day that I was not going to better, ever. I was a burnt out drug addict. My mother would always say, “Once an alcoholic, always an alcoholic.” How was being a drug addict any different? I was always going to be this way. My dad would say to us as kids, whatever we choose to do in life, do it to the best we could. Well, here I was. My trip was over and I partied to the best I could. I became the best drug addict I could be, but now I wanted out.
We drove in silence, except for the loud complicated thoughts going through my head. I couldn’t look at my dad, and he just drove with nothing to say. He was a talker, but not. He was a friendly kind man, and I knew he loved me, he just couldn’t relate to me. He was awkward. I was awkward. This drive was awkward. I wanted him to talk to me and to say all the right things to make the deep pains of never feeling I belonged to go away. The pains of rejection at birth, could he not speak to those areas like a soothing ointment over a tear in the skin? No, he couldn’t. He was just a man, with his own thoughts going through his head, but I could not see them, nor could I hear them. I could just listen to his congested breathing with the break of a possible word to be spoken, only to be shut by the hesitation of not really knowing what to say to me. I continued to stare out at the mass landscape of corn fields and back to the white lines on the road, leading me to my new destination, just like the white lines that lead me this current destination.
Thoughts?
