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I’ve had a mostly exhausting life. And most people have exhausting lives, full of exhausting people, but people who have had significant time stripped from them feel each moment. So waiting around isn’t ideal. The faintest moments spent standing in line or waiting on someone who’s late brings many feelings. Abandonment, anger, loss.
Most of all, I feel exhausted. When you start healing, set your mind to it, you feel just as tired as when everything was on hold to survive. New expectations arise everyday as all the things you missed start flooding by. You will never get to pick up where you left off, and while you know this is felt by all the masses you are sour with them for equating your pain with theirs. They let their lives pass them by. Their pain is in the gut rentchingness of regret. I feel mine on the island of sickly dispare. A tummy ache to a terminal illness. Both make you throw up and not eat but one is for a day or two, the other for a millennia.
So when I am stuck in the hotel lobby waiting on 206 I feel very nearly, sick. Any number of hotel guests are late, but today has me especially weary. For I have been selected by a boss so high up, he is to me, a god. Though, after having conversed with him on the matter, I can say he stands only in a godly position when looked at through the lens of ambition. Regardless, I have been selected to share my life with the guest placed in room 206 without knowing anything of this guest.
To be honest I don’t know much of the nature of this hotel. I started working here after finally relinquishing a tired position in a hostel. One that offered me as much hope as it was able, which was frequently, none.
(If you can’t tell or are still young and have yet to understand your teacher picks everything but the important pieces of text, this is meant for you to envision a rather dreary part of my life that was more hostile than hostel, and occurred much earlier than any job ought to.) Even without knowing much of my new found place, being instructed to bare one’s soul for a stranger would be off putting at best, and for people like me, cause to run away screaming. However, a contract is a contract and I hadn’t even earned enough to pay for the horribly expensive shoes and suit jacket. (Yet another thinly veiled metaphor for therapy.) If you are rolling your eyes at my explanations, I feel inclined to remind you that I have neither trust nor faith in you.
Tapping my foot was a comfort but my legs wobbled nearly too much for relief. The entrance of the aforementioned guest stopped me still. In moments such as these people who have experienced trauma have two options. You can press forward as though your mental state is not boarding on liquified… or… you can become deranged. You can set aside every solid aspect of life to -for a few minutes- absolutely lose your shit.
Luckily my brain never chooses to go number two (truly the shittyier outcome) in front of other people. So I wobbled and wilted them into the elevator and up to the second floor. And while I knew that this choice of not losing my shit was not consciously mine, I also knew that people who did, seemed healthier and happier. And that every time I did, even in private, I felt the relief of an old pool finally rinsed and emptied. My inner barricades momentarily relieved. I was leading 206 on autopilot, as many people who have dissociated will describe as a type of non-existence. From this point forward, I will likely only be able to define the most splintered images of this interaction. I will appear and disappear at random, but seldomly at will.
Good Luck.
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