I have a secret.  It is the kind of secret that Charlotte Perkins Gilman wrote of when she penned The Yellow Wallpaper.  I am sliding round and round the edges of a room, wearing an ugly green smudge into the wall.  It is dirty and hideous, and there is a trapped woman who is trying to get out.  The difference between Gilman's pathetic heroine and me is who our jailer is.  In The Yellow Wallpaper, Gilman's protagonist is imprisoned by the good intentions of her husband and his sister.  Her family means well; they just make her crazy, that's all.  In my personal short story, I have imprisoned  myself; I am trapped by my own choices, and the damage to which I return over and over again.  I am trapped by the love I feel to family members who are wrecked, seemingly beyond help, and to the ones who cannot yet help themselves.

My ex-husband cut everyone out of his life.  We divorced, and the fragile threads that attached the hearts of his children to his own were severed by his...I want to say selfishness, but perhaps it was his need to preserve himself at any cost.  He wanted out, and he left us all.  If I despise him at all, it is because he had the misplaced courage and the selfish cowardice to do it.  I would like to live independently, but not at the cost of my children. Never that.  My life's account would be destroyed beyond repair if I left them like he did.  I do not have the capacity or the desire to forget them.

So occasionally I have to shake my bars, rattle my cage and long for the freedom only oblivion and utter selfishness can bring.   I am trapped forever by tender, tightly woven chains of love, and there is this smudge around my life I have worn like a caged tiger paces around its cage.  I pull into me the very things I want to push away.  I live in the tension of the longing and the loathing.  I am reconciled to it most of the time.  In the moments I am not, there are lortabs or bitter chocolate. So on days like this I fantasize escape...driving away forever and ever, Thelma and Louise style, wind in my hair, never looking back, and crave a whiskey straight up. 

Today, hanging across my eyes is a closed sign.  You can't come in.  No one can.  I can't smile, there is mostly a lump in my throat while I struggle with my guilt, my anger and my escape fantasy.  I can't connect with anyone, and mostly I don't want to.  Except I know this isn't my normal. 

If I were a western film, I would be the eerily empty town with the dry wind howling, tumble weeds careening across the dusty street.  The saloon door hangs crookedly on a hinge and creeks when the arrid wind gusts up to push it away.   If my loved ones were near, they would be nervous and hurt by my emptiness, and feel secretly guilty, wondering if they have something to do with it.  They would blame me for my silence which would remind them their lives aren't right, and they would resent me for their connection to my pain.

 I don't really control this barometer.  All I can do is withdraw until I can't stand myself any longer.  At that point, I reach out for the love and the companionship that ultimately makes my journey beautiful again.  I am sorry.  I am ashamed of the complexity within me, and the struggle that I wage with myself and the sadness.