Complicated

Children make you complicated. They make your life complicated but you become complicated first. Your breeding of yourself, like an explosion of some kind of horcrux, pieces of soul and personality exploded out from you and forming these other versions of yourself, diluted, profaned, enriched and beautified by their other part(s) and by chance and the warping of experience. A sad and brilliant dance then carrys on as these carbon copies grow and explore and weave lives that are extraordinary in that they reflect all of you and nothing about you at the same time. The parent stands apart bamboozled by the creation and the events, able to interfere but unable to change anymore than you can change your own reflection in a mirror. You stand, observing their growth and behaviour behind that mirrored glass. I was never ready for this but I was born ready. I was never expecting this but I saw it all coming. I didn't know I wanted any of this but I cant live without it. The gravity of family and development sucks and pulls in a relentless manner that gives little time to think. If you stop to think you are caught and you drown in the black but vivid spiral that is the remains of your own life. You who were once an individual, or so you thought, now immersed in a team sport of commitment, support and anguish.

Then comes the curious dissolution of your life as that precious family grow up and leave like swallows in the autumn. The unused macaroni and empty beds, the silence, the lack of grocery shopping and raised voices, the stopping of the music, the slow creep of worry and the awful and hurtful awareness of the passage of time. That time that once seemed vital and unending now looking like the dry mouth of a blank, dark and anonymous alley into which you've accidentally run. How did I ever get to be here? Why is there no turning back and am I alone?


There is some comfort in other activities, random things you come across and fall into, self actualisation and daydreaming, books and travel plans. There is news, never ending and tedious. Things happening across the world that command you to take interest in them, there they are, laid out before you. You consider them like some powerless king, you may falter towards some judgement or hasty opinion. Then you change the channel or click the mouse pad and normality resumes. Their in the empty place with it’s photographs and trails of exhausted text messages. As if your brain isn't full enough, now, after a lifetime you struggle with the memory of experience and the total recall of trivia. It's pleasant but unnerving, shocking and comforting and try as you might you can never quite explain it. Never quite.