I’ve been told countless times to “move on”, from friends, from our mortgage broker, from the mountain itself. What if moving on required the honoring of being in it?
This is what I’ve given myself.
I allow the horror and give myself a side door exit when needed.
I allow myself to witness the injustice, the unconsciousness to rise up exposing the very broken system in which we all are tethered to.
I allow myself to feel the brutal reality of those changing the locks to our home that’s going under foreclosure, confusion since I still have my possessions in there, not able to review what is *mine. It’s not just stuff. It’s a story that I was part of. The outside cast iron tub, the wind chimes, my child’s toys that I have yet to even shift through gaging their value of worth in memory. The problem is nothing is worth a life, yet everyone is getting on with it. Moving forward isn’t a step in a direction, it’s sitting in the seat of it – a KonMari honoring if you will.
I haven’t fully said goodbye. Just like when we moved from Colorado, moving to Alaska I never got to pack my things and move. My husband did. And now, it’s the same story. That fateful Alaska December day, was the last day I was inside my house. Seasons followed, the road was rebuilt and I finally revisited the outside, paralyzed at the overwhelm of feelings and re-lived trauma. It was only 5 minutes of a stay and I was done.
“Move on they say.”
“I’ll buy your sweet little house”, they say.
“Get the hell out of Alaska.”
“Why do you even want to live there?”
I don’t have answers, none that would satisfy the questions. But what I do know is what I experienced has value too. ‘Processing power’, if you will. I didn’t want to leave. Can you imagine what it’s like to move your entire life upwards across the country and your children’s life to take a chance on where your heart is, and then have a landslide rip through all facets of your life, disseminating its entirety with only your breathe of life being your own and yet people’s solution is to “move on”, or “maybe someone could buy it” backlashing the unawareness that we *can’t live there but somehow they’re strong enough to live there? How does that not crush one’s soul as to disrespect what we’ve all been through? Is the insurance and mortgage companies drunk enough to allow the vulgarity of this situation in thinking, the house is still standing, it must be worth something, more than a human life? I pray for the person who had to change our locks because he’s doing his job but the cost of that is dangerous, in my opinion. I’m not giving up my house to just ‘move on’ when there’s nothing showing up to move towards to, in the nature of the like . What needs to happen, is all those people directly affected (IF THEY WANT) need to be compensated for their loss in whatever measure demonstrates respectful equality.
Yet, here I am, feeling alone in the outrage.
I can’t even touch on the real loss. The loss of life, itself. There is no comparison, there is no compensation that could ever heal that, ever. But then there are those of us not in that experience and have a story to tell that’s filled with reality of how we’re all living on a tight wire. Doesn’t matter if you live in Alaska or the beaches of Florida, trauma is real, it’s not over, we must do better by requiring higher standards of living regardless of income level. And how we do that is not to separate it into someone else’s experience. Instead, act as if…
Ding dong,
Vanessa Wishstar