A Spinning Wheel

Sometimes it doesn’t matter what you’ve done, what you didn’t do, what you look like, what age you are, any of it. Nothing matters at all. You have no control. Your parents don’t love you. No one loves you, not the actual you, the scared child, the terrified adult. The broken bird you promised you’d find again one day isn’t in the place where you left her and not in the same condition. You assumed that the passage of time wouldn’t count in this particular case, and in many ways, time lives up to your expectations. She is a raw and feral thing. The time not accounted for was your own, the days spent in her stead, wondering where she is, what she thinks of you, waiting for any sign that you’re an acceptable delegate. The person you disappoint most is yourself. You can’t give her what she needs because you are, fundamentally, not her. You have lived your own life, albeit not the life she wants, nor the one you wish you had. No one is happy. 

Is dissociative identity disorder merely a physical embodiment of semantics, an exercise of appropriately parsing out the right equation to square everything that ever happened to you, to her, to the others? Is there meaning that can be found in separate lives? She needs a mother and a father. You can barely take care of yourself, and the days that you do, you do so begrudgingly. On behalf of. Maybe not running away from the trauma is the most people pleasing thing you can do, so of course you excel at it. 

Who was in control of the sinking Titanic? 

All I am is a spinning wheel.
 

Portrait credit: Reo Asali