On turning 30 ... in the midst of the storm

Saturday 22 November ...and the days after that, until Tuesday, 9 December

Listening to this 

These waves that wash me more and more these days are starting to erode my beach , bringing to shore all sorts of leftovers - seaweed and shipwreck memorabilia - corroded, faded, obsolete monuments of all that once was and of that which lingers gracefully and proud, but subdued and somewhat disregarded. They give and take and the balance sheet seems to yield surpluses and losses and never break even, as quarters shrink in actual measures but expand disproportionately in abstract and the emotional realm. 

The foam of these violent splashes is salty and tastes of iron .

It's been a wild ride and that's the most and least I could say about these years for which to use a decade as a measure is the same as to include the War in the generic 40s.

Childhood ?simple, wild, organic, happy, demands and mostly fulfilled. Adolescent  dramas and changes, simple, wild, organic, less demands fulfilled, more fulfilling of demands. The 20s? The great daze, wilderness and submission, ambition beyond limitation and exhaustion, dreams and indulgences, both cunning and misplaced, bravado and vulnerability... A bloody walking oxymoron and let's face it, at times, a stumbling moron.

I had one more year of grace, of my life celibacy, one more year and a bit and I was going to go to town. My buffer turned out to be the greatest, most unwarranted wall I've ever slammed into, squashing my face on its rugged corners so violently I could almost identify the split second when the skin tissue ruptured and the blood gushed out.

14 months it took to reconstruct my face and another 2 and a bit and counting to start all over again.

People generally ask so how does it feel to be 30? Do you feel any different? Those automaton questions, weightless, generators of reassuring answers - of course it feels the same as being 29 and 364 days...except most don't go back to ask how it felt at 29 and 364 days and that's probably for the best.

The more his absence stretches, the more its presence presses. The dust that settles, though for most is as fine and light as all the other layers of dust that had settled before, is definitely not the same dust now setting on my past months. It's not choking, it's settling very slowly, so much so that I can almost see every particle and every now and again, a whirlwind occurs and it's courtesy of my very own meteorological set up and those poor, fragile particles are whisked away abruptly ... but they make their way back, they do keep making their way back and will eventually merge into a layer. it's not hopeless, it's just hard and it can't be rushed, helped or avoided

I still break down and it's cleansing, depressurizing, validating but I try to allow it to happen only around people that are able to simply look at me, say I know, it's ok and leave me to it.

I was talking to a friend of mine today about hope and he said It's what defines humanity, essentially, what makes it all better, all worthwhile. I said No matter how you spin it, some things are hopeless. He replied Sure, but I was talking about the macro and you go and make it personal ... when people disguise their inability to accept or deal with a reality as hope, it becomes dangerous. I asked then if hope is not what keeps you on the desert island where you were shipwrecked, whereas grit is what makes you build a raft and set sail for better or worse. He said Hope is what keeps you from jumping into the shark infested waters to be done with it. But I just wouldn't conceit and asked if it wasn't preferable to make the decision to either jump into the potentially shark infested waters or build that damn raft ( and still potentially end up as shark food), than spending your days, hopefully existing on that desert island until you lose your faculties and regress to primate state. He gently, wisely and so definitely delivered the final blow: Hope is what drives you to keep trying to build that raft after countless failed attempts. 

The moral of the story? Nothing is hopeless - as common sense as that might sound. We are all hopefuls and even when playing devil's advocate - because not any part of me, not ever denied hope, it is demonstrably in our DNA helping us along. A little grit is needed though as well.