Realization

Sometimes it's the smallest of things that make you realize just how much time has gone past since certain days. Playing an old song that I used to love back in my school days it suddenly hit me that the song came out over 20 years ago! The 90s was not just some years back, it was 20 years ago! To think of all the castles in the sky we all were building and how they've ended up.

Long ago

It's finally hit the big 30 mark; 30 years now to the event that defined so much of who I am and so much of what I am. 30 years ago he walked out the door never to return and every year since then I feel the day shrouded in darkness and deafening silence. I've tried so very hard to not think of this but I've failed miserably. It's amazing to think that even after all these years I haven't accepted what happened, still consider it to be unfair and unjust. Perhaps in time I will grow to accept it as an event that deifned my personality; changed who I was meant to be. I guess I'll never know how I would have ended up had I known him longer.

The memory of other days fades away slowly but not this one....this one lingers....it was long ago but it still seems like yesterday.

Too much to bear

What do you tell a man who has had everything taken away from him in life? When he stands at the brink about to let go of it all, you try out all the usual techniques but then with this one how could it have worked? When he told me what he had been through, it really got to me. Losing a daughter is a pain no one could even imagine, and then his sister-in-law and his brother take their own lives within a span of a few weeks from eachother - that is a lot of loss to have to deal with. I can't even begin to imagine what the last few months have been like for him because ALL of this happened in that time period. He didn't pull back from the brink, I don't think I could have said anything that wouold have brought him back. All I could do was watch as he slipped away and I was left with the empty shell that he had become.

Losing touch

I went home after 3 years....I could barely recognize some of the places and areas now. The city has changed quite a lot and yet I still felt that warmth of home when I first got there. Slowly though as I reacquainted myself with everyone and everything, I realized that the strong feeling I used to get of home wasn't the same anymore. Am I losing touch with it? It has been a long time since I moved out and now having moved around so much am I becoming more of a nomad and losing the concept of home? Or is it just that the city is now just too alien for me and I cannot adjust to it anymore?

Consequences

On every shift I end up seeing people who've made horrible decisions in life and they go on making them even when things go wrong. The problem is that they don't think of how their actions impact their children. I see children being torn from families, from one parent to another and it's heart wrenching. To a child, a family is what they look at for comfort and safety and when this very source of comfort becomes a source for anguish, you can actually see their dreams shatter in their eyes.

Misdirected hate

"Remember, they only hate you for the uniform not for who you are!" That's what I was told way back in the beginning but at times when you face such hate and such violence, you forget that it's directed at the uniform and not you. It's hard not to let these things affect you. Yet we go on, day after day, out there protecting you from the monsters you wish you never face

The wait

The wait is a killer....the constant sense of not knowing where things are headed. The knowledge that decisions are being made that impact your life but you have no say in those decisions and that you must wait and find out what will be.

I sit here trying to go about the day as normal but with a sense of impending change, a change to all my plans; I've never feared change but in this instance, it can be a case of all or nothing. I've rolled my dice and now I wait to see what the results are.....

A life with meaning

What is the point of a life lived in the pursuit of material goals? If at the end of it, you haven't done any good for others, then what has been the point of existence.....

Settle somewhere

Home.....am I ever destined to think of another place as home? I've been in this nomadic phase for so long that my mind automatically thinks of any place as temporary. Perhaps its the choices I've made, they've brought me so far away from where I was that it's hard to step away from this nomadic life. But there's recently been this growing sensation....one that makes me want to settle. Once that draw me to home. Perhaps that will get me the rest I crave.

Looking back

When you look back, do you see the mistakes you made or do you see the successes you have had? Perhaps its a matter of perspective that defines what you see when you look back.