The Weight I Carry
Some of you on my friends list, and some of those people who find this web page by accident when your looking for physics articles on fusion power, might know that I spent some time living in California. Redwood City, which is south of San Francisco, was the specific city that I lived in.
I think about my time there. I think about it a lot.
For a wet behind the ears prairie boy, who had never been anywhere outside Manitoba on his own, California was a HUGE adventure.
What most of you don’t know is that as well as being a huge positive adventure in my life, California is directly tied to the biggest cross I carry. Perhaps cross isn’t the right term. It’s the biggest weight I carry.
At the time that I left for California, my life was in a bit of a slump. I had NO self confidence, no courage, no real hope. I wasn’t dealing with my parents divorce very well, and I was becoming slowly overwhelmed with a loneliness that was becoming crushing. But I didn’t know it. Before I left, I didn’t know how bad I was. I couldn’t read the warning signs, or perhaps I refused to see them, but I was about to step off the edge of long steep cliff. In California, I found friends who treated me as I always thought friends should. I found a job I really liked and a boss who really wanted me there. I went to places and did things I never did at home. I found support and friendship and people who cared about me for no other reason then they wanted to. And then I left it. I went back to family trouble, personal trouble, money trouble and life trouble. Things were VERY hard, but I managed to get through it because I thought I would be going back to California.
“I can do this, because I know it wont be forever”, I thought. I can deal with the sadness of being alone, because I know that somewhere out there, friends are waiting for me to come home.
Things were bearable because those friends were going to come see me and they did. And while they were here, things were right and fun and ok. The friends couldn’t stay forever, but when they left, the hope of going back to California was still there.
Then things got hard, very hard. I pray to God that nothing in my life will be that hard. I went back to school and tried to finish up my degree. I tried to find friends and love and get my stuff out of my dads basement. But school was hard, people were cold and I was so wrapped up in what I thought I was, no girls saw anything but. And the basement had cold hard grips on me.
What came then is another LONG entry for another day. But I will say that I got very depressed and very scared. When your scared like that, you get angry and defensive and desperate. You can cling and you can push away. I put a death grip on California and my friends. I clung to it as if I depended on it to live and in my thrashing I killed it. I scared my friends away and scared them enough to threaten me with the police. And in an instant all my hopes for going back there disappeared and there seemed nothing else for me.
Guilt makes you do things you don’t normally consider. Guilt can crush you on the inside until you don’t know how to feel anything else. Guilt made my hands move that night of my own accord and ended a three year friendship forever. I didn’t do anything to get back at anyone, or make anyone feel bad or feel that it was their fault. I did what I did because I simply thought that there was nothing after that moment. How could there be anything more?
Its been almost 6 years now since then. Almost ten years since California and the sights and sounds of the city still are strong in my mind and my heart. But as I sit here now, writing this, I can’t remember the most important things. The sound of my friends voices and the look of their faces.
To my Boss from the Bookstore. Your continued friendship through the years since, has kept me sane. And is appreciated beyond words.
To the others. Slowly I forget. Slowly I have a harder time remembering what we did and said and felt. Slowly the memories of the good times disappear into the ether and are forgotten. Faces, places, dinners, things, and adventures disappear and get left behind. Eventually all that will be left is the weight I carry and I wont remember why.
Someone once told me that you should always make the effort to hang on to the best friends. Make the biggest effort for the friends you loved.