We can't return, we can only look behind from where we came

yesterday, a child came out to wander

caught a dragonfly inside a jar

fearful when the sky was full of thunder

and tearful at the falling of a star

I was running. Running hard, as fast as my little legs could carry me, to catch up. I was following my mother’s voice. 

Like many mothers of her generation, I imagine, she fell back on the music of her young adulthood during those late nights, rocking me to sleep. And even as I grew older, old enough to start to really remember things, some of them kept on. Other songs, I forgot. It took me many years, and many times of hearing it later on, before I realized that “All My Loving” by the Beatles was in her rocking chair rotation. 

But “The Circle Game,” by Joni Mitchell, was a perennial favorite. My earliest memories of it, I think, harken back to when I was just old enough to go on the quarter-mile walk down our street under my own power. On the way back, I’d start to grow tired, and she’d bribe me by telling me that if I made it to the big rock in front of a neighbor’s house, I could climb on her back and she’d carry me the rest of the way home. Up our long, winding driveway, which seemed insurmountable.

sixteen springs and sixteen summers gone now

cartwheels turn to car wheels through the town

and they tell him: take your time, it won’t be long now

before you drag your heels to slow the circle down

I don’t know why, but I always had trouble remembering that second verse, the one about when the boy’s ten and everyone tells him “when you’re older.” I suppose I was looking forward to cartwheels turning to car wheels through the town, even if that didn’t happen for me until well over the age of sixteen. 

My freedom came much later, and at great cost.

In recent weeks I’ve acutely felt the loss of my family, more than I ever have in the past. Meeting James was the catalyst that pulled me away from them, and caused me to cut off contact. Now, objectively, it needed to be done. They are poisonous people. But one still loves one’s parents, I suppose, no matter what.

Until now I’ve never felt deprived. I had James. I had his family. And while they’re flawed in their own way, of course, like every family, they try. They care for each other. The deep, abiding bitterness and hostility that I knew in my family of origin is foreign to them. But now, I face the possibility of losing everything. Him. Them. Everyone.

Because of James, I am geographically and emotionally separated from everyone with whom I grew up. In some cases that’s good. In others, a bit more ambivalent. But I’m feeling a kind of homesickness now that I never knew before, even when I felt sadness and longing for something a little more familiar. Now, I am feeling the kind of homesickness that comes with knowing your home is gone.

Not just distant, but gone.

I guess, in a way, that’s true of everyone. Once you’re not a child anymore, the concept of “home” that you once had can never exist again. But now I’m left feeling like I took a sledgehammer to something that…well, all right, it wasn’t GOOD, it wasn’t HEALTHY, but it was something. Turning to my parents in a time like this would be the worst thing I could possibly do. I know that. But not even having the option? It’s a terrifying thought.

Once again, like the affair, this is a situation I did not create - I could only react to it. Will I be able to react with the same surety, the same sense of rightness now? And what will happen years from now? 

What will I regret?

so the years spin by and now the boy is twenty

though his dreams have lost some grandeur coming true

there’ll be new dreams, maybe better dreams and plenty

before the last revolving year is through