It happened about an hour ago!

I lay there thinking that I had to go to obscene lengths to kill this person that I had become. A person beholden to others and trapped by expectations which twisted her sense of self worth. She was constantly waging war against the ghosts of the past, the mothers and the fathers who manipulated or who were manipulated themselves and the siblings who didn’t care either way.

Looking back at the deceased (for that is what she is now), I realised that she had no damn choice in one sense. Born into a world where her mother was dripping in self pity and her father coping through tyranny, she felt as if the world was like walking on broken glass, so she tread lightly, not like a giant should.

She twisted herself into indescribable knots of angst and rebellion – a part of her wanting out – and another wanting to stay because what choice did she have?

At every junction, she could forgive herself and leave the offering of a painful and dis-functioning life or keep going, carrying the cross and burdened.

She blamed them of course – those who brought her into the world – and knew that they trained her to collapse at any sign of challenge, give up at any mention of struggle, groan at the sacrifices and manipulate to get her own way when she could not do so powerfully.

She needed to die . . .

She needed to be put to rest where the ghosts of torment could no longer stroke her with their fingers of pain.

Her only crutch, the wooden staff of the past, helped her to struggle down the paths of life and was the very reason she could move slowly into the future. Without it, she would have had to walk on her own two feet and with her own legs, unaided and resolute. Her focus, instead of on the path at her unstable feet, would have been on the horizon where all dreams come to life.

But . . . there was no way she could relinquish the crutch. Cradled lovingly for a lifetime, she had worn her very own hand prints into its surface and let the stains of uncertainty bleach into its grain.

Her feet did not know how to step lightly anymore.

Her legs did not know how to dance with a spring in them.

Her knees did not know how to hold her balance.

Her thighs no longer showed strength.

She had to die . . .

The only way to reach the future, was to run with joy!

Something took a hold of her and stopped her in her tracks and whispered, ‘no further.’

The crossroads was simple, let her be and allow her to shuffle with the phantasms of the past and you go on, no staff in hand, and walk tall.

An hour ago . . . when I died . . . I shed a tear, for she did hold my childhood memories, but I knew that they would go on with me, coloured by a different hue. This time, not stained by the past, but instead lit up by the future.

And it was good to be alive again!