Fringes

I’ve lived on the fringes; on occasion.

   No matter what the topic, I'd become distant, aloof, not daring to invest enthusiasm. I figured that I'd be squashed like some insect that violated the rules of the game when I entered too deep into the inter-sanctum. I can't claim I thought about it, I just knew it instinctively; like predicting there were dangers in a darken jungle. Seemed to have always been that way, as experience proved I best save my breath on voicing incongruities; no one wanted to hear about them.   

  I became aware I was living empty, waiting for my turn; just like everyone else. Secretly I clung to the hope that justice, as a deity, would see me special and make adjustments to the order of it all. But there was no real reason for seeing it that way.  It wasn't like I was abused on purpose; instead I swallowed the whole idea of earning special meant entitled privilege. 

  I had been told countless times in the past, it was a family curse, we just had to learn to lump it.  Ours was a contract with difficult. We struggled for everything for so long, even suffering became an effort. The deception of it became clear to me without preamble, somewhere along the highway paved with discontent as a substitutions for genuine. I saw the practice of being quiet about miniscule portions, under the guise of the safest path; it began to render a subtle bile tasting abhorrence.  Why survive if it was to be filled to the brim with resentment over lack? No reward for being invisible. Sure as hell didn't get me up the ladder of success, unless being at the bottom longest was any accomplishment.  Nor would taking it in the shorts earn extra credit in some future pay off.  They even stopped making grandiose promises; they knew the pay-off was lame reason as well as empty of any real hope; but what could they do? Devoid of any better course, they plodded along with the generational delusion as comfort rather than trust any lesson to change by experience. 

  Our hope for improved quality had decayed into dreaming beyond fairytale madness. Being ignored had become antiseptic, it was nothing personal.  No one was watching to comment on the progress of it. No escaping into the sanctuary of God either, I figured, the religion I had been handed down was used up long before it was served as left-overs to my parent’s parents.  I could tell the truth of it whenever asking those piercing questions?  Why should love hurt? I would be delivered admonished for the temerity of seeking to know. Yeah, the family was distilled to excuses for not getting what you want as some function of being divinely deserving. Except most of us don’t linger on the putridity of that, it'd make us vomit if we dwelled too long on the contradiction of our sacred values.  It'd break our heart to consider we've been settling for someone else’s terror. 

   That was the legacy passed down; habitual, hieratical fear.  Just plug it into any hope, then reap a huge helping of despair for efforts to dismantle unapproved, safe, aspiration. The startling truth that the way of it wasn't born out of survival, it was self defeating along with self fulfilling homage to addiction to victimhood; it was pervasive and revered as our most basic tribal value.  That was the Holy Grail of it.  A wealth of martyrdom to rationalize slacking; justified purpose of keeping fear at bay. 

It was an unspoken ancient war fought in order to turn inert any unspent potential. All the while not moving forward or making any changes that would add a smidgen of quality to life, or chance of personal worth; we were in this together...and the long haul.