Haunting's

Have you ever had a bit of music stuck in your mind? Over and over on endless rewind?
It doesn't matter if it's a song or a phrase, so long as it stays inside, on and on it plays.

My silly bits of phrase aside, I'm having one of those (melancholy?) moments tonight. Sometimes I get stuck inside a song and endlessly it plays in my mind like an unstoppable case of hiccups. I wonder how very like my life this is - jobs, relationships - they seem so uncontrollable and unstoppably repeating. Same person or same situation, the relationship repeats. "Personality conflicts" on the clock, tumble over on repeat.

A stuck song, like hiccups, simply evaporates unnoticed like a morning's fog. I am 34 years old. My other problems repeat and have yet to evaporate on their own, or with visits to one of several counselor's or a "druggist's" tender care (and the subsequent lining of his pockets). I am fully aware it is my own self that is creating these repeating situations, the trick is the illusionists answer to how to get out!

My age has it's advantage's. I am a very different person now than whom I once was in every respect. I am finally happier. I am more sure of myself.  I still find change difficult, but it is manageable now. 14 years ago, in college, the simple action of applying for an entry level part-time job to work while in school was so over-whelming it would send me into hysterics to try to do nothing more than fill out a job application. "What if they don't like me? *I* can't do this! No one could *ever* accept me!" Thoughts like this were repeating for me then. They were my un-asked for mantra if you will. I am now, thankfully, far, FAR better, but how much can one person truly heal? Actually *change* from what they once were?

Can you fall so deep into a pit that no matter how high you might climb, what is *your* personal highest is never more than a higher spot in the rabbit hole you tumbled down? But then, a thought like that could might be applied to the whole of the human race. Higher, and happier, is where and what it is. I have achieved MORE, That is what matters. Reaching a particular state or idealized goal, reaching enough of something... what is this "enough" creature? This dreamed "goal"? Why it is MY own creature! Society may dictate to me that I am to be a certain way. I am to look a certain manner and embrace a certain lifestyle. That is society- NOT I. I and that world in which I live are not at all the same.

There is one thing that I have heard from wise women much, much older than myself. In the end, the one you must answer to for your actions, for your very life and who and what you are, is yourself! Have you made decisions that are ones that *you* can live with? As death brings a gentle hand of the final darkness to your eyes, will you look back on what it is that you have done, the person you have been, with a sense of peace or despair?

I am no saint. I am not particularly religious nor swear to any exact faith though I have investigated many. I do try to live a life that I consider honorable, but I have *many* short-comings. I currently fear the worst of these would be my status of relationships.

Seven to eight years ago now, I suddenly found myself falling into a group of friends. They were wonderful people and I was enamored with them all and the idea of them both. They were all people who were in their 20's, attractive, clean cut, non-drug user's ... and Pagan. Wiccan to be precise. It is a religion which I played with for some time, but while I liked some aspects of it, it never really fit. And so I remained both a part of their 'circle' and outside of it at once, but the one thing I never doubted was our mutual love and affection for each other ... until I did.

Surely anyone of an age with myself is familiar with this problem or process. While my friends and I loved each other, expectations and hopes of each individual in a group can never be completely met (as a great many married couples know, I am told.) Failed expectations and failed relationships between many members of our group - our 'recycled man' policy as my girlfriends and I call it sometimes - in the end, we are only a shadow of what we once were. Friendly acquaintance's, little better.

As such friendships began to fade, I found myself in a desperate want for company and companionship.My most ready supply of a fix for such a drug was, and still is, the location where many of us spend the majority of our lives - the cubicle farm known as work. Unfortunately, the most readily agreeable members of this farm to ripen and provide me the fruits I wanted, were the fruits most forbidden. That being, the married men of the office.

The story of how it all happened is long, but it is the truth that I am having an affair, or close enough to it ... two, actually. Two married men at the same workplace. Oh I *am* a fool to do it, I make no excuse of simple-mindedness for that. The fact is, I am lonely ... and terrified of a relationship that has a real shot at becoming long-term, although I couldn't admit the second half of the problem to myself until very recently.

It is ironic because I have never had 'sex' with either of the two men, but it has been quite enough that I imagine their respective wives should be quite rightly upset if they ever knew, even if the wives themselves are finding satisfaction elsewhere too.

This is the truth of my life. The truth that I am only beginning to feel the weight of the guilt from. I *never* thought I should be so stupid as to do these things. I was always very hard on the women who would have affairs for their lack of self-control. I know now that it is less a problem of self-control and one of simple loneliness, apathy and boredom combined for too long in a stressful environment where we maintain a fake identity and force ourselves to go against our very human animal, and it's needs for acceptance, caring, companionship.

And so ... my life repeats. I find love that can not be had, to prove to myself that love does not conquer all, no matter how strongly you both my swear it. To torture myself with the grapes of Tantalus, and the dream of being a happily married woman.

Ah! What tricky things dreams are! Dreams are a mist world subject to your every changing whim and thought such that you can only find endless perfection. Welcome to the hardness of the solid world where once you enter a relationship beyond that initial infatuation, you are confronted with still finding fascinating the magician who has now shown you the truth behind his illusions and the person behind the stage paint and clever costuming and lighting.

The dream repeats, the disappointment repeats, and endless we go as the shadow-show played out against the screen of the earth, who's candle-flame is the light of the sun. But I do not feel so hopeless as I sound. Even a great tragedy is nothing but a mere play, a play which I intend to wake from laughing.

That laughter haunts me now. I can hear it as if it were a whispered line off-stage for an actress frozen by the amazement of the world she now see's. It is a gentle, forgiving and loving laughter, one that has been happy to see the play, whatever the play was about, however great or poorly performed by it's thesbians. A play I am glad to have been in, and I will wake from this laughing, and let the laughter haunt me now.