I Want Them Back

Sometimes you just get angry. There are things that happen in your life that you can't control, both bad and good, that's a given. But some days I just feel like I have been robbed, like things have been taken from me and I am impotent with rage and I want them back.

I want that year back, the one I spent being sick with cancer and having surgery twice and I was in a scary car accident. The one in which I had endless tests and frightening after effects and multiple other health ailments and moved to a new state and couldn't find a job and was treated cruelly by my boyfriend's parents and ended up with a job that I hated.

I want the time back from all those other crappy jobs I took after that because I was sad and scared and I hated myself.

I want that time back, the semester in college when I suffered incapacitating depression and could barely get out of bed for six months. I want all those months of all those other depressions back, too.

I want that year back, the one in high school when I was angry and miserable and facing the ugly, bitter dissolution of my parents' marriage virtually alone.

I want those two years back, the time in middle school when my father had life-threatening surgery and was in a rehab hospital because that surgery went awry, and my mother traveled to out of town to visit him every other weekend, and I had to babysit my younger sister and brother.

I want that time back that I spent hating myself and settling for less and ending up with nothing.

I want those children I never had even if I probably shouldn't have had them for several very good reasons.

I want all of it back. We all want stuff back. But just because you are suddenly middle aged and you think you have somehow deserved better than life has given you--that you are now owed a second chance because you can't go back and fix things--that doesn't mean you will get one. The bad decisions you make and then have to live with, the random shit that just happens--that stuff is immutable. All you can do is keep looking relentlessly forward, push the past out of your mind and move on and do the best you can. It may not always be good enough, but you have to try.

It could be worse; hell, it could always be worse. I should be happy I'm still here, I guess, happy with what I have and what I have been given and what I have learned from it all, and with the friends and family that I am fortunate to have around me.

But some days I can't help it; I see the time I have wasted, the opportunities I have squandered, the mistakes I have made--and I look and I see all the things that have been taken from me without asking, and I want them all back.