Helium Balloons

Where Did it All Go? Part 2

Where Did it All Go? Part 2

Dear Friend,

“Why do you waste so much time… writing and studying those subjects and practicing music? You won’t make a career out of it”

I remember when those repetitive words that my mother and father used to utter over and over used to be a challenge. I’d passionately spurn them with angry retorts, choruses of ‘I’ll show them!’ reverberating through my head which hung above the clouds and was filled with fantastical images and dreams of running away to a city far away from home.

Where did that get me?

It got me aimless and lost and fucking screwed up. I guess I shattered my own windows which I had intricately painted with my set of vibrant stain glass colors. I made them fake pretty as I attempted to hide a bitter reality that hid behind them. They’d warned me, though, denying things won’t change them and fabricating things won’t fix them but I was insistent.

I studied harder and harder.

“I’ll show them!”

I devoted insane amounts of time furiously typing out words into my keyboard with the hope that it’ll improve my writing.

“Just wait and see how I show them!”

I listened to my music teacher far more intently, pounding at my guitar to drown out the sounds of my failure that refused to reduce in volume.

“Goddamn! For fuck sake, I’ll be showing them!”

Ultimately, I had nothing to show. And I tried so hard to assemble the pieces of my life that went crazily out of control. I could see every last ounce of hope, clear and pronounced, dwindling away.

The faint echoes of my own words “I’ll show them” came in a monotone as if laughing at my failure. After all I had said confidently, I had absolutely nothing to show. My words used to form a barrier that clouded any rational judgments that I could have made and I claimed a lot of things that I could not achieve.

I didn’t want to talk failure. I didn’t want to envision failure. I didn’t want to plan failure. Hell, I didn’t even want to think failure. I used to be vaguely optimistic about the future when the future that I had all mapped out wasn’t even guaranteed. Recently, I had told my friends how we’ll show them, and my argument was effectively countered by “Like they’ll care”

And that’s right. It’s going to be hard to ‘show’ people who always seem to seek disappointment like it is the easiest thing in the world.

Yours Lovingly Xx