Five

The Circle of Life subscribes to the theory that you’re born, you grow, you live, you wither away, and then you die. Something went terribly amiss within my circle because I never got to do the “live” part. Sure, life has to go on in some form or the other, but existing is a far cry from living and that’s pretty much what I’ve been doing for the bulk of my life. Well, the bulk of my existence, rather - because you can’t call what I’ve been doing living. Living implies being your own person, playing by your own rules, doing whatever you feel like doing, and not giving a second thought to what someone might think of it. Living implies love, happiness, friends, places to go, people to see, things to look forward to, and fond memories to look back on. Living means full of life and a passion for living it.

I’ve been full of many things, but life has never been one of them. I’ve never had a life that I could call my own. I went from being someone’s daughter to being someone’s mother to being someone’s wife to being someone’s, literal and figurative, punching bag. I lost me and my life along the way. Me. I’m not sure if I ever found me. I never had time to. Becoming a mother at the tender age of seventeen doesn’t leave much room for self discovery. Just as I should have been beginning to live life for me, away from past heartaches and old wounds, I began living life for my daughter. I can’t count the years that I’ve been on autopilot now. Just going through the motions of life, but not really taking part in it. It’s something you learn to do because you’re forced to. It comes from living your life as somebody else’s something instead of living it for yourself. Existing. You realize you’re in the middle of that six lane highway with cars coming at you on all sides again, but this time you have to take the aggressive role and direct and divert the cars. You don’t have time to stop. You have to keep going, no matter how you feel or what you’d rather be doing because if you don’t, every one of the cars would spin out of control and come crashing down on you. So you keep directing and you keep diverting, all for the sake of keeping peace amongst the fray that has become your existence. When you tire of it, and anybody would get tired of it after a while, you turn on autopilot because you know that you don’t have any reinforcements to call in.

The solitude of just existing isn’t even the saddest part. The saddest part of just existing is reviewing the spins and turns of your own circle of life and realizing that you’re already at the withering away stage, right before the then-you-die stage. You start to wonder if the then-you-die stage is the final one or if somebody left out the dying-bit-by-bit stage because that seems more appropriate to your circumstances than withering away. Withering away implies that there was something viable there to begin with. Yes, the saddest part of just existing is feeling like you’re dying without ever having lived.