The cracking of dreams

It was just a quick trip to the store for some soy cheese and then to grab some nachos for dinner. The pea soup had sat out just a little too long, so it was no good. We don't have money for bills, but a few bucks for dinner on an evening when I'm overloaded with homework and too tired to cook really wasn't unreasonable. Just a quick trip. Just a simple, mundane thing that we've done countless times. Daryll was the passenger and I was the driver.

Somewhere between Fred Meyer and Muchas Gracias, It gripped me with such a sudden force, I wanted to cry. Fear, dread, melancholy...the feelings that haunt below a seemingly still surface. Rippling and whispering beneath the thin layer of ice and distraction I use to keep them at bay, they found a crack in my surface today. With a suffocating alarm, I clung to the steering wheel, realizing my own terror. Here I am...married, pregnant, attending community college and spending money I don't have on a meal I couldn't muster the energy or thought to create. Here I am, in this mess, in this pit of financial despair with an ailing husband, and an unborn child, clinging desperately to the hope that education provides, clinging desperately to a frail and invisible chance at pulling myself out...pulling us out. Even as I clutch and crawl my way up this thin and delicate lifeline, I feel it chipping at me. I feel it like a thousand beaks, pecking, tearing, taunting. The life I don't want, the life I fear mocks me with threats to swallow me whole. I feel it sucking at my heels...oily and black, cold and bleak. A life of poverty, of hardship and of shattered dreams. A life without living the passions that call to me through mournful daydreams of a better existence.

In that moment in the car tonight, and for the rest of the drive home, the urge to run screamed at me as the demon-thoughts of what I don't want pointed and laughed at my quivering psyche. They know I'm getting tired. They can see the weariness in my eyes and spirit. Struggling to keep my head, I thought of Australia, I thought of Italy, Greece...some of the places I long to run to. I thought of the lives I've danced through in my head and wondered if the grand adventure my spirit cries for will always be just a thought in my head to distract me from the harsh reality of hardship and struggle. Will I find myself wallowing in the unyielding clutches of my socio economic status as my dreams are slowly forgotten and I give in to this...this nothing that I exist in? I am learning that it is not in my nature to just lie down and let it all take me and now, more than ever, I have a real reason to keep fighting to live...to really live and to share that living with my little family. Still...I can feel it. That weakening, that cracking in my resolve and thinning of hope. I will go until I collapse and hope that I beat this thing out...this race against myself and the things that wish to devour me. I am so tired. I am so scared...and more and more, I feel desperately alone.