Lost years buried under the fog of the unknown

For years, I have locked myself in a box, not being able to breathe with ease. The endless tears alone out of others’ sights. The deep pain is wringing my heart and stomach. The feeling of loneliness. Not wanting to talk to anyone about the issues holding me hostage.

What is a girl who grew up surrounded by hate to do? What a girl grew up without a mother’s love to do. 

The black cloud or lostness in the wild of a troubled childhood. Deprived of love and affection. The lostness in the maze of maternal relatives hate and resentment of my existence.

Young and shrouded in fear. I often wished I was never born. My life went by, year after year, without focus, without a plan, nor an aspiration or a dream as a foundation to build my life and my future. 

Things happened; life was full of unfortunate surprises. In college, I grew fast. From a child to a woman ready to leave home at any cost. I was entangled in a cycle of constantly thinking of a way to get out, to leave home for good.

Home was a thorny bush. It was a place unfit for a child that was born out of no choice of hers. A place where fear is the fruit of daily life. Anxiety is the whip of the sun when it rises until it sets. God in my mind, and prayers that will take years to deliver an answer.

I was lost in my mind, lost in the reality of my life. A reality I did not accept but acknowledged I’m living it. A reality of living a nightmare. When a girl blooms like a fragrant rose. I, on the other hand, was a rose withered. Petals scattered all over the place, dull and ugly. The reality of my life at home was merely that.

I never knew what youth was like. I had no youth life and no vision of what it is like to be a teenager, growing into her youth. I was deprived of the most beautiful experience of life: “youth.” I lost the opportunity to be the hoya of the jungle. Free, with fragrance that reaches east and west from on top of a thousand-year-old tree. Strong and protective, singing songs of wisdom and love that will feed a youth’s delicate years with pleasure.

And with many lessons to learn, to grow in the world without fear and with confidence to be the next perfect example for a generation to follow.

I grew without paying attention to every stage of my life. One day I was a child; the next I was a woman, a wife, and a mother.

A mother without a mother, how is a girl without a mother supposed to mother a better generation for the future? I was granted a task that proved to be challenging, as it will always be. Its a task every girl must be prepared for. And she must have the instincts of motherhood flowing free in her veins. If she is ever to succeed in being a mother.

Thinking back now—how bizarre! 

Is it bizarre because it’s morally unaccepted in society, or is it because I came to realize how life should have been for any child that comes to this world?

will this fog I have fought for all my life to have it lifted. This fog blinded my vision of the future. The fog of the unknown.  I felt the pain I was living in, pricking my body and soul. I feel the pricks bleeding slowly as the fog of pain and sorrow slowly flows away like a dark cloud that brought a storm, retreating after it caused havoc in people’s lives. 

I’m exposed to a world I don’t know. I opened my eyes to see a world far ahead of me. A world I didn’t recognize. My body and my mind cried tears of confusion. The comfort of the fog I was living in for all my life is now missing.

The fog that shrouded me in all my life, warming me like a Pendleton blanket, is now blown away far from me. It’s the fog of an unpleasant life, yet it was comforting. It was the only life I have known and been exposed to.

I’m left behind in a world so strange to find my way around alone without a guide. 

The cold wind of lostness chilling my skin, shivering my heart and body. My eyes tear as I try to make sense of what is in front of me now.

Fears of being alone again and in a strange place surface and vanish as I try to adjust myself to a rather big world under the smell of freedom I never knew existed. Freedom that’s holding my breath, and open my heart to its comfortable smell. 

As I wondered what would have been like to live in this freedom from the day, I cried my first cry and took in my first breath. I asked myself, Would I ever be able to live this new change and embrace it as if I were just born?