Exile - 03

I am often taut with worry and sometimes feel as though we’re only a footstep away from chaos. But I have to hold my nerve, for fear of passing on my chronic sense of unbelonging in this world.

The circumstances of the world shift without explanation or warning. Why do some of us meet difficulty with despair and others do so with fortitude? Who can comfort us when we are scared? Whom do we gather around us when darkness descends and the trees fall? What if a tragedy in a person’s life cannot be so plainly seen by others? What if it cannot

During that time, the world seemed completely unforgiving. I was a single father at age twenty-six, divorced after a meaningless marriage that had lasted a year. My mother had died young after a lifetime of misery. My father and I struggled to keep my son from the jaws of death. And all around me, I saw nothing but a kind of farcical futility. I co

And so, inevitably, my symptoms of panic returned: this time, with perfect resonance, taking the form of hyper-ventilation: a constant gasping for breath. I was thirty-seven years old, and it seemed to me that I was right back where I had started, seven years before. The Wasteland was all around me, and I was living in it again. But beyond a vague