29/11/2011

To my life, my thoughts, and everything that led to where I'm at now

What if... what if I had run away when I was younger? What if I had left home - would it all be different today? Would I be less of a confused mess? Would I have a life to speak of, instead of just words and thoughts, and how much different would it all have turned out if I'd left years ago, when I was still young enough to adapt and learn to fly...

I was thinking about a whole lot of pointless what-if scenarios today, mainly triggered by a conversation about one of my cousins, whom I haven't seen in a decade now. She's my youngest cousin, and we met exactly three times in our lives. Yet her life turned out quite parallel to mine in some strange ways, except she did the opposite of me in the end - she ran away.

Let's rewind for s second and give it some context, shall we?

I met this cousin for the first time when we were little - I was 9 and she was a blond-haired, blue-eyed 5 year-old from the East. She came with her mother to stay for a few weeks in Paris with my mother and I, and the truth is that I don't remember much of it at all. I'm guessing we spent our time playing with dolls or running about in the park. What I do remember is her mother - my aunt - going crazy at some point after an argument with my mother that led her to lock herself up in my bedroom and refusing to get out for days. Their stay turned so bad that my mother had to send them both back early, and that was it.

When I was 13, we went to visit my mother's family in their country to spend Christmas with them for the first time. My cousin was there too, but without her mother. Her father had left eons ago and her mother couldn't cope with looking after my cousin, who by then was around 9 years old, so she was often left in the care of our grand-parents, whom I met a total of 3 or 4 times in my life. I remember one morning sitting on the floor by the large wooden coffee table, writing a letter to a school friend on some plain piece of paper because that was all I had. My cousin came to sit next to me with an old rag doll - probably the only one she ever got. She kept talking to me in her language and I kept saying "I don't understand what you're saying", and then she gave me a few sheets of writing paper with Disney characters adorning the sides. Beyond that memory, I remember next to nothing.

The last time I met her, it was the summer of my 18th birthday and she was 14. Her blond hair had been cut so short she almost looked like a boy. I was staying at another aunt's place for a few days before heading back to London for good and she'd come to stay for a few days as well. This time, we didn't really talk at all, and I found her quite withdrawn and lost. Little did I know that during that same period, she was about to be taken by her mother pretty much overnight to move to Germany. I was withdrawn and lost, too, and only really remember one random moment of her and another cousin sunbathing in the garden.

I found the parallel funny between me and her, how she'd been taken overnight to move into a whole other country just the way it happened with me. Nowadays she's fluent in German, while I'm fluent in English, so there was never a plan from life to get us to ever talk to each other, I'm guessing. Just like me, she landed in a foreign city whose language she couldn't speak, struggling with her mother in different ways.

And that's where the parallel stops and the opposite life choices come in. As soon as she turned 18, she left home and never went back. I... just stayed and never really tried to leave.

Not long ago I learned that she got married, but she never invited her mother to the wedding, and they are no longer in touch. I saw her mother a couple of years ago when she came to visit us for a few days. She was upset and angry that her daughter had cut her off.

But here's the thing. There is only two choices in the story: either you stay out of loyalty and therefore give up your own right to live as your own person (the choice I made without really knowing at the time) or you put yourself first and severe the bonds (my cousin's choice). Neither choice is right or wrong, but the outcomes are as opposed as night and day. Sometimes you have to leave for as long as it takes to be ready to see certain people again - even family. But I missed the boat, I was too weak, too... weak. Too scared and isolated.

I just keep thinking that there is such a thing as too much love to the point of suffocating a person and leading them to become helpless and unable to ever cope on their own.