Eve

Tomorrow is the day.

The day the course of my life was forever altered.
When one moment I was just coming in like every other morning to gaze longingly for another long day but was greeted by a bizarre altered-reality type scene.
How I was known by others as a friend, a daughter, a sister, a cousin. An enemy.
How I knew myself as me.
How my future role as mother and wife was changed, for the better but also for the worse.
How my view of what can happen in the world was suddenly too incomprehensible to consider all at once.
The day I had to hear my father, lost for words. My brother, so consumed by shock that he threw his mobile away because he wanted to unhear my words... while I was still on the other end of the phone.
The chance to actively mother once again slipped from my grasp, even though it had been so close I was granted that brief month to smell, touch, see, taste it this time.
I lost my innocence. The most pure love of my life.

It was the day I gave her back to the world.

Yet still, "the world" doesn't understand why I can sometimes bite them without their expecting it. What I have seen and experienced - and lost - is forgotten in the moment. I never ask for forgiveness, I don't even ask for understanding anymore as it seems too far a bow to draw for some to consider it an effect of an event that happened "all those years ago now". It is as it is with some people, you can never hope to reach those who weren't meant to be reached.
So instead, I learn and I make note of those things that are deemed mistakes, faux pas' if you will, in some people's eyes but jewels of growth and opportunity in mine. They can kick me while I'm down and I thank them later, in my own time, for the chance to learn from my part in the scenario. But has it really served a purpose for them? And did they ever pause to consider where I was coming from? I wonder, but it's not my business to know. Another's growth will come from all sorts of things for their own personal betterment and not necessarily ever from an interaction (or altercation) with me.

I'm not too big (or small) to say I've been hurting. Am still hurting. Sometimes in tremendous amounts. It is hard to admit, when previously you have been a very capable, dependable person who went out of their way never to neither intentionally nor accidentally hurt another. I appear to have momentarily lost that knack. Honesty will do that to a person, I guess. I have lost my way a bit, especially when feeling the hurt on behalf of others. Feeling it and wishing desperately it would ease for them. It has gotten me into trouble on occasion, when speaking *for* others in the face of another's short-sightedness. But it has all helped to shape me and all the parts that make up the whole of me, where I stand today. Which is different to how I will be in the future. The experiences I have today will decide who I am tomorrow, step and repeat until the final curtain, I suppose.

Four years ago tomorrow, we said goodbye to Ellanor. But in another way, we also welcomed her forever into our hearts and memories.