Family history.

It’s been a year since I have felt that feeling. The feeling I knew really well in my childhood. When I stopped talking to my mom and my sister I didn’t expect that this feeling would go away, or that it would just stop happening. But it did.
The feeling is like a wash, a wave, that just comes over me. Maybe it comes over you too.
When I stopped talking to my mom and my sister I didn’t feel any shame. There was maybe a moment of grief, or maybe it was a mirage - the two seem so alike sometimes.
It’s a wave that comes, and takes over your whole body. You sink deeper into the couch or the chair or the bed. Whatever surface you’re on. You’re never standing, there’s no way you can stand through this.
Your hands tighten, your fingers grip into whatever surface is near by. Your vision narrows. You begin to whisper to yourself, just hold on, just hold on.
It’s as if you know that you’re about to no longer survive this, this wave of whatever this is. This mirage. This imagined life.
Something inside your throat tightens and tenses. It’s as if there are one million stories in side of it and no one is around to hear them or tell you that yes, they are true, yes that happened, yes, I saw that glimmer of hope, that star in the sky, that monster in the closet. A man in your bed. A mirage.
When I sit in my living room now, I look for that feeling. I scan the horizon of my coffee table, my desk. I look across the room at the wall. I try to see if the yellow light reflected in the wall will give me what I’m looking for.
They don’t. They haven’t. It is only silence now. A dog barking outside. The sun, casting it’s light on my face through the window.
It has been about a year since it has come and gone, that feeling. A feeling of belief and disbelief all at once.