Into the garden of earthly delights

My dream home is gone as are much of the things I'd gathered around me. There is no going back through time to the place I lived before that one. There was no way to know that what my partner would do -that would be the last time I could forgive him. My home was no longer worth the pain of staying, but I did stay. I stayed until it belonged to someone else, giving me the resources to move on to a home I am for grateful for - I was invited here to start over when I had nowhere else to go.

The year I stayed, I lived like a hermit in my dream home - holed up in the room we'd shared. He moved into a room that where I had created art of hearts being pierced by ice picks or hovering above a bed of nails or broken into bits. Similar hearts in permanent ink cover my arms and chest. A heart being tossed about by waves and wind... another being sewn back together but laced like shoes with a permanent gap... the last heart surrounded by roses without color, in a garden where the rose petals would wither and fall away leaving only the heart stabbed by their thorny, wooden stems and held captive - unable to move as the seasons passed and roses bloomed and died over and over. I wonder if a part of me always knew my heart would be broken by seeing what no wife should see. Captured pixels - their moment of passion. My husband's back as he moved in her.

The day my world crashed in on me, it was like a wave that had been building through the rolling surf lifted me high into the air and I could suddenly see all the world around me from above the water and the shore. Then the wave overtook me and I held my breath in the undertow -  fighting my way back to the surface without really knowing which way was up or which was down. My body rubbed raw as I was pushed through the sand, bleeding from hundreds of tiny wounds.

There is no crystal ball we can consult to see what lies in our path so that we can guide ourselves from harm, If we had a crystal ball we could never look away. Path after path, choice after choice, compelled to change our mind over and over to see if what is behind Door Number 2 is better than what is behind Door Number 1. But there is no place like home and there is no life other than the one we have now, and no future but the one we are destined to have.

I stayed in my dream home as it rose into the sky in the eye of the storm. I watched through the window as my past rushed past, circling round and round until the house landed with a jolt in a beautiful garden. I believe I am here for a reason in this place where NYC beckons like OZ sparking across the water of the Hudson river.

I choose to look ahead, to laugh and dance and sing my way down the yellow brick road  - forever grateful that my dream home did not fall on me and trap me in my past.