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January 06, 2004
Rebuilding
Trust is an easy thing to give. You only need to be honest and decent and trust the other person. They will pick up the baton. But when that trust is damaged, it is a lot harder to rebuild.
Imagine if a tornado hit your house. An F5. Everything is gone. Destroyed. The home you lived in is nothing more than matchsticks. Your life, your future, your past, all of it seriously damaged. You are lost and confused. Everything is out of your hands, and everything is so emotional.
What can you do, but to rebuild? You can't just give up. You might be angry, dejected, sad. But you have to restart your life. It isn't easy at all. You might decide you can't live there any more. You might decide, "Screw this place, I don't need to be here." And you might be right.
But sometimes, something draws us to try and carry on our life in the same space. With the same people. And so, you must rebuild. There are steps that you have to go through, of course. They are not easy, but they get progressively easier.
You start off by picking through the destruction for those items that might have
survived. The photographic memories, the object that was given to you by someone special, the history of your life. All in the rubble.
Then, and this can emotionally kill you, you have to clean up the lot. Wipe the entire existence of your home away. Dig up the foundations that you had laid down. Remove every last thing from the grounds.
Now, finally, you have a clean slate. An old lot, an old space, familiar, yet oddly empty. You are torn along with it, but you know the worst is behind you. You know that you are ready to move forward. You have the plans, the contractors and everything ready. But you are still sad at the destruction.
Eventually, the empty lot starts to resemble a house. The foundation goes back in, the frame starts to give it shape, the walls make it solid. It takes time. The work stops when it rains or snows. The going is slow as equipment fails or supplies arrive late. Eventually it takes its final shape. Eventually.
And when it does, you stand back and look at your new house. And you are filled at once with pride and with sadness. But hope is the most palatable emotion now. Hope that you are at the end of the long painful process of rebuilding. Hope that this house will soon become home.
Comfortable now, having lived in your new house for a little while. The new furnishings are finally wearing out their newness. The place begins to feel familiar and relaxed. And just like that, it is now home. Just like you left it, but with a little too much drama to tell the grandkids.
I think that's the best analogy I can come up with for rebuilding things with 'L'. I've never been through something like this, and for a while I did not know that I could go through with it. But now that I see it as a "small steady steps" thing, rather than needing to get it all hashed out at once, it is looking manageable.
Posted by Samer at January 6, 2004 10:25 PM
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