40 Days of Gratitude: Day 38

            During my visit home, my mother's new next door neighbor started the process of clear-cut logging the land next to her house.  The land I grew up on.  By the time I go back again, it'll be bare, empty and utterly destroyed.  The trees will have been razed, and there will be machinery tracks cut like scars into a suddenly empty hillside.  The road will have been torn up by the trucks lumbering up and down, and whatever was there before will simply be gone.  Forever irreperable.
          It cut into my 40 days of gratitude for Lent pretty damn hard.  
          40 days that I thought would be really easy to catalogue.  40 days of how damn lucky I am.  Lucky to have opportunities.  Lucky to have friends.  Lucky to have health.  Lucky to have life.  Lucky to take shot of Whiskey each of the nights that they are howling, to rock my demons to sleep.  Demons that a person as lucky as me doesn't really have any business grappling with.  Because I lead a charmed life.  A life full of adventure, of travel, of good times spent with good people, and a life of opportunities seized by the horns.
          After all, I'm busy studying at a world class university, busy performing standup and keeping fit.  I have no one to visit in any hospitals, and no graveyards where I leave flowers.  I have never been mugged, attacked or spat at.  Never not recognized how very charmed my little life seems to be, how I have (and have had for years) a Golden Ticket to opportunity and adventure, as long as I work hard to keep it.
          And yet the trees are falling.  Stripping away the protection they once offered the hillside.  Laying bare it's secrets, and emptying it's soul.  Peeling back the layers to stare at what was below the forest canopy.  Painfully, unwillingly, and without mercy.
            The clear-cutting, although totally unrelated, slashes pretty deep because it seems symbolic of a process that my famiy is going through.
         One I'm too afriad to tell anyone about, because I'm somehow convinced that what I think, what I say, and what I do, will be used to hurt people I love.  
          One I'm too afriad to talk about openly because I've been told point blank by more than one person, that what I believe, how I think and what I feel, matters in a very real way.  
           One that may very well define not only what the next four months will look like for me, but the next forty years.  
          I hold my Golden Ticket, clenched as tight as I can get it in my fist, and am reminded as the trees fall, that it's not mine.  I did nothing to earn it.  Every advantage I am given is because of a disadvantage someone else is forced into, every step forward for me, is a step backwards for someone else.  And on top of it all, I get to hold that Golden Ticket knowing all the while that people I love dearly are being destroyed and destroying.  That my choice is between stepping forward and away, to pretend I don't see/can't see what's happenning, or open my fist and turn around.  Saying goodbye to an opportunity that seems less and less like it's mine, in lieu of taking on a responsibility that I've known my whole life I'd one day have to shoulder.  Who knows, maybe something will shift or change for the better.  But I doubt it.  I've learned to be smarter than to expect that.  And when this all plays out, I'll write something with actual details.  From where-ever it is I end up needing to be, doing whatever it is I end up needing to do.
           Because sometimes you can't take the opportunities you are offered, because you are needed elsewhere.  Sometimes you can't have adventure, because it's someone else's turn.  Sometimes you can't be whole, because for someone else to heal, another person has to carry the burden of being broken.  Sometimes we all draw the short straw.  And sometimes we have to choose to draw the short straw, because the person who has held it for so long, can't carry it anymore, and they are breaking those around them with their pain.
         Gabriel Garcia Marquez once wrote, "What matters in life is not what happens to you, but what you remember and how you remember it," and this is no different.  Someday I'll be able to write about it in detail, laugh about the ironies over beers with friends, and those demons won't need more than a cup of tea to quiet them even on the worst nights.
           Someday, however, is not now.  Now I get to grapple with being the Girl With A Golden Ticket.  Standing on a train platform, knowing I can never leave.  Because while the Golden Ticket buys my way out of this mess, it's not just me I need to think about, and I know no one else strong enough to step in and help.
           And despite all, it's still 40 days of Gratitude, and the rules are that I come up with something I am grateful for every day of Lent.  All freaking 40 of them.  Even the ones where I'd rather crawl into a hole and hide.  The days I wish I could pretend weren't.
        So 40 Days of Gratitude: Day 38: For being able to remember dark days in the lightest of all possible ways.  Because someday, that's how I'll get to remember today.