{"id":2384,"date":"2012-03-07T08:07:47","date_gmt":"2012-03-07T13:07:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.gadflyonline.com\/wpblog\/?p=2384"},"modified":"2012-07-15T20:11:06","modified_gmt":"2012-07-16T00:11:06","slug":"leaving-nowhere-behind-by-melissa-r-mendelson","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/gadflyonline.com\/home\/index.php\/leaving-nowhere-behind-by-melissa-r-mendelson\/","title":{"rendered":"Leaving Nowhere Behind by Melissa R. Mendelson"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

If someone had asked me how I would describe my life, I would answer with this.\u00a0 My life is like a train departing from nowhere.\u00a0 I would lose time going nowhere.\u00a0 There are moments, where I wish I could stop this crazy ride and erase what was, but I can\u2019t.\u00a0 Too many dark tunnels have swallowed me whole, but now I am seeing daylight.\u00a0 I can\u2019t tell where I am going, but I know that it is somewhere.\u00a0 And my past remains vivid in the rear view mirror of my life.<\/p>\n

Thirty years have come and gone.\u00a0 I was forced to board a train away from home, and a ticket was shoved in my hand.\u00a0 This is where I get off, but I don\u2019t belong here.\u00a0 I don\u2019t want to be here, but if I don\u2019t step onto the platform, I will be thrown from the safety of my seat.\u00a0 It is a bad habit to be standing still, but there were times, where I wanted nothing more than to be frozen.\u00a0 But if that was the case, the world would simply leave me behind.<\/p>\n

I had traveled through the long, dark corridors called high school.\u00a0 Rocks were thrown at my window, breaking glass.\u00a0 Brakes were pressed, and I flew forward, bleeding a thousand tears.\u00a0 The engine of my heart broke down, and I drifted into nothing.\u00a0 For a long time, I thought my life would never escape this dark tunnel, but somehow, someway, I broke through to the next journey ahead.<\/p>\n

As this train carried me forward, the land remained barren, dark.\u00a0 I had no choice but to come here.\u00a0 If I could, I would\u2019ve stayed back, but such wasn\u2019t the case.\u00a0 I rode a thousand miles, losing myself with each stop, and now I don\u2019t know who I am.\u00a0 But then she came and saved my life, giving me a destination to head to, but the journey promised to be difficult.\u00a0 A second chance isn\u2019t as easy as people think, and some of us are doomed to repeat the same mistakes that broke us down to begin with.\u00a0 And so was my fate.<\/p>\n

I reached a crossroads.\u00a0 I found a dream waiting to be realized, and my college film project promised a better future.\u00a0 I had opportunities.\u00a0 I had direction, but he chose for me, forcing me to go where I did not want to go.\u00a0 For two years, I rode along the tracks to nowhere, losing myself again in Oneonta, and wondering why didn\u2019t I make the choice myself.\u00a0 I could have found love here.\u00a0 He was waiting for me to see him standing there, but my gears were cast into self-destructive mode.\u00a0 I didn\u2019t care, and I rode on in silence, passing him by, a decision I would always regret.\u00a0 And time moved on.<\/p>\n

My life was a train wreck.\u00a0 I wanted to get off this crazy ride.\u00a0 I wanted to disappear, but instead, I was swallowed whole by a series of dark tunnels.\u00a0 The wrong choices now took me into the wrong directions, and rocks were thrown at my window, breaking glass.\u00a0 The brakes bled with every misery, every tragedy I endured, but somehow, someway, I still moved forward.\u00a0 But was there any hope for me ahead?<\/p>\n

In 2005, I met fear head on and forced it down, back into its long, dark tunnel.\u00a0 My whole life was spent in fear.\u00a0 I didn\u2019t want to be alone, but I made myself alone.\u00a0 Now, it was time to gather strength and heal my wounds, and I had to stop looking back because I was beyond the point of no return.\u00a0 I was still moving forward, but I found myself struggling, suffocating between a rock and a hard place.\u00a0 Nobody was going to stop this crazy ride.\u00a0 It was up to me, but it would take a few more years to realize that my life needed to change.\u00a0 And I wasn\u2019t the passenger I always thought I was.\u00a0 I was in the driver\u2019s seat, stuck on auto pilot.<\/p>\n

Last year, I found myself holding the steering wheel.\u00a0 I looked at the land ahead, unknown territory, but it shined under sunny skies.\u00a0 My fingers curled together, feeling strength, and I sat upright in the seat, no longer hunched back or doomed to looking down.\u00a0 Anticipation tingled my heart, and dreams soared through my mind.\u00a0 My eyes glanced up at the rear view mirror, seeing a broken life left behind, but that was not the future of my life.\u00a0 That was not where my destination waited, and where it waited was where I wanted to go.<\/p>\n

It took a long time to get here.\u00a0 I wanted to come here.\u00a0 This is where I belong in the land of dreams.\u00a0 I wanted to touch the portrait of this world, melt into its beauty, and be a part of its soul.\u00a0 I know its darkness, its pain, and I can\u2019t make that go away.\u00a0 Maybe a word, a thought of mine could push it through those long, dark tunnels I endured, and maybe I could give it the strength to stop falling apart.\u00a0 Or maybe I can\u2019t, but I can\u2019t give up.\u00a0 That was the enemy taking the wheel of this train ride from the beginning because I gave up, and I won\u2019t anymore.\u00a0 My foot is on the gas, and I am going forward.\u00a0 I\u2019m going to change my life for the better.\u00a0 I\u2019m going to save myself for the pen is mightier than the sword, and no more rocks will be thrown at my window.\u00a0 No more dark tunnels will take me down.\u00a0 I\u2019m going somewhere, and I\u2019m leaving nowhere behind.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

If someone had asked me how I would describe my life, I would answer with this.\u00a0 My life is like a train departing from nowhere.\u00a0 I would lose time going nowhere.\u00a0 There are moments, where I wish I could stop this crazy ride and erase what was, but I can\u2019t.\u00a0 Too many dark tunnels have […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,200,219],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/gadflyonline.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2384"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/gadflyonline.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/gadflyonline.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/gadflyonline.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/gadflyonline.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2384"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"http:\/\/gadflyonline.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2384\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3202,"href":"http:\/\/gadflyonline.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2384\/revisions\/3202"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/gadflyonline.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2384"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/gadflyonline.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2384"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/gadflyonline.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2384"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}