After all, it is the togetherness that gives us stability, that gives structure to our lives and shapes the coexistence in which we feel protected and held. So many people around me. Some further, some nearer, yet over and over again the word that holds me. „Remember that you can not dothat because you are offended,“ I was told, and I let myself be persuaded. It was not the question of whether it was important to me, whether it was good for me, no, somebody else was not right and not good. Of course, you have to balance your interests, but when the togetherness becomes a conflict with each other, and counseling, when I am involved with proclamations and objections, when I feel buried in the very things that I should do, which I consider or leave aside, when people think, and not necessarily those who are close by, that they know how to live my life so that it will fit, so that everything is in order and right, if they keep telling me to have to. But they always have such good arguments.
No, they all mean it so terribly, weird, awful good with me, meant to have
to take it out of my hand, because it was not in good hands there. And I let it
happen, let me tell it, and put the second iron belt around my heart. Locking in
the uncertainty, the uncertainty through all the good and the bad. I had a
hunch, just a hunch, that it was my life somewhere, about which they not only
determined, but meant to have to take it out of my hand right away. „No,
you cannot do that. We know that a lot better,“ they said, or „But do
not let anything persuade you, she does not know what she’s talking about.“
Whisperings, purposeful influences, always doing
it to suit somebody. Self-proclaimed life experts, professionals in dealing
with it, and I let myself be told. Quieter and quieter was the voice in me,
which might still protest. Too overwhelming, the voices seemed to be around me,
and when I showed myself stubborn, they thought they would have to get louder,
until the voice in me was finally unheard. And what was meant as a togetherness
became a conflict. I wanted to believe it and I wanted to confide in myself and
I did not want to believe that something did not come true just because you
yelled it just because you repeated it over and over again.
„They exist, the great love, and you have to
find them,“ a woman told me, who had closed several husbands, endlessly
lounging about and whispering to everyone who once winked at her and had
nothing else in mind. And I did not look more closely, trusting her words,
words that would have stood well with a fifteen-year-old girl, but not a woman
over 50. If my interests should not shift a bit, I should have thought, but it
was all sore and suppressed, so that I was dedicated to the pain and not the
truth.
„I’ve done everything for the others, given
everything and never taken anything and I’m so fed up, but that’s the way you
have to do it,“ she had said further, and despite the stupidity of her
words, I listened to it. Did not ask, trusted and seduced me, to the faith and
to the second iron belt around my heart. And then everything will be fine, then
my life will go the right way, I hoped, but all that was and all I could feel
was the pain, until it stopped too and everything seemed numb and cold, dead
under the belt. It had nothing to say, because everyone else knew better
anyway, those with the life experience and the tremendous successes. Saying and
not looking closer, that was the motto I followed, and made the iron belt a
little tighter, for safety’s sake.
