There I was just changing my 4 month old son Liam for bed, I had just pulled his shirt over his head and as I lay his head back down our eyes locked and I could sense his excitement so I slowly inched closer to his face and then gave him a raspberry on his belly. Now usually a 4 month old will just look at you like you are an idiot when you attempt this (trust me my soon to be 2 year old daughter did it every time I tried until she was at least 10 months, now I cant get close to her and she is dying) but in this one instant my little boy just lost it and for the first time in his short life I made my boy laugh. I cannot even begin to describe the emotion that rushed through me but I could feel my heart shed some of the cold exterior that I have built to protect myself.
The craziest part of all of this is that I have been feeling so alone lately. My family is more or less non existent in my life, my friends well I am not sure what to think about them, and work well work is work for the first time in my life. I of course have my home life but when you want to brag about your babies I would imagine an audience of a 2 year old and a 4 month old are not what you had in mind. And the wife well she already knows the stories so that is no fun. I call my mother but the conversation just falls into what it has always been which is just a bunch of excuses of why she cant travel 3 blocks to see my kids, my sister has made recent attempts to see them but she did remove and block me from her facebook page, my friends well they don't even answer the phone half the time which has really caused some soul searching as of late.
You see I was the popular kid back in high school the one with people always around them. The problem that I had then basically came down to the title of this post. Although I always had people around me I was in reality in a room full of no one. I knew it then but I didn't care because I knew in my heart that with the messed up life I had been chosen for, if I was alone I was going to have one of three things happen. #1. I would be beaten by my mom's boyfriend. #2 I would have fallen so far down the line I would be writing this from a cell or #3 I would have ended my life. So I used the people that used me to make sure I lived after all I owed that much to my father who died at 30.
The kids were easy to use too, every weekend like clockwork my phone rang off the hook people wanting to come and stay with the kid who had no supervision at least not until closing time at the local watering hole. And I let them all come one by one to shit on me and talk about me behind my back and even while I was in the same room with them. I each weekend would find myself in a room full of no one, no one that cared what happened to me, no one that respected me, no one that knew how broken I was inside or that I wished that I did not need them by my side. No one that knew me.
I have always felt like I have been in that room. In school, at work, at home, in churches, with strangers, with family and even sometimes with myself. It is my least favorite place to feel like I am because when you are in a room full of no one, even though you are surrounded by many you are truly by yourself. I need that room when I was going through high school without it I would be a memory, but sadly I am still disappointed by the superficialness that has led me to this place now where I have something to brag about but all the people that I can tell already know the story and 2 out of the few I can tell are 2 and under.
I will never fault the kids that clung to me like glue because they could party their high school years away because I used them too for my own reasons. But would it really have hurt them to invest themselves in my life a little more. Would it hurt my family to travel 3 and 4 blocks away to share my life with them. Unfortunately the answer to that is yes they too have always treated me like I was expendable. I never used my family for anything or walked all over them and I will not understand their actions.
Which brings me to my point, all my life I have been sitting in a room full of no one, pretty much a loner just thankful for the surroundings of other heart beats so that mine did not stop. All my life I have been haunted by the miseries and pains that my road has encountered. All my life has been spent pondering questions and what ifs but for 6 years now I have been on a path to redemption a path that found me at my bottom and at my worst and I am proud to report that my eternal flame that was near it's final flicker has actually been refueled and is burning stronger than ever.
You see I am 34 years old and I have lived through more pain and sorrow than most people see in a lifetime. And yet no matter how dark it got I have marched through with the will of a champion. Tonight I realized something when my son giggled. I was not in a room full of no one, I was in a room full of 4 and quite frankly how many more do you need.
Thank you if you took the time to read this, I love writing more than you know....
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