It must be nice to be the eye in the sky.
I've often wondered, idly or in desperation, what it would be like to be a bird, free to go wherever you liked, to do whatever you wanted, or to simply soar in the heavens because you could, because it was there and it was beautiful.
Now I wonder what it would like to go one step further than that. To withdraw yourself completely from the cares of society, from the responsibility of a human being, and to simply sit, thousands of feet above and away from everyone and everything, watching time pass and events occur which could have no possible connection to you. To have no obligations, no schedule, no past, and no future.
It's an impossible situation.
And yet the alternative to this impossible mind-rest, this escape from reality, is to continue to stay in reality, to interact daily with dozens of people, many of whom you'd probably have killed already if this was, say, a rabbit warren or a termite nest or whatever. To be subject to the rules and commands of people thousands of miles away who have never met you and have no idea what is best for you or for anyone but their fat-cat friends. To constantly subjugate yourself to the almighty dollar in order to have the most basic necessities of life, and to jump through hoops of fire, nearly always singeing your fur as you do, just so that you can scrape together a few of those dollars. To go on your knees to those who have them, to bow and beg and plead with them in order that they might throw you a pittance, whether it's so that you can eat or so that you can spend your few untormented days in the company of someone you love.
Except for a very few very lucky individuals, most of whom are undeserving of the privilege, we all have to deal with things like this. We start out with nothing; hopefully those who brought us into this world care enough to give us a little bit of a leg up into life, but not everyone has that luxury. In any case, you live the first ten years of your life in blissful ignorance. You don't understand what will be expected of you later, you don't even know what it is. You don't know that your entire life after you turn 18 will be concentrated solely on making enough money to live. Lucky you - you live those ten years in probably one of the happiest moods you will ever be in. Doesn't matter who you are or how you spent your childhood, it's almost certainly downhill from there.
So you're ten now. You've been here for a while, you think you know the ropes, but it turns out that you don't, at all. You have a slow eight year realization of this fact, and a slow, resigned acceptance of what is to come. You're thrown into high school and told that suddenly, everything you do is on your permanent record, and that it's even possible for your grades and accomplishments now to determine your station in later life.
What are you supposed to say to that?
Then, at 18, you leave. One way or another you're out of the nest, and you're on your own, whether you've got parental support or not. There's always something you have to deal with for yourself, and there's usually a lot more than just one thing. You've never been taught how to do this shit; you don't know how to take care of a house, you don't know how to deal with not having any money, you don't know how to get cheap airfare.
And in the midst of all this, you have work or school to worry about. On top of being by yourself in a strange world with all these unfamiliar tasks and obligations, you have to either support yourself or increase your knowledge or both, and shoulder all the burdens thereof.
And they keep stacking up.
At first, you've got one or two loads on your back. You figure it's okay, you'll work them off and then you'll be in the clear. Same for the third, and the fourth... but then more and more weight keeps being added on, and you keep figuring it'll be alright, and you'll deal with it - and then suddenly there's too much to deal with. You feel crushed, you feel cursed, you wonder what you ever did to deserve this shit, and you probably screw up a couple of things. Then you're in the clear for a while. This is where they get you - every time you're in the clear, you've got absolutely nothing to do or to worry about, but as soon as you have something again it's never one thing, it's four or five at once. Never do your loads get spread out, ever, no matter what you do.
It fucking wears you down after a while, you know? And it's never over, because there's always something else, some other difficult bit of learning to acquire, some other thing your boss wants you to do, some unpaid overtime or some onerous busywork. Some unexpected expense, like a broken computer or a broken leg or whatever it may be, that causes you to lose time or money or both and fucks your budget all to hell. Some obstacle that keeps you from keeping yourself sane.
And here's the crux of it: Sanity is not an easy thing to maintain, for anyone, in the best of times. If you've got all the work of daily life whizzing around you and competing for your effort and your attention, you spread yourself so thin that all your carefully constructed shielding, all the armature of your mind that keeps your psyche from collapsing like a Xenopus egg with the membrane pulled off, is deprived of any kind of maintenance or support, and the fragile little ball at the center of it becomes exposed and vulnerable. It's a tremendous effort to keep your mind on so many different things at once, and it's even harder to pull your attention back together into a coherent shape after you've split it up that way.
Some of us are lucky. I, personally, have an external source of support in the form of Wolf, who has never failed to bring me back from the brink when I've been about to fall over. He's probably the only reason I'm still sane at all, and I can never repay him for that. Without him I'd be wandering half-naked through the streets of some city or other in the rain yelling about my demented philosophy to anyone who'd listen, or worse still in a sanitarium. I'm completely serious.
In order for him to help me, though, he has to be sane himself, and that's my responsibility. And part of that, for both of us, is that we've got to actually be able to spend time together.
When he's tied to New Jersey because of, you guessed it, money - the health insurance racket, to be specific - and I'm in school out here, and air travel is what it is, that's far more difficult than it should be. This is not an at all uncommon situation; the majority of furs, a large percentage of Reedies, and a larger-than-you'd-think part of society at large does the whole long-distance thing. In most cases, though, there is at least a good reason why the two people involved can't just get together by one of them moving in with the other. Just off the top of my head, here's a few examples: US immigration policy, which doesn't recognize same-sex couples. Jobs or careers which can't just be left behind. Two people in different schools.
We don't have such a logical reason. The only reason he's not in my Birchwood with me is that if he leaves New Jersey without being in college, he loses his state-sponsored health insurance. If he loses said insurance, we suddenly have to come up with 20 thousand dollars a year, more actually, to keep his lungs from shutting down and killing him.
What the fuck is that? I can't remove my boyfriend from the miserable fucking city he lives in, nor spend time with him, because motherfucking Genentech and Novartis want 20 fucking grand a year and the motherfucking government refuses to implement a policy which would, you know, actually take care of its sick citizens?
Ladies and gentlemen of this supposed jury, that does *not* make sense!
If this was Canada, if this was the UK, if this was most of Europe, it wouldn't be a fucking problem, because some countries led by thinking people have decided that it's to their best interests to fund healthcare for their citizens. Why the US hasn't gotten the fuck off its ass and followed their example is up for debate, but it's not fucking right.
Needless to say, that fucks with both of us to begin with. And when I fatally mismanage my finances to the point that I have to go whore myself out to the banks for some kind of credit, any kind, just so that I can get a plane ticket to spend a fucking week together, it fucks with us even more. It especially fucks with me, because it's my own fucking fault and there's nothing I can fucking do about it now.
See what I mean about it being difficult to maintain one's sanity?
Wolf is my life. Everything else I interact with, Reed, my family, all of that is completely subservient to him. I can't really describe what it's like; if you know, you know, and if you don't neither I nor anyone else can explain it to you until you feel it for yourself. I could spend pages trying and you still wouldn't get it; it's not a failing of yours, it's just that it's not explainable in words. In effect, though, we're basically one person. Imagine if you had to split yourself in two and leave half of yourself on the opposite side of the country, for a completely ridiculous reason, and you have some rough idea what it's like.
Anyways. I've said most of what I wanted to say. I'd encourage anyone who reads this to share their thoughts on life, work, and love in the comments; I'm really interested to hear what other people think.
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bitchy
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