Today as I spend time in my head and I am considering the "how" of things. How I want a fresh start...a better year....better relationships.

A fresh start... a better year... putting to bed a bad year... this year will be better.

I have never had a "better" anything. Maybe that is being too harsh. I don't see things as better or fresh...at least not where or when I an concerned.

A fresh start is a foreign body to me.  To do that would be to erase the memories, the scars, the voices in my head, the shadow people in the corners of nearly every room I enter.  All are impossible.  Especially when there are many, many memories below the frozen surface of my mind.  Frozen in time; so cold that it hurts.  

A perpetual brain freeze.  I wish for just one day without this pain.

No fresh start for me.  What I can do though, is obsess over the how of my life.  I have pretty much given up on the why.  There is just no good answer there; at least not at this point.

How doesn't have to do with other people.  It has to do with me.  How the **** did I survive?

There are a lot of awful childhood verses sung; a dysfunctional family, a leering dad, secrets and more secrets, an angry mother.  Each verse different yet fraught with painful similarities and fragile coping.  

And then there is me.  And others like myself.  I am shattered and still standing yet I have no idea how I got here or how I figured out that this was a life worth surviving.  

How did I not give up?

How did I put one aching foot in front of the other, day after day?  Night after night?  

How did I barely sit down at breakfast each morning believing that our dance in the dark was a household brand?

How did he know just how far to go?  Close enough to fearful pleasure.  Far enough from impersonal death.  

It is a precarious how.