Stuck in the Middle with Me

I have had two close friends kill themselves. You hear about the guilt associated with that and, I don't know, but for me a story had ended and I was still stuck in it. It frustrated a sense of appropriateness that has to do with whatever it is in us which wants to make things into stories. 

It was left to me to hold the bag, as they say, to go on living as though it made sense to go on living in the same circumstances, an insult somehow to what had happened. It would have made more sense to me to wake up in a cell with Dustin Hoffman in PAPILLON, eating bugs and shit.

Then I could have felt that one story had ended and that I had been reborn, somewhat, into a new and fresh life and that it wasn't disrespectful to my friends to carry on, but I was stuck in the middle, in a life too changed and not changed enough. The other way to get there is a length of time.

That was the way for me and it took a hell of a while. And I was lucky. Some people are wounded in such a way that they never come out of it. Some don't even know that there is an "out" to come out into. I ache for them. And I ache for anyone beset by a burden of circumstances.