A Writer's Notebook, Day One-Thousand-Two-Hundred-And-Eighteen

I am feeling so stuck and I cannot take it.  I want to make things better, but I don't know what to do.  The things that need to change in order for it to be better are not just ideological.  There are material issues in my life right now that I don't have control over, but which are having an extreme negative impact on me.  I am still living in the house Melissa and I bought, and we are still in the midst of the same ongoing renovation that we started before the pandemic, but the situation with my brother makes living here feel like a prison.  You see, my brother decided he wanted to move to this area, which was perfectly fine, but I asked him, for a number of reasons, to not move too close, literally not to buy a house on my street.  He said that was fine and even that he didn't have any interest in living so close, but, of course, he wound up deciding the only house he could possibly want was one down the road.  It was clear this decision would be bad, that he was going to be doing real harm to me, to my relationship with Melissa, and to our whole family, but he didn't care, and now, I want to be free of this.  I cannot sell the house right now.  It would be a financial disaster, and would leave Melissa and I without a good option of where to live, especially considering the housing market right now.  My brother scares me.  When he and my mother told me he wanted to look at a house here, despite our conversation, I wrote him an email explaining my feelings.  His response was to hit me with his car.  He backed it right into me, on purpose.  He excuses it by saying he didn't accelerate into me, just took his foot off of the brake.  I found out later he hadn't even read the email.  I don't think he ever read it.  And now, he lives down the street and it is not good.  I want to still have a relationship with him, to work on making it better, but he doesn't seem to understand the depth of harm he has done, and his responses when I express how I feel are very deflective.  I need to find a way to change things, but I am stuck in this situation and don't have any good choices.  Even if they do ever finish this renovation, it will all have been a waste.  I don't want to be here, but I can't do anything about it.  I'm not even sure why I am trying to make things better with my brother, a lot of the time.  I don't know if he is capable of being a person worth having in my life at this point, and I wish that he understood the damage he has done for real.  At the same time, I feel incredibly guilty expressing these feelings, as if I am doing something cruel to him.  I am writing about how I want to fix things and change them, and even that feels like it is part of the same thing, that someone does something to me that causes real harm and the result is that I should fix it myself, that I should just forgive and move on.  I can't though, not with this, not when so much that once seemed good has been destroyed. 

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