Peace

On Friday afternoon, I pulled onto the wet-n-wild gravel road that led to my parent's house, which is located just a couple of miles north of the Home Town. The temps were reaching in the high-40's and all that snow that we had to endure just a couple of weeks before was melting quickly.

It was during that time that I had found my own personal inner "peace."

It's strange how that works and I've broken it all down before, I know. In P-Town, I'm miserable. I'm there to work. My social life is non-existent. It's almost pathetic. Combine that all with my past history with the town and basically, I cannot breathe.

I feel that my reputation has been tarnished in this town and considering the job and the social standing I have in this town, it's not the best of situations. Unfortunately for me, my ex-wife ended up being (several things that I choose not to repeat), but with her reputation now of backstabbing and spreading lies about our marriage to my own students (whom she had the pleasure of working with) ... makes me feel so-big. Who are the students going to believe? I've tried to repair the wrong-doings of my ex-wife and that usually puts me in a situation where I'm on the defensive -- then I think, why am I doing this? Why should my own personal life become the fodder for my students, and of course, they all eat it up. To get personal dirt on a teacher, true or not, spreads like wildfire and I'm always too late to put out those flames.

But my students know better. They soon realized and found out who my ex-wife is all about. Apologizes were offered and I accepted them, but the scars remain.

That all brings me to another point: will I ever trust another woman again? I cannot even watch movies any longer with a love story between a man and a woman (the affection for one another is tough to watch) or even couples in a movie that fight. A debilitating phobia? Perhaps. I can sit and listen to boo-hoo sad songs ... but as long as I don't have to see it, I'm fine.

I'm sure this feeling will pass over time, but I'm not sure how long. At least the bad dreams have stopped.

I still cannot help think about what one of my students said to me last week ... all about where I see myself in five years. I still absolutely dread my future within five years of right now, but I had the same attitude when I was in college and I got through that! But one of my responses was that I would love to end up back on the family farm, just a couple of miles north of the Home Town and live in peace.

I pull through the sloppy driveway and see C-Dog running up to meet me and I know that this is where I want to end up, the place in which my great-grandparents built the house from scratch, where my grandparents once lived and farmed, where now my parents live. I would love just to hang out on the patio and look straight east during one morning with a cup of coffee in my hand.

Like Pop Fisher said from the movie, The Natural, "I should've been a farmer."

And I would be happy, alone or not.