You Carried Me

People say that I’m the one with all the strength.  Sometimes perceptions are farthest from the truth.  What people see is what is obvious.  What they see is what they reflect within themselves.  People project views about life, their hopes and aspirations, dreams and expectations on others.  Get up when you fall.  Rise above your sorrows.  Learn from the lessons.  Move on.

Those are words meant to placate but do not describe who I am.  What is the truth is often shrouded in obscurity.  To get to it requires painstaking uncovering of one mask after another scaling layers of hard soul-searching and truth-telling.  I am not the one with all the strength.

You carried me in life’s roughest moments and you painted me as the heroine.  I was the one with all the accolades, the lofty achievements, the unabashed glory.  Yet no one saw you were behind me all the time.  I could never be truly myself without you.  And now that you are no longer here, I lay bare to the world --- insecure, afraid, and oh so little. 

How can I go on without your strength?  Who will carry me, soften the blow, and fortify my resolution?  You carried me with the strength of your wisdom, the clarity of your advice, the protective shadow of your abiding love.  Without you, I am half the person that people think I am.  Without you, I’m not complete.