Something's Burning

Easter break is now over and I return to my apartment with a bittersweet sigh. Bittersweet in the sense that I say it both as a sigh of relief and also as a sigh of remorse. It is not often that I get home to visit my family, so I try to make the most of it when I do. I also pray that everything will go nice and smooth while I’m at home, but sometimes things don’t always go smooth. No family, no matter how full of love it is, is without the occasional fight or quibble. I really wish that there was no reason for those arguments, but sometimes they just happen. I guess that’s how we can tell real families apart from the ones on television—real families can’t solve all of their problems in a 30 minute time slot.

Last year I had contemplated not returning home for Easter. I really wanted to do something with my friends, but I also missed my family. I was torn and I could easily be swayed either way depending upon how much convincing either side did. I ended up going home for Easter as one of my family members professed to me how much it means that I’m around during that time—a time of family. Going to Easter church has been a tradition and I could see then that I would not want to miss that time of spiritual bonding. I don’t know if I felt exactly like this a year ago, but I think I did a little bit, at least. That was last year and it ended up being a happy occasion.

Now it’s this year and that same family member has done a complete 180 on what they had told me in that April of last year. We were an incomplete family at church this year. A part of our family was lying at home in bed and I really missed that unity of our family. This was only the start of what would be a tumultuous day emotionally for me, and I know that I was probably a big part of the trouble that was cooked in our kitchen that day. We all argued about valid topics, stupid topics, topics that had been dead for a while now, and anything that we would let fuel the fire. In any argument, I’m usually the one responsible for dousing the flames in gasoline instead of trying to stamp them out. I think that I can outlast anyone else in the fiercest of argumentative fires so instead of letting it die down, I’d rather make it as hot as my skin can handle.

That’s pretty much what I did, too, and I left with some flickering wisps of fire still burning. I guess I just wanted the day to be so much like I imagined it in my mind that I was unwilling to see it any other way. I wish, though, that sometimes things could be seen my way by some people, but often they are unwilling to look. I’m not trying to say that no one cares about what I think, no, not at all. I’m just saying that sometimes certain people are so entranced in their own little world that they push away and alienate everyone else around them, even their family. They only want to do what benefits them and makes them happy instead of looking at the happiness of the whole, or of the family. I wish things could have been different, but what’s past is past.