Family

Family is all about emotion.

Pure emotion.

Love, anger, pride, happiness, sadness, despair, hope, joy. It is all there and it is all distilled down to its very essence.

If you are lucky.

If you have a real family, a close family, an honest and loving family, then their gift to you is emotion.

And that emotion is what makes you feel alive.

Everything else is bullshit.

You scratch and claw your way through work and obligations and responsibility so you can crawl on your belly back into the arms of those who are so very real that they are in your heart and in your mind and in your soul.

Every day. Every fucking day you fight to even have a chance to bask in the comfort, the warmth of these very special people who make your life worthwhile.

You hold on as tight as you can because they are your lifeline but they slip away anyway.

There are casualties in every life. The circle gets smaller all the time, sometimes as it should, sometimes it constricts suddenly and unexpectedly and that freezes you for a moment.

All of a sudden there is an absence, a void that can never be filled. And you wonder what the hell you could have done, what you should have done to change outcomes, to appreciate more, to stretch it all out and  rub that magic salve on your soul to ease your own pain.

All the petty thoughts and concerns you ever had come back to haunt you, all the times you complained about little things that seemed like mountains to you at the time, these things together add up to a fearsome thing called wasted time.

You think about the word priorities.

You realize your grasp of life is a bit skewed. Lazy times when you should have gotten the hell out of the house to get together, or had people over to the house to get together, when you stayed glued in front of the TV instead.

Phone calls you should have made, E-mails you should have sent.

Small gifts, warm thoughts, kind words, private smiles.

It all comes full circle.

If you are lucky. If you learn your lesson.

You realize the precious nature of the love you still have left, the people who still make up the circle.

You hold on tighter to those precious people, you reach out to them, spend more time with them, work hard to keep it alive and deep and meaningful.

Those people are still there, they are there to comfort you in the times of loss and hurt and confusion.

They are there not to answer questions or to provide an explanation of how life works.

They are there to hug and to be hugged, to love and to be loved, to comfort and to be comforted.

They are there to look directly into your eyes and say - wordlessly - I love you. You can trust me. I will give you what you need right now because one day I will need you to give me what I need.

Close family is a gift.

The most meaningful, supreme gift you can have in this life.