Paradise lost

After twenty years in Barbados I became convinced that I was living in paradise, yes the cost of living was high, but I was getting by at a standard of living that, not as opulent as I could dream, was comfortable. I had a place to live, a loving son, a women I loved and a job that I enjoyed.

Then I hit fifty-one and it all came crashing down. I found out the woman I loved  felt somewhat different towards me, and with forethought and malice decided to take away my paradise.

No place to live, no job, no security, no money…all gone! Thank god for family, my sister came to my rescue and offered me a place to recoup, to recover. A place to lick my wounds and heal so I ended up moving in with my sister in Miami.

Now three months later, I’m back in Barbados. Back because my VISA ran out but also back to get my medical history for my doctors in the US. back to change my VISA so I can look for work in the US and while back I fully expected to be hit by nostalgia…and a yearning to be back home, back where I belonged, back to where I was known and to what I knew.

But its all just a place to me now, much like Las Vegas and Disney is, a place I visited and stayed awhile. That’s all.

What I’ve lost I can never get back, a partner in life that I can love and trust, gone, betrayed. A family destroyed by the explosive force of one person’s anger and vindictiveness born from a desire to control the world to their own view which, erroneously based on self determination, can only end up as ultimately self-centered and selfish.

At the same time my son, through his on-going maturity, has moved into the next phase of his family relationship, from a fully-dependent part of my family to a self reliant dependent. This is a natural stage of any growing family, when your child becomes an independent individual, making decisions for themselves based on the core factors you’ve instilled in them, through your life actions and teachings. All we can hope is these instilled behaviors will aid him positively in determining his future.

My son will always be that my son, but now, at soon to be twenty, and having lived on his own for fours years (albeit the first two under supervision) he is well on his way to being his own man.

So at 53, on my own, with my past just that, in the past, and no clear path forward, I strike out into the wilderness of single life, in a foreign country, without a job to seek out my future, my dreams, to find paradise once again.