by Allison Prinsen
If I were to draw the shape of disappointment it would be the two ascending lines of a triangle that break and fall at its peak.
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It’s a similar feeling inside, like a buckle. Something that was once sturdy and steady has fractured. Something that I relied on was no longer the thing I thought it was.
My health buckled on the day I was diagnosed. The body I knew and trusted no longer existed. It broke that day and has never returned in that form again. Because that’s just how it is when something breaks. You can’t return it to its original form. There is a crack there forever, it can’t be undone.
We’ve all broken something valuable, at least I have. I’ve come to my parents in tears, holding the pieces of something I knew could never be put back together again or be replaced.
There is nothing to do then but live with the break. The cold reality that no matter how gifted you are with glue, the crack remains.
If I were to scan the landscape of my life I am covered in a vascular network of fractures, from things not going the way I wanted, to a friend not reacting in the way I thought they would, and on and on it goes.
And then there are the cracks that have almost broken me in two. These stretch far and wide and if you were to run your fingers over the surface of my life they would still catch the edges.
This was written during a Callanish Writes group on the theme of disappointment.
Allison Prinsen first came to Callanish as a retreat participant in 2006 and now works as a Counsellor and Creative Arts Director at Callanish.