2.16.19
By: Laurel A. Brooks
Tags: Reflection, Isolation, Theft

Photo by Petra Brýdlová on Unsplash

Nothing forces you to not be attached to material things like getting robbed.

Though they didn’t get away with anything important like money or my ID, I still feel violated, like an open wound that still hasn’t scabbed over. I dreaded telling family because they’d either freak out, say they told me so, “you shouldn’t be out at night alone” (I wasn’t), “why didn’t you call the police” (I did) or both. So far only my father knows, who, being the Virgo he is, gave me 2 out of 3 and needless to say I didn’t exactly feel comforted.

Presently, I’m a total smoothie of emotions, and the flavor is inconclusive.

If I look at it from the standpoint of a clichéd film, this would be the part in which the main character feels things aren’t perfect but still couldn’t POSSIBLY get worse, until they of course, do. Yet I’m not the one writing the script and I have no idea what’s going to happen next — an audience member would salivate at the suspense but as the star of the show, I’m left anxious about what worse thing could happen next, or if blind optimism is the way to go.

It’s up to me if this becomes a tragedy or turns into a dramedy.

Maybe.

If my mother was still here, I’d tell her we have almost similar stories of dealing with thieves; she was getting off of a bus and I was standing on the corner. He ran up on her, they rode past me on dirt bikes. The cops never showed up then, or now. And we both were left feeling the same — pissed off, adrenaline rushed and drained, hating humanity just a little bit more than we did earlier.

As if the Valentine’s season wasn’t nauseating and mildly depressing enough, I get purse snatched. Funnily enough, hours before my day was going great. Late-starting, but perfect. Great food, my alma mater won their basketball game and I played Giant UNO and drank one extremely strong hurricane. Now I feel like the aftermath of one.

Astrologers say we all are supposed to go through our “Saturn Return” — when Saturn returns to the position it was in when you were born. It impacts you in your late-20s and effects your 30s, and a second time in your late 50s. It brings sobering reality. In laymen’s terms, it nice-nastily kick your ass into growing up; never to embarrass you via “tough love” but to push you to the bank and stare you down until you finally cash that reality check.

If not, you’re doomed to suffer. Well, more like not reaching your full potential or something or other.

I don’t know what the lesson is in this is, perhaps there is none. But something I read for my “Saturn in Capricorn” is that holders of this display great fortitude, which is courage in the face of adversity. I don’t consider myself brave and I’ve been through enough to not be crippled by fear, unless it’s the fear of the unknown, which I’ve got a surplus amount of.

Slight paranoia accompanies me when I go out now. I’m looking over my shoulder a little more, turning my usually fast “city-walk” into an Olympic sprint when I’m able. Retreating from any contact with strangers that I can avoid. I’m not afraid; I’m anxious. Except that I already had anxiety, now it’s just become a more intense version than before. The feeling when you were seconds away from falling off of a cliff only to be grabbed back, yet the feeling of almost falling to your death replays on a loop despite your relief that you’re still alive, still able to walk away from the cliff that tried to kill you.

Outside looking in, it looks like no big deal. I technically was only dispatched from my mother’s purse and, my lipstick, 7 dollars and my only iPhone charger. But I was robbed — of my safety. Peace of mind. Especially at random, when if I knew it was coming I could prepare, could engage strategy.

But what can you do when you’re completely blindsided? Nothing.