Another's Point of View

The Climate and I
written by Ileana Martin
April 1, 2008

Like everything I write this is coming from my own experience. I write because maybe there is someone there that thinks they are crazy, like I did, and reading this will bring a little light to their pain. It has been been 9 years since I have been experiencing all kind of different "climatic disturbances". It was at the strike of Dawn when the Tsunami hit. Remember answering the phone and hearing the words, "Felipe died".

Everything around me turned black and I was up to my head on debris and water. No one is prepared to survive under these circumstances. It was terrifying. The degree of terror could not be measured on any scale. So I went down. Where the current drag me? No idea so far. The more I tried to go up the deeper I went into a dark empty hole.

I slowly pulled myself up and opened my eyes. Everything hurt. Like if every bone in my body was broken. I kept repeating that I was not going to be able to survive that. To add more confusion I saw that everything and every one around me was safe. They were not hit by the Tsunami. No other explanation I could come up made any sense. If those around me would have been inside
this, no way they would be acting like if I could be "Normal", telling me that everything was going to be "okay". Were they out of their minds! How was everything going to be the way it was after that?

I saw all the pieces of the old me scattered every where. It was impossible to put together all the pieces back because some of them were completely pulverized. For the moment, I had to follow those that were outside and do what they said until I could figure out a way to swim my way out.
Then the wind finished desecrating everything, leaving nothing standing. No pieces of the old me left behind. It was all gone; same body.....different person.

I was like a tree in Winter - dead but still breathing inside. No leaves, hibernating, only an empty trunk left behind. The problem was l was the only one seeing and feeling this way. I was alone trying to figure out who I was now, what was my place in this new world I've discovered. I looked in the mirror and I was not there. Someone else looked back at me. Someone I have never seen before.

Total Confusion - Excruciating pain, the first years. Everyone around me still saw the old me. Of course, the outside was the same. I was the only one that could see the inside and the "Storm", that was still striking. A new person was created, very slowly, different from the other one. This
person is a 9 year old woman trapped inside a 57 year old body. Everything is new about her. Everything she believed in and expected to have, gone. In a split of a second!!

Nothing on this earth could put her back together. She is still struggling to fit in with the rest of the world that has not experienced what she had. She had developed tools as she walks the devastating road. She had to. Every time a new situation comes up, a different approach is taken and a different tool created.

She knows she has to survive and go on. But this time she can only do it her way. She can not let other dictate how to deal with her pain. Is hers and hers alone. The world around her can not be changed. Everything and everyone keeps moving like they did. She knows that now. Her world was the one devastated by the Storm and she her believes are the only thing she has.

All she can do is take one day at a time and survive 24 hours. No tomorrow, just today, that is all she can handle. She has been able to understand better how to carry her pain. It is not gone, only manageble. She still have days when without warning she falls back in the dark hole. The difference from before is just that now she has tools to use so she spends there less time than before. It is hard road but she has to keep going until is her time to go.