The Big Nothing

If I could be free of familial obligation I feel that I would have the same sensation as someone who has mastered an addiction. If I could contentedly go through my life knowing that I would never bend to the will or whim of my parents, so much of my time and energy would be free that I would surely rise like a phoenix from the ashes.
Damn them for giving me life then exercising all of their energies towards the end of subverting that life to their own wishes and desires. Damn them for seeing me only as  an uncooperative place holder in the symbolic order. Category: daughter, type A, first born.
Damn them for assuming that my existence is about them. Example: If I am not there it is to make them sad, depressed. Damn them for making me responsible for their emotional state. If I were to have continued to do the same I would have been dead long ago, suicide note reading:
“I have tried my best. Nothing I can do is good enough for you. Why must love be contingent upon approval?”
I ran away once and got no further than Lakeland Village.
Later I got as far as San Francisco and it might as well have been Mars. I felt happy and free. More myself than I had ever been permitted to be. Love and Will were more important than material things and these in true form could never be subject to approval.
But several times a year I must be dragged back into the underworld, into the land of the dead. Because while they lacked the ability to think of my happiness before their own, I did not. I would go and try to give them the pretty picture. I would not say any of what I really thought to them. I would let their hurtful words and way of being wash over me and not struggle against it. My mantra was “I am a duck.” I had the promise of  leaving their presence to get me through these visits.
But each visit was as toxic as a nuclear blast. Before and after I was sick. During I would almost die.
And at last my connection to them was tenuous at the most. The stronger I became the less reason could be seen to consent to participate in their play. The only reason as always was, “to not hurt them.”
But these miserable people were endlessly hurting and always the blame would lie somewhere other than within their own disturbed psyches,  rooted somewhere other than in their many poor choices, somewhere other than in their own utter lack of illumination.
If I were to tell them the truth would it be kind or cruel?
Kind or cruel?
Kind or cruel?
That for me, the interaction is corrosive, futile, unnecessary and harmful to all that I strive for.
If they cared for me as an objective entity at all, they would leave me alone and seek their happiness elsewhere. They would not make me come back, they would not force me to take the communion of pain and eat of the flesh of  their woe and drink of the deep back blood of their despair.
They force it, but I could say no. I could make a clean break if I told them the brutal truth.
Kind or cruel?
I keep trying to give them what they say they want. I keep trying to be good for the BIG OTHER, the eye in the sky that is watching over my deeds.
And yet I want nothing more than to flip them all the bird, Ma. Pa, and Jesus too. I want to set the world on fire.
I keep turning the other cheek, good lamb, but within me a wolf is growling. The real in me begs to be freed of all the empty gestures that supply the emptiness the symbolic order demands, the emptiness my parents crave, the big nothing they have sown.