Song lyric prompt

Mumford and Sons

And you rip it from my hands

And you swear it's all gone

And you rip out all I had

Just to say that you've won

Well, now you've won

But I gave you all

I gave you all

I gave you all

I'm sitting on a Greyhound bus and I'm crying as I look out the window. I keep the brim of my white baseball cap pulled low, shadowing my glistening eyes and streaked cheeks. Research may state that tears are a healthy release of tension, but that knowledge doesn't stop me from adopting the Vulcan approach instead.

I press one of my hands against the window, which is cool to the touch due to the rain slashing at its exterior. Pink ear-buds snake into my ears and the lyrics coming from them are of heartbreak and a shredded pride. I am smiling, but it's cracked at the edges. There is a well of sadness in me, there are even flickers of failure, but there's a blanket of relief thrown over both of these, which keeps me from drowning in it.

The bus has a hundred seats. Almost all of them are occupied by people and yet I feel as if I am in a bubble. Curling towards the window, away from the empty seat next to me, away from the aisle beyond it, I feel the most alone I have in two months.

And it was bliss.

I think about the hostel waiting for me in another city, about the bed behind a door that locks, about a toilet that flushes and a shower that isn't timed. It doesn't matter that I'll be sharing the space with other travelers. It doesn't matter to me that the room, the bathroom and the kitchen will all be communal. All that I am heading toward must be better than what I am leaving behind. It has to be or the hope that I've been clinging to these past two months will let me down. I can't be let down again, not after having already failed myself.

I came here imbued with such hope. I can still remember going camping with my folks in our green Volkswagen bus back in Oregon. My mother had been reading aloud a letter from an Australian friend, when all of a sudden, she let out a cry! She threw her hands in the air, got out of the bus and hugged me.

"She wants you to come stay with her in Australia!" My mom yelled, a grin leaping onto her face. "She wants you to come live with them in the woods, nanny their three year old while they build their new house. They'll take you all over the country, to the markets; she even wants to introduce you to men!"

That moment of realization was still so clear to me, that exhilaration. The months following that life-altering letter were like lightening, there and gone again. My dream was coming true. Not only was I traveling, a dream bound in my bones, but I'd be going the one place I'd always secreted wanted to go. More than that, I'd be paid to be there. What more could I want?

Gently, I thumped my fist against the glass. It was my only acknowledgement of an anger I wouldn't permit myself to feel. It was always better to experience shame than anger, as the first was easier to conceal and keep from becoming a public spectacle. I had always despised public spectacles.

Yesterday, for the first time in my 23 years, I had been angry enough to punch something. Looking now at the ring on my finger, which sports a Shakespearean quote, I can recall how it had bit into my skin on impact with the ground. I'd used the excuse of an upset stomach to escape from the house and the family I'd been staying with. I went out to the restroom, which consisted of nothing more than a tent. Inside, there was a crate and a hole in the ground below it. I had knelt down outside the hut, drove my knuckles into the soil and then cursed colorfully. From the physical violence to the verbal one, that was entirely unlike me. I had buried these instantly, used the tent and gone back inside to the family I was 24 hours away from leaving forever.

And you rip it from my hands

And you swear it's all gone

And you rip out all I had

Just to say that you've won

Well, now you've won

I feel like I've lost a battle, as if I threw down my spear and sank to my knees in surrender. I feel like a coward because I can't stop looking back on my being in Alaska, when I worked on a train beneath a boss that barked at me like a sergeant at her marines. She would get up in my face and scream. She'd been shorter than me, but her unreasonable and immovable cruelty still towered over me. I'd wanted to stand up to her, but I'd been afraid she'd strike me. In the end, as it always was, I'd played the noble note. I'd found a way out, shook her hand, grinned as if I'd been the one to win and then walked out.

I'd lost this one. I'd lasted three months, endured the child that screamed and hit me and sent my glasses flying. I'd tried to hold that little girl close and tell her I was sorry she couldn’t see her parents, the very same parents who had given their child to a nanny for eight hours a day, every day. She wouldn't let me hold her thought, wouldn't let me touch her, crying "don't look at me!" if I looked right at her. The only time I ever held her was when she found a spider in her room. She called my name, "Nicole! Nicole! SPIDER!" I'd run in, swung her into my arms and then into the other room. I plopped her onto my bed, which sat in the middle of the privacy-lacking kitchen. She immediately began shoving at me, slapping, hitting, sobbing for me to LET GO. Staring at her, I'd tried to understand what I was doing wrong.

"Why can't you trust me?" I wanted to ask. "Why can't we get past this? I've been here for two months, two months! I've played marbles with you, read the same dinosaur book to you over and over again, pushed you on the swing and sung London Bridge is Falling down a million times. I wanted us to be friends." I didn't say anything though. She was three. She wouldn't understand my questions, just as she couldn't understand why she'd been yanked out of daycare to spend eight hours every day trapped with a stranger. Knowing this, I wish there was somebody I could ask, but there was no one. I spent every night asking questions of the stars over their shed, but stars aren't known for their wisdom.

So I gave up. Those were the words that kept ringing through my mind, not that I was heading into the city for a different adventure, not that I'd done my best or that they were just as at fault. I had given up. I hadn't been patient enough to deal with a lonely child. I hadn't been understanding enough of parenting methods far tougher than those I'd been raised with. I hadn't been enduring enough to sleep in a bed in the kitchen, to use internet that failed every time it rained, to only being able to read when the solar panels had seen plenty of sun, to only using a shower for five minutes, to using a toilet spiders made their houses in and centipedes slept under, to living with two adults who let their child cry herself to sleep and showed so little interest in me, that I felt as much an intruder as their daughter already treated me. I hadn't been ENOUGH. They'd won.

But I gave you all

I gave you all

I gave you all

But I had done my best. I had given my everything, more than I'd given that boss of mine in the Land of the Midnight Sun, more than I'd given anything that had tried to break me. I had given my all and that that had to be enough. It didn't mean I'd won, but it had to be enough.

The window glistens with rain as we leave the city behind and head towards another. The hat is still pulled low over my face, but the brims not hiding tears anymore. It's hiding my grin.

I had given my all and that was enough.