Clean the Slate.
It's called clean the slate, not buy a whole new one. A lot of times when we write we try to build suspense and make you question and solve the puzzle. It's a tactic taught to us in grade school and learned in life lessons. Me simply saying anything has no meaning until you have lived it. Most of life's hardest lessons are self-taught. It doesn't matter how many elders have told you their life experiences, it doesn't matter the warning signs others have placed. If you don't understand something after hearing the foreboding tale, you will most likely live the tale.
My father never liked the biblical story of the Prodigal Son. Quite frankly I didn't either. I mean, come on he seems like a tool of a sibling. The dude goes off and parties hard meanwhile he left his obedient brother doing double the work at the farm. But ok Dad, let's throw a big celebration for him when he gets back. I would have been just as pissed as the obedient one was and my father agreed too.
I was the obedient child growing up, my sister was the one that fled and partied and she was welcomed back with open arms by mother. I resented her. I don't know but I assume my father must have felt something similar to feel the same distain to the story. The thing was though, my sister was partying to numb pain, not have fun. Of course, it took me living it to see it.
Live the tale did I ever. I don't want to get into the event that changed me. I'm not here to harp on that, but the pain it caused led everything to feel plastic around me. Being that nothing felt real, even my actions, I was living without the concept of consequence.
What someone on the outside can easily say was me having fun was really the outward explosion of internal crashing.
After the dust had settled and there was nothing left of my spiritual self I was stuck abandoned in a new world of my own making and I didn't have enough energy or strength to rebuild it so I lived there in the filth. Outwardly I went to work, school, paid my bills and did my chores. I lived in the same house, drove the same car but my soul was broken. I didn't party anymore but now I still did things to numb my new spiritual reality.
It took me a long time to rebuild any part of my world, slowly I have become me again. I have returned. In many ways now I realize that prodigal son went through a hell of consequence and wasn't coming home to the farm. He was coming home to himself. His father is more of a symbolism of God patiently waiting for his son to come back to the light, and brother is a story of humanity wanting not to look past the flesh and worldly things for answers.
I wonder at the obedient brother, I bet you he took off too at some point, and I bet you in time he decided to clean the slate, rebuild and come home. But one thing is certain for me, I am home, and I am better for understanding the journey of the prodigal son.