You never leave. You always seem to find your way back. Who are you? Why do you come? What is the point of you? You lurch. You loom. You breathe quietly over my shoulder as I pace through. The heat of you, the resonating pulse.. Why do you insist? You’re gone. You’re the breeze I feel on a cool spring day when I forget my weight and turn my face to the sun. You’re the laugh in the awkwardness, the warmth in the loneliness. You… are all I can’t afford. You, are all I thought I would be,… but you.. just,.. cannot be.
When you have nothing to lose, you lose your sense of loss. When you turn to conviction of what’s right, you justify what is wrong. You allow yourself the sanity of understanding in what may not be comprehensible at all. You begin to realize, that all you have… that all you have done… is nothing in respect to what impact you really have.
My formative years could be classified as complicated. While I never had to live on the streets, you could say that I was as close to poverty as one could be without literally sleeping on a sidewalk. My mother did her best. My father also did his best at avoiding his responsibility as a father and drowning his way to an early grave. I went to a school where I, as a young white female, was always the minority all the way through graduation.
But I would dream. I would lose myself in seemingly endless rabbit-holes of daydreams that would distract me from the reality around me. I loved math. I loved art. I would lose myself in trigonometry and precalculus trying to figure out the why and then turn myself over to a stick of charcoal. Still-life was my favorite. I would draw fruit, my stereo, myself.. all in the moment. It was if drawing it in the very moment of whatever was going on in my life… would encapsulate it. It was a way of controlling the present.. taking power away from the clock ticking and absorbing the now into a permanent moment by sketching it into the forever.
This person I was… I still am. But she is buried. She is becoming a fainter figment of my imagination yet has been kicking and screaming locked away in the basement making room for the adult I have to be.
This is totally normal, right? Don’t we all have a “younger” part of ourselves burning inside of us that just wants to be heard again? Don’t we all struggle with the “what could have been?” To be clear, I wouldn’t change a thing about the decisions I’ve made in life. I know, that I am exactly where I need to be and that if I made any other decisions than I did.. I may have never heard the calling I was supposed to. That my children… the very reason for my being,.. would not have been and to think of that.. is worth having not lived at all.
But DAMN. Not to get dramatic about it but for real.. What the hell happened? I’m not referring to the “things” that have come my way or what has “happened to me”, rather I’m talking about that spirit… That young spirit of not caring about what people would think. That young spirit of accepting nothing less than unwavering happiness and total conviction in the belief of being made for something more with an inability to fail. “She” has become a ghost. A haunting, yet welcomed, episode of what I was when I was younger.
I think we all die a little each day but in a way are reborn often as we make our way through life. That we grow through chapters, and that we are lucky if we learn the lessons along the way.
We change.
We become people that we may not have expected ourselves to be. That the chapters of our lives.. truly impact us and make us who we are. That who we are is perfectly imperfect and that’s exactly who we are meant to be.
So we wake. Then we work. We squeeze in life along the way, rinse and repeat.
But when is the time right, if ever right, to realize the freedom of our youth and take back the simplicities in life that brought us joy? I argue to say it’s always the right time. That what is life if we aren’t taking it by the horns and living out our true selves?
Selfish, maybe. Honest, completely.
We take a piece of every person we meet with us. One day to the next, we are not the same. A kind smile, a word of encouragement, a test of our patience or an insult on our character… each encounter whether we like it or not… we are impacted.
It’s quite amazing when you really think about just what complex creatures we are. That a mere scent can conjure up memory. That a long time friend can rewind time to a younger day. That a new friend can make you see a side of you you never knew… And that life.. in all it’s glorious eternity.. will never stop teaching you that you know absolutely nothing about what it’s all really about. That we can compartmentalize along the way and bury the bad yet revel in the good.
I’ve come to love the ride. It’s ups, it’s downs and everything in between. We are here and able to experience the marvel of life. That the strong undertow beneath us all of not really knowing why we are here.. is a shared tide. That all will be brought in, and all will be washed away.
Stop fighting it and enjoy the current. It’s beyond you and I, yet brings everything and everyone where it’s meant to be.
Screw Spilled Milk 