Maybe it is at the bottom, the darkest furthest reaches of the well of loneliness that we finally find our freedom. Our air - our breath. This is the place in which I sit. I sit ALONE nothing but myself, some music, a glass of wine and my thoughts - my words. I know not the way to return to life - to being vibrant - but today things shifted. A peace. A deep breath, the strength to walk away. To walk towards my future...I truly do not know where it will lead me. But I do know that it is not here. Maybe it was merely the words of the song, the sun fading over the horizon unseen. Maybe it was too much of the same, it has become too predictable. It has become too common. It has become something I do not want. I cannot fight for the thing that cannot be. The thing that will not be.
I don't know where I go from here - but i know that I do not go back. There will come a time that it all will be nothing but the past, but memories. You cannot build life from memories alone. You build a life brick by brick, by moving forward. Our time here is limited, and sometimes we are dealt good hands, sometimes not. We know not what that hand will be - but we can only play those cards to the best of our abilities. It all fades too quickly - if you had just one day left would you be satisfied with where you were standing at this present moment.
My back aches with the weight of the loneliness - but as i sit here and I contemplate it, is it the loneliness that makes it ache or is the pain from my wings trying desperately to break through my skin and take flight? The ache courses through my veins as the blood, I am longing for something, yet
maybe at the end of it all I am longing for myself. For finding the love, warmth, comfort I crave in myself.
I have always been a curious kind of girl. Traveling my own path, making my own way in the world. I have taken the road less traveled, and paved it with tears, laughter, mistakes - yet it has been my path.
I am a restless soul. I am always longing for some great adventure. I have been finding it daily in caring for myself in was that I haven't taken the time to do...but I had to do it on my own terms on my own time. And maybe that is where I will find my bliss, in my own time, on my own terms. I am not a creature of convention - I am a woman of a certain age, yet I have never been married, I will most likely never have another child, I will always be a student of life. I will always seek adventure. I will rarely be the woman that wants to stay at home, I want to inspect every corner of the globe, I want to immerse myself in every culture. I want to run with the bulls in Pamplona, I want to hike the PCT, I want to attend the Cannes Film Festival, I want to see Carnivale, I want to run wild.
I always imagined I would do those things with a companion and they would be "our" adventures - but as I sit at the bottom, maybe I was wrong all along. They were my dreams, my needs, my stars and they didn't align with the stars of another. And rather waiting for someone to run wild with me, I run and run and run until my wild path crosses the path of another running just as wild...and then we run together, sometimes I faster than he, and he faster than me. But we still run. We run together. Until that time, why I am not running. I am not running and seeking my dreams due to convention. Because I am a woman of certain age, and society expects me to be something that I clearly am not. I am the girl with the ever changing hair, with insatiable wanderlust. I am the woman who could live out of a backpack as she traveled the world, who could camp under the stars, who could wear an evening gown and sip champagne. Who says I can't be her by myself. I have never needed permission to travel this road, to map my own course. Why now? Why have I succumbed to the loneliness - maybe it is because I live in the shell of a life that once was.
I hope that as I write these words I allow them to become my own prophecy, and not just the words of a woman high on sunshine and music. I want to say that from this moment forward I will not feel sadness for what was, what might have been, what I thought was...I want to say that I will emerge as a beautiful brave butterfly - but that I do not know. I know that through my words and actions slowly the wounds will heal, they will begin to cauterize, the coursing blood will cease to flow...and I will find that freedom. One day not far from now I will pack my belongings, and I will move on, Totter will begin her solo life and I will begin mine. She will find her love, her own adventures and I will support her in each and everyone. But I will be turned loose to run free. I will emerge from the bottom of the well in to a new life, a new adventure, a new me.