breathe

I’ve come closer in this past year to peace. It may not seem like it from my posts, but I feel it nearer every day, tantalizingly close. I feel a surrender to events that doesn’t have to mean giving up. I feel a smile that is neither happy nor sad. I flow, all I know is I go, one way or the other.

Sweet Anna tells me to breathe, to think back to a time when I was happy and breathe. It inspires me, and I thank her for it. And I think on my happy times, and on my bad times as well, and I breathe.

The good, the bad, the panic, the calm, the cum, the laugh, the cry, they’ve all taken my breath away, they’ve all held my life in their hands for a moment, and given it back. My heart’s pumped another day.

Time smooths you down, so my mother says, you stop feeling as much.

Age is a distance.

And I learn again and again that all the clichés are true, and every cliché can still be mine and mine alone. I learn to choose sappiness over indifference. Sincerity over uniqueness. I trip, but I fall forward.

This smooth marble feeling creeps up on me, begins to gloss over me, not in my grasp, but nearly there. I start to pearl over. I begin to realize this might not be a catastrophe. That there is a balance. A reserve. My center remains molten.

Day and night start to fall into place. My wants multiply until I want it all, and then needs start to feel irrelevant. Some things I will strive for and never get, some things will fall in my lap undeservedly. It feels so good to just desire.

So much more to go, and yet I’ve come so far. The realization that my life didn’t have to feel common, wasn’t, has wrought such a change over me. I’ve found the people with words and actions and faces that can touch right underneath my nose, me and you.

I start to love without trepidation.

I hope to come to the point where I can string love in garlands everywhere defiantly, and see the love that has already been strewn here and there on my path, in my every interaction with the world. I hope for no shame and no fear in this. I know I will feel those too.

I hope for courage.

I find myself in everything. I find everything in myself. There is so much hope for me. I pile dirty thing on top of dirty thing till I am overwhelmed, and then hope crashes them down, pushes me to move on.

Someone saw me over the holidays after a 15 month absence and told me I’d changed.

“Your face, something, you look different.. better.. your eyes or something “

“I grow old, I grow old”, I quoted with a laugh.

I have. I shed innocence in exchange for awareness every day.