It is odd, I think, how something grabs you, pulls you into its self even before you know that it has happened. Yesterday I decided to walk home. It was one of the rare days where the sun and its accompanying warmth were something I enjoyed instead of being pained by. It was good to have the time alone. Even with people all around me I felt a comforting separation, like the way you feel when wind blows so hard against your body that you feel you could lean right into it and the force of the wind would hold you up. How does the song go? Alone but not lonely? That is how it felt. There was only me; my consistent breaths filling every space in myself, the tension of my blood filling my veins as it has longed to do for some time, the elation of my muscles, relaxed yet exuberant in the exertion. My rhythmic footfalls seem to pulse in time with the rest of me and seems to count time moving forward and yet not moving, like how running on a treadmill makes you feel like you have moved great distances while keeping you in the same place.
I felt free. Not the kind of freedom that comes separating yourself from everything but the freedom of putting your arms down, turning off those parts of your mind that analyze everything and run risk assessments, and instead allows everything to rush toward you like waves crashing playfully over you. All the joys that I so closely guard in my mind, in my heart, in my body are almost tangible in that moment.
I finished a book this morning. At the outset, I knew it was not going to be a series that I thought had great merit. It mirrored so many others and attempted to show complexity the way that I wish life was complex when I want for my life to be different. But my head, and perhaps something deeper inside me, tells me that those complexities, where people push through to find who you are under what everyone sees, are fantasies. I know no one pushes that hard to truly see under it all because I don't. I am working to hard to try and see who I am and figure out who I want to be that I don't have the energy to push through someone else's facade to see what lies beneath. And I know that no one has the energy for me. That knowledge doesn't mean that I don't ache when I read about things I wish were possible in this reality. The connections I seek do not only exist in fiction where the true measure of two people's love and devotion are clear in the inner thoughts that you as the reader have access to or the private moments after the great loss when one of them dies. I feel that kind of love and devotion to others, I know because, every time I read about it in someone else's story, I remember all of those whom I love, whom I've lost. And in that moment I realize, what I am afraid of is not if I feel that way about others, I am afraid that others do not feel that way about me. Perhaps it would scare me if they did.
The thought leaves my mind and hovers around me like a dense fog and my body cries out for me to walk again. To walk and feel my breath lift me, my blood flow, my muscles exert, and my feet carry me to a time where seconds do not turn to minutes and then hours and days. My body cries out to feel that freedom once again, to cary me back to those whom I love more than anything...
I felt free. Not the kind of freedom that comes separating yourself from everything but the freedom of putting your arms down, turning off those parts of your mind that analyze everything and run risk assessments, and instead allows everything to rush toward you like waves crashing playfully over you. All the joys that I so closely guard in my mind, in my heart, in my body are almost tangible in that moment.
I finished a book this morning. At the outset, I knew it was not going to be a series that I thought had great merit. It mirrored so many others and attempted to show complexity the way that I wish life was complex when I want for my life to be different. But my head, and perhaps something deeper inside me, tells me that those complexities, where people push through to find who you are under what everyone sees, are fantasies. I know no one pushes that hard to truly see under it all because I don't. I am working to hard to try and see who I am and figure out who I want to be that I don't have the energy to push through someone else's facade to see what lies beneath. And I know that no one has the energy for me. That knowledge doesn't mean that I don't ache when I read about things I wish were possible in this reality. The connections I seek do not only exist in fiction where the true measure of two people's love and devotion are clear in the inner thoughts that you as the reader have access to or the private moments after the great loss when one of them dies. I feel that kind of love and devotion to others, I know because, every time I read about it in someone else's story, I remember all of those whom I love, whom I've lost. And in that moment I realize, what I am afraid of is not if I feel that way about others, I am afraid that others do not feel that way about me. Perhaps it would scare me if they did.
The thought leaves my mind and hovers around me like a dense fog and my body cries out for me to walk again. To walk and feel my breath lift me, my blood flow, my muscles exert, and my feet carry me to a time where seconds do not turn to minutes and then hours and days. My body cries out to feel that freedom once again, to cary me back to those whom I love more than anything...
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