The oddity that a pirouette must be when you don't know how to execute.
The sheer unfamiliarity of life, crashing anew, through what you thought your future would be.
Breath. Every single one.
I'm here, in the interstices that make up a person. Trying to write about change, except I'm not there yet. Transformation is, perhaps, not a state you're meant to inhabit for prolonged periods of time. I realize it's quite stressful for the people who love me, to say often, don't look now, I'm changing.
Except the only alternative would be to cease and desist completely, and I am still, at my core, a stubborn child told to aim for more than she perhaps should have. These days, I gaze around me often at the things that have made up my past and my life. I love them fiercely, but also am increasingly aware that they are only things.
That even the things you love best eventually must transition into the past.
Could it be that I am changing, while at the same time, watching the things I love change about me, also? And will that make it easier to navigate? Or perhaps not?
What do I become when the thing I considered my base itself turns out to be fluid and ephemeral? And with what right can I stall the world from changing?
Threatened with living without somebody, I realize the weightlessness of living without a place. A beating heart, more resonant by much than a lukewarm thing.
I'm scared.
And peeled. Transformation can suggest many untellable things. Am I a stranger-person-thing? I realize I'm not making sense much lately. It's because I find myself suspended inside a soft, jelly-bodied shell. Watching the things break and slither around me, rearrange in ways they haven't been before.
I thought for 25 years, I had a clear idea what I was supposed to do and be. For 25 years, stability frightened me, was shunned by me, felt difficult to me. And yet, now that I look around, I find my two feet firmly planted in the dirt. I've tendrils that morph into roots. Is it holding me down, or back? Is there a way to be one, but not both?
I get the feeling I'm being asked to evolve. To become a different version of who I've thus far been. It's strange, and I don't know which bits to take with me, which to leave. Will I need this old jacket in this process of becoming? Is it cold where I'm going?
I've learned to hold inside me so much aching, but space, also. I'm more patient than I was, perhaps dare I, understand more. I love differently than I used to. It's more nuanced, deeper, but also in a sense bitter. I show up more for the things I say I will.
I feel inside myself safety, but know also how precious and tender it is, how important to cultivate it. It's an active dance.
I'm at an age, at a point, where I'm actively asking "what do I wish the next years to look like?". Who will I be? What will she do with her self and her time, so that I can continue to be proud of her?
I'm happy. So far, I've lived a life I'm proud of, though not always. Less than bright moments, but aren't there always, and when I look back, I fall in love again with so much that I chose and did.
I'd like, if I can, to keep doing that, but am finding at the same time, it might not look the same as it has so far. That the choices and moreover the choice patterns that have accompanied me throughout twenty-some years of life are shifting.
I'm standing on a rockaway boulder, under a precipice. I struggle to make my words clear, and even more to accept this unpredictability. After all, there's only so much life slithering in through my nooks and crannies, still.
Where are you? Where are we? Where is this all going?
