To the music in her mind..

She dances alone in a clearing full of eyes all alight with wisdom and understanding if only they could see her. They cant, she covers her own eyes to keep it inside thinking that if she cant see them they cant see her, and she’s right. What they see isn’t here, its nothing but a shallow veneer wrought of lilacs and ivy woven tight with thorns to prick the unwary and keep a million tiny pieces trapped inside. Pieces that she has painstakingly collected through time untold and clutched in the tiny fists that beat against the chest of humanity.

Its not a simple as they think nor as hard as they imagine to dance beside her, but the vision they behold blends and wavers between this world and another baffling their concept of reality and truth. Frightened by what they can’t understand they watch on and the whispered songs they should have heard from the dawn of this act vanish beneath the din of observation and judgment. Still she dances, uncaring that lines are blurring and unmindful of the storms that are brewing overhead. This is her time, and her place, and they cannot really see her after all. They could dance beside her but the very nature of their world holds them back.

She falls exhausted to the dirt at her feet and carelessly they rush to her side, words of solace and pity that grate through her veins, burning her with the intensity of their desperate advice. Clenched fists that they would see this fall as weakness, this need to stop and catch her breath as impairment, did they not see her dance? Surely if they had they would know she deserves this moment in the dust, the sweat that glistens on her skin, the pounding heart that threatens to burst from her chest. They didn’t, they saw nothing but the tears and anguish of a child too afraid to reach out and take their hand, too lost in her own dreams to even see that they only want to help her understand. They cannot see that its not she that needs to understand.

Why can they only see her here she wonders, when she lies in the ashes of her own humanity too weak to rise and greet the song that plays endlessly through her mind, and her tears begin to soak the fallow earth that cradles her prone body. Mired in a net of judgment and evaluation she could drown in her own thoughts as they try to surge past her lips in a torrent of explanation, only to be lost in the stream of labels and opinions that pour from their mouths. Careless definitions cast forth in an attempt to find a way to keep her here, in this world, where they can see her. She rises to her feet and though she still cries she smiles and turns away, shrugging off those hands that seek to bind her to this reality. There is nothing for her here but dust and ashes, and so she starts to dance again, hoping against hope but knowing better, that this time they will finally open their eyes and witness the peace this dance brings her.

Living life one minute at a time.

Every day dawns new for me. It’s always been that way, for as long as I can remember I have been telling people to leave the past where it belongs. I don’t regret, or dwell, or mourn the things I once had that I have since lost. I’ve always just known that no matter how much something hurts today, and even if it still hurts tomorrow, that there will come a day when I hurt less and there will even come a day when I don’t hurt at all and that loss will be just another memory in a long stream of them.

People for the most part confuse me. Their tendency to dwell in a past they can’t change or on a future they can’t possibly predict never fails to amaze me. That they would sacrifice their happiness now for what they think might make them happy in the future is a concept I simply cant wrap my head around. I live in the moment, taking happiness and sadness as they are presented to me, accepting success and failure as they happen, and in the case of the latter picking myself up, dusting myself off, and moving ever forward no matter how slow the pace. I have no real plan, no idea of what I’m going to do next year, just a few ideas and the willingness to see where they take me.

When you are a child everyone always wants to know what you want to be when you grow up. The truth is that I am 30 years old and still don’t have any idea what I want to be when I grow up, but I played their game and I played it well for awhile when I was young and therefore their expectations weren’t high. As far as they knew I had aspirations and dreams just like any other child, but I was just pulling rabbits from a hat to make them all gasp with glee. I discovered early that if my talents appealed to one or two of my teachers, they could shield me from the scrutiny of the others. I found the library, and the music room, anything to keep me inside at recess. There were still ripples, but for every teacher that took my book away in class, there was another teacher to go straight in and get it back for me.

The problems started when, as I got older, people started expecting me to follow through on these dreams. When everyone else was executing their carefully laid out plans, developing their career, I was struggling to keep my head above water in a world where I was increasingly expected to mingle with my peers on a social basis. I no longer had teachers to shield me, and it was no longer acceptable to focus on one activity to the exclusion of all else. I no longer had the angsty teenager excuse for hiding out in my bedroom all the time, and yet I was feeling an increasing need to be alone and do the things I wanted to do. I was slowly becoming aware that there was no place for me in mainstream society.

The thing that struck me to the core was that this revelation gave me a measure of peace. I didn’t care if I didn’t fit into mainstream society; I’d never understood the motives behind it anyway. Get a good job, make lots of money, buy a big house, a cottage on the lake, and a fancy car all so that you can keep working long enough hours that you never have time to enjoy any of it anyway. I don’t need any of those things to be happy. Save lots of money for your retirement just in case you make it there and there is no more social security to support you. When I get too old to take care of myself I might just wander off into the woods. Don’t bother coming to find me.

None of these things concern me, and that’s a hard concept for most people to understand. Some consider it immature and irresponsible and I agree that my absolute refusal to plan for the future can come across as naïve on the surface, but I believe that it is based firmly in reality.
I don’t need any of those things to be happy, I can be happy with them and just as happy without them. The material possessions are peripheral to my actual needs.

This doesn’t mean I don’t sometimes work towards a goal, it just means that my plans aren’t concrete. They don’t represent a bigger picture of what my life will be like in the future. I can succeed or fail on any step at any time and it doesn’t really have that much of an impact on things as a whole, because as a whole all I want is happiness.